For more than 2.5 years Derek Smart has been relentlessly criticising and mocking the Star Citizen Project and its management-team. Much has been written about his claim that Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) will never be able to deliver the game they promised after a scope-increase. However it remains unclear why Smart has chosen to invest massive amounts of time into an endless twitter-campaign against CIG and extensive blogs that can shift in tone from rational to mocking or angry within a few paragraphs. In this interview we asked him to talk about himself, his career as a game-developer, his hunt for his „white whale“ of the all-encompassing space-simulation-game and try to get a better idea of what drives him to do what he does.
3:28 – Becoming a gamer
11:56 – Becoming a game-devloper
19:40 – Bullying
28:30 – First game he ever finished playing
30:01 – Battlecruiser 3000 AD – the first game as a developer
39:02 – “Anger is for the weak”
40:12 – Staying independent
44:08 – “The Take-2-debacle”
53:46 – Are you a difficult person?
01:02:30 – Presenting himself as “Somebody not to be messed with”
01:07:11 – The hunt for the white whale
01:14:28 – “I was one of the original backers”
01:19:00 – Delays are normal, aren’t they?
01:37:31 – Would you say a game of the scope of Alpha 3.0 is doable?
01:42:07 – Why did your blogs become so harsh in tone to quickly?
01:50:59 – Wouldn’t you have refunded yourself as well?
01:58:29 – If it can be done, why can’t it be done?
02:06:37 – “The one thing I regret”
02:07:55 – A doomsday cult?
02:16:46 – A proud man feeling disrespected and brushed aside?