Honestly, if the Penders lawsuit was what gave us the rebooted stretch of Archie... I'd call that some kind of win? It let the comic drop and rewrite so much baggage from its long and sometimes batshit history, and I loved the version of Sonic's world they used that opportunity to craft and flesh out. I'm not sure how much of Archie Sonic I ever would've read had 252's relatively clean slate not given me an excuse to binge-read the absolute hell out of the Shattered World arc (and accompanying Universe issues). Plus, as much as the eventual cancelation stung, IDW's given us some fun original characters with its own run.
To what The Joebro64 said. While Penders was definitely the stonewall preventing the ideas from being touched on again in franchise there were definitely things going on at Bioware that probably killed the possibility of sequels more distinctly. If i remember right they were bought out by Activision towards the end of development for Chronicles and when it was completed the entire division was reassigned. The higher ups looked at forecasts for the DS Mass Effect they would work on next and shut down the division i believe was how it went. It was interesting back then that the bioware and Sega forums perpetually branded the game the stigma of being incomplete. The lack of side quests later in the game and some beta elements imply a lot was possibly missing and the game was rushed out to complete the contract before the buyout was complete. Between that and whatever the story was with the member of the team handling the music showed big ambitions can easily fall to mediocrity.
EA, but, yeah, holy shit it didn't even occur to me that that buyout was around that time until you brought it up!
EA, yeah. So much coverage of the Activision Blizzard Buyout stuff I slipped up there. Reminds me a lot of all of the buyouts around then when EA and Activision were buying up all of the mid size developers though.
Alright, so this thread is now more than 13 years old. Kids, who were yet to be born when Ken sued people over his OC's, are now old enough to read trashy comic books. So has Ken released the THE LARA-SU CHRONICLES yet?
We're the ones who have been giving Penders attention for the last 13 years. The guy is winning, and it's all our fault.
Giving him what? Not money, certainly. Given that his brand is all he gives a shit about, that would mean he's not "winning". Thankfully, wasting time on bullshit is a net loss for the entire world. The only thing winning here is entropy, and in a way, that's comforting.
I assume he meant attention. As in, that the Sonic fanbase has been giving Penders attention all these years, allowing him to stay relevant.
My bad. Yes, that's exactly what I meant. He should have faded into total obscurity by now, but he's managed to stay relevant despite delivering the closest thing to nothing.
To be fair, outside of this thread, I never get to hear anything about Penders. He's already pretty obscure and irrelevant, imho.
And that's it. Sonic fans still giving him attention on Twitter and elsewhere. That's what drives him.
Where elsewhere? I doubt he's reading this thread. I'm pretty sure that Twitter is the only place where he's interacting with people and reading their critiques. However, I've heard he's planning to shut down his twitter account relatively soon. That's gonna push him even deeper into irrelevance.
An FYI that Penders is apparently leaving Twitter by the end of September. Not sure if he's deleting his account or just abandoning it, but his feed is (however biased it may be) a genuinely good resource for behind-the-scenes information on the Archie series, so it would be good if an effort was made to archive it.
I think we can use a tool like gallery-dl to grab all of the uploaded media from a Twitter profile, but I do not know how much it downloads outside of the media itself and if it even works after all of the changes that have been made to the site. The tool is at https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl/ if anybody wants to give it a try.
archiving such important content like 1,000 different empty lawsuit threats before it becomes lost media on a real note, though, it doesn't really seem like there's THAT much worth archiving on his profile as of recent? The most interesting thing he's posted recently is a commission of Snively and Knuckles but most of his other posts is just convention announcements and politics. I bring up most recent stuff now as the older important penders posts have definitely been archived somewhere while the newer posts definitely have not either way not really something for me to comment on that much but i feel is important to bring up with archiving pender's posts
You're on Sonic Retro. We want to save as much of this stuff as possible. He's tweeted stuff like early layouts, pencils, behind-the-scenes shenanigans from his perspective, etc
He actually shared an image of some costume/prop work of Vulture for the cancelled Sam Raimi Spider-Man 4 film some time ago, and any other previews or in-dev stuff for his work are in danger of being lost should he never get to release it, due to forgetting, data loss, or his mortality catching up to him. It's always a shame when people are selective of the things they save in this way (and just saving all the media wouldn't do either.) The best we could ask for is him uploading a stripped version of his Twitter data himself.
I have periodically saved his media because I've always worried that he might wipe his account for some reason. Of course, this might be a great time to point out that every Sonic/Sega creative who has posted on Twitter should have all their tweets backed up, since the entire platform is far more unstable than it once was. There is information there that could be lost to time if it isn't preserved in the hear and now.
Not sure where it's being archived, but archive any tweets on archive.org if you're not already. I mean this generally, since I'm sure most are. Anyone else got alternatives, in case Penders threatens to sue them?
