The rise and fall of Mark Kern: how one man may have doomed Firefall and The9 (UPDATED)

Chinese game developer and publisher The9 has been betting big over the past few years on Firefall, an MMOFPS being developed by the US-based (and The9-owned) studio Red 5. The9 is shooting for global success, and even sponsored one of China’s top soccer teams to get the Firefall logo on the shirts of top footballers like Didier Drogba and Nicholas Anelka. Between Firefall and Qiji 2 (a game The9 is counting on to succeed in the domestic market), The9 has spent more than $100 million just on promotions over the past three years.

But 2013 winds to a close, it’s clear that Firefall hasn’t yet attained the level of popularity that The9 is hoping for. And when The9 removed Red 5 CEO Mark Kern from his position shortly before Christmas, it raised questions about the future of the project and about Kern’s leadership and the degree to which he is responsible for some of Firefall‘s failings.

Kern came to Red 5 Studios with an incredible pedigree, having worked on a number of Blizzard’s most popular titles (including Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood Wars) before closing out his time there as a team lead for World of Warcraft. Given his experience with competitive e-sports titles like Starcraft and the addictive MMO World of Warcraft, he seemed an ideal man for the helm of Red 5’s Firefall. After all, The9 was hoping the game could be both a massively-multiplayer hit and a game with tight, balanced-enough PvP to make a splash in the esports scene.

And Kern came through for Red 5 right in the nick of time, with money in-hand. At a time when the studio was near bankruptcy, here was a man with the right credentials, the right history, and money from the right investors that could help keep the company — and by extension, keep Firefall — afloat. There was a time when it would have seemed insane to suggest that if there was something wrong with Red 5, Kern — one of the company’s co-founders — was it.

After his dismissal the weekend before Chirstmas, Kern released a somewhat cryptic statement in which he called his time at Red 5 “my own Kobayashi Maru,” a reference to the fictional Star Trek training exercise that is designed to be impossible in order to test candidates’ response to a no-win situation. The implication seemed to be that Kern’s failure was inevitable, presumably because he was tasked with developing a game that couldn’t be successful.

But this weekend, an anonymous Red 5 employee took to Reddit to question Kern’s narrative, posting a lengthy diatribe that accuses Kern of a litany of mistakes and overreaches. Games in Asia spoke directly with this poster, whose Reddit screen name is BrutalWhimsy, and has seen documents that confirm his identity as a Red 5 employee.

Spending millions to promote a game still in alpha

In his post, BrutalWhimsy alleges that Kern vastly overspent on ill-advised promotional stunts that failed to pan out, funneling both funds and focus away from the work on the actual game. Kern, for example, established a separate video production team, outfitting it with Red-brand production gear (among the best and most expensive in the industry), an ever-expanding staff and a separate soundstage. This team was used to make live-action Firefall videos, but it also worked on the vaguely-related (and “stillborn,” as BrutalWhimsy put it) series “Gamechangers” and on several completely unrelated projects.

Seriously, can anyone tell me how this cringe-inducingly pandering music video for some random band was helping to promote Firefall? (Incidentally, I could write a whole separate article about how stupid this video is).

BrutalWhimsy also cited another Kern-driven promotional project that went horribly awry: the creation of a Firefall-themed bus that was meant to serve as a mobile promotional tool and a mobile server from which to host competitions via LAN while the game was still in beta. The bus was also meant to expand via hydraulics to increase its size, and BrutalWhimsy suggests that the project cost around $3 million. The bus contract was given to West Coast Customs, the vehicle shop that tricked out cars for the MTV show Pimp My Ride, but West Coast Customs apparently botched things, going over-budget and delivering the van both late and missing some of its key features. It missed premieres at all the major conferences, and now “sits in a warehouse somewhere, collecting dust.”

While in this case the failure was partially West Coast Customs’s, BrutalWhimsy points out that a $3 million promotional bus created by the world’s highest-profile car customizers probably shouldn’t be a priority for a game that was — at the time the bus project began — still in the pre-alpha phase. In a separate Reddit thread, Kern himself admits: “The bus was terrible.”