I knew I had to make a comic about Ubisoft’s astounding new supremacy in the world of Obviously Horrible Ideas. Their mastery of this is now absolute. You can look at Daikatana and see that there was the possibility that this could have been a good game. There was doubt, at some point before release. But you could see the Ubisoft failure coming from miles away. Ion Storm attempted to set the world record at diving and failed when they smacked their face off the diving board. Ubisoft set out to hit their face on the diving board, and succeeded.
It was frightening and yet somehow awe-inspiring to watch them march off of this conceptual cliff with such steadfast confidence. It’s like a menacing and Kafkaesque version of the Emperor’s New Clothes where all of the people are screaming, “Dude, you are naked!” to the heedless king. The lemming comparison ceases to be adequate. Lemmings go over cliffs because they are oblivious. Ubisoft went over this cliff because they decided that going over a cliff was a now a core part of their business plan.
I struggled with this comic for a long time. I eventually realized I wouldn’t be able to make fun of this in any traditional way because Ubisoft was already a joke.
Shamus Young is the guy behind this website, this book, these three webcomics, and this program.
