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The basic story was that Mike Berlyn, who wrote for Infocom back in the 1980s, had discovered in the late 1990s that people were now writing interactive fiction for free, and created a company to cash in. He would sell and market games and give the authors royalties. The company was a flop. Only one author other than Berlyn signed up to have his games sold via the company. The marketing was poor, consisting of a few ineffectual ads in niche hobbyist magazines and repeated spamming of the interactive fiction newsgroups. And a strong case can be made that the idea was doomed from the start: to keep the company afloat, Berlyn had to either convince people who were already into IF to start paying for his offerings when there were many titles of comparable or superior quality available for free, or else convince people who had either never heard of IF or considered it obsolete to pay for it, or, most likely, both. The company started to founder, Berlyn disappeared from the community, and around the time the company finally did shut down, someone discovered that Berlyn had spent the time of his disappearance posting frequently to newsgroups about casino gambling.
The article that used to be in this space was a recounting of this story dressed up with arch phrasings and with more detail about the various stumbles along the way. I can't really call it a flame, because with a few exceptions there were no digs made; it just recounted the facts. But I have nevertheless decided to take it down, because I no longer think that a description of the failure of a man's business is the sort of entertainment I want my site to offer. If you really want to read it, I'm sure that the article is archived elsewhere online.
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