Robot Gentleman
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 16, 2017
Mark Edward Kern is a video game "developer", scam artist, and amateur pornographer hailing from California (formerly Taiwan). Though he markets himself as a visionary in the gaming industry, every project that Mark has touched in the past twenty years has ended in stagnation and failure. Despite this, he has positioned himself as an authoritative voice in online culture war drama, having built up a large audience on X/Twitter. He has resorted to latching onto any passing gaming discourse like a leech, desperately trying to maintain relevance for himself and his current "game".
Blizzard and WoW
Mark's most prominent credential is having worked for Blizzard Entertainment. Between 1998 and 2004, he was credited for working on StarCraft, Diablo II, and vanilla World of Warcraft. Mark would later claim credit for WoW's initial success, which none of his former colleagues have corroborated.In 2005, Mark left Blizzard to pursue his own projects. While it appears that he left the company on good terms, he has since framed his departure as a virtuous protest against layoffs and the corporatization of the industry.
Over the years, Mark has become increasingly critical of his former employers, leveraging his credentials to speak up on their various controversies. He got a lot of initial popularity by hand-delivering a petition for Blizzard to set up dedicated vanilla WoW servers following the forced shutdown of Nostalrius. In 2018, he began calling the company and its leadership "out of touch" over the poor handling of their franchises. The following year, he called for a boycott after a Hearthstone e-sports player was suspended by Blizzard for openly criticizing China. In 2021, he spoke out again when Blizzard was involved in a massive sexual harassment scandal that effectively nuked its remaining reputation.
Mark's actions struck a chord with many former Blizzard fans, who have felt (understandably) upset at the company for its antipathy toward their audience. They have also gotten him a lot of attention: his X following has tripled since 2018. But Mark's credentials have gotten pretty stale, and bitching about WoW hasn't made him any better at making video games.
The Firefall Saga
Not long after leaving Blizzard, Mark co-founded Red 5 Studios, which developed exactly one game: the short-lived MMO Firefall (a PVE/PVP sci-fi shooter). Having risen to the mantle of Red 5's CEO, Mark oversaw a chaotic period of development that ended with him being voted out by his board of directors in 2013. According to Mark, he was removed because the team wanted "to make WoW with guns" and because he refused to take a $2 million bribe for Chinese investment.
A testimony by a former Red 5 employee told a very different story, accusing Mark of gross incompetence. Mark allegedly:
- Was only made CEO because he was good at securing investment capital, not because of his direct contributions to the game.
- Wasted large amounts of money on a bizarre production company involving expensive, rarely-used camera equipment and cringey parody videos. (Keep this in mind for later.)
- Took long absences from the office to focus on unrelated projects, and was directly responsible for the game's chaotic focus due to his inability to listen to his team.
- Was verbally abusive to his staff and threw frequent temper tantrums in the office.
The most well-known of Mark's misadventures was "the Firefall bus", a grossly expensive marketing gimmick that he came up with to promote the game's struggling e-sports scene. Despite paying $3 million for West Coast Customs to design the bus, which was meant to tour the country, it ended up being inoperable and sat in an empty lot for most of its existence. Mark did not appreciate people making fun of the bus.
Mark's firing was not enough to save Firefall, which went defunct in 2017 after mass layoffs of the studio's staff. In the midst of its shutdown, Mark went to Reddit and asked the game's community to help devalue its IP so he could purchase it back. This was not received well.
The EM-8ER Scam
In 2014, Mark started a company called "MEK Entertainment", raising over $1 million for a VR-based MMO, Voxelnauts. He was kicked out of the company in 2015, having been accused of misappropriating funds:
But maybe he just had bigger ambitions in mind. In 2016, Mark raised $23k on IndieGoGo for a new project, EM-8ER (Ember). Ember is being developed by Crixa Labs, which Mark had incorporated under the name of his 78-year-old father - probably because the state of California has a $265,000 lien against Mark for unpaid taxes.
Marketing his upcoming game as a "spiritual successor" to Firefall featuring mech suits, kaijus, and large-breasted women, Mark would go on to raise another $107k from a separate IndieGoGo campaign in 2017, and he heavily marketed additional backer options to prospective patrons, selling expensive vehicles and "skins".
While his regular monthly patron options were priced at $8/month, some of these backer packs (which could be purchased prior to November of 2023) were selling for hundreds of dollars, with the most expensive going for $1,500. It's been estimated that Mark has raised a total of over $600k through crowdfunding, all for development of Ember.
So, what's the status of the game? As you might've guessed, it isn't out yet, nor is it likely to be at any point in the foreseeable future. It has been in development for over
The first playable build of Ember was released in 2019, six years ago as of time of writing. It looks, and plays, like a bad Unity demo:
This was followed by two years of radio silence until 2021, where he added a few basic systems and models to the build. The playable mockup remains (by Mark's own admission) very incomplete, filled with placeholders, bugs, and with few of the promised features added. Though the purpose of this build was to launch another crowdfunding campaign to finish the game - this time through Kickstarter - Mark has failed to launch it despite repeatedly teasing it over the past six years. Does that sound familiar?
There have been practically no public updates since, save for a single idle animation showcased on Ember's YouTube channel. As of March 2025, Mark claims that "his team" has still been working hard on the game, despite his earlier admission that Ember is a solo project.
Most of the monthly "skins" offered through backer packs are actually pieces of concept art (much of which resembles softcore porn) of things that aren't the game yet. Does that sound familiar?
The few "skins" that have been modeled in the mockup leave something to be desired:
(These are the same character, "Feli Gatestrider")
In recent months, these "skins" appear to have been generated by AI:
In February 2025, a porn parody of EM-8ER (archive) with the same name was released on Steam. Mark quickly filed a trademark complaint, which was unsuccessful because, after 8+ years of "development", he had never bothered to register a trademark for Ember:
In order to find new paypigs, Mark has turned to shilling his game when he gets into online drama. He denounces any criticism of his long development time and monetization as "hit pieces" by the woke mob.
The game's forums are on life support, and its subreddit is all but dead. However, he still operates an active Discord server where a small but dedicated number of asspatters continue to defend the game, or lack thereof.
Culture War Grift
In the absence of doing any real work, Mark spends a lot of his time engaging in online culture war discourse. He's gotten a lot of fans from his anti-"woke" stance dating back to his weak participation in GamerGate, in which he started a bizarre change.org petition complaining about an "anti-gamer" Law and Order episode.
Nowadays, Mark has turned to attaching himself to any ongoing culture war trash, invariably begging for attention. Much of his complaining revolves around seeing non-fuckable women in his vidya. His descent into "Gamergate 2.0" has also marked when he started to type like Jeremy Hambly.
His rage over censorship of hot babes was eventually directed at a shitty anime game, Project Eve / Stellar Blade, when its developers put a bra on their big-boobed protagonist. Mark started another petition to "Free Stellar Blade", which he has as of time of writing spent over a week spamming over and over on X. More info on that can be found on the relevant pages.
Other notable controversies that he's inserted himself into include:
- Calling Bethesda's developers "lazy" after the release of Starfield, not because the game was woke or lackluster, but because he didn't like the minimalist start screen. The irony of EM-8ER's developer calling someone else lazy wasn't lost on his critics, including Bethesda's head of global publishing.
- Calling for the community manager of Helldivers 2 to be fired after she blocked him on X. He has since posted about Helldivers hundreds of times, blaming many of their poor development decisions on that same community manager.
- Slapfighting with Disney Parks employees after claiming ride delays are caused by woke:
Note that while he virtue signals about "our kids", he doesn't always pay child support for his own:
- Being shit on by the official marketing account for Assassin's Creed:
In the midst of his many self-made controversies, Mark continues to advertise EM-8ER, acting as if supporting his stagnated project will stick it to wokeism and DEI. There's too much to pick apart in this statement, so I'll sum it up by noting that Grummz crowdfunds his projects because no serious investors will touch him after Firefall or MEK Entertainment (not to "be free of DEI money"), and that turning off backer packs a couple months ago does not excuse the many years during which he freely sold expensive JPEGs to prospective players.
Oh, and don't forget to subscribe!
Lesbian porn and "Debbi-chan"
Since 2001, Mark was the proud owner of "foxyfighter.com", which he used to commission and produce lesbian catfight fetish porn. He did this while pretending to be a woman under the moniker "Debbi-chan". He has been accused of funneling the money he's raised over the years (including from Red 5 AND from Firefall) to pay for porn for the site.
The full contents of this website were available to subcribers for $15/month, and included "100% original" pornographic artwork, stories, and photographs.
By his own admission, Mark was directly in charge of producing and commissioning most, if not all of the porn on the site.
As "Debbi-chan", Mark also published lengthy pieces of fanfiction about himself as a woman, being dominated and fucked by other women.
He also published a story in which "Debbi" beats and rapes a woman he named after his ex-wife:
During this time, Mark began to film amateur photo/video pornography for the site using paid models. Interestingly he used RED Dragon cameras to film this porn, which happened to be the same model he purchased for Red 5's production company. Coincidence?
Mark continued production with foxyfighters until around 2021. He continued to use its sister forum "freecatfights.com" until very recently, with his last login being in January 2024.
How was Mark exposed as "Debbi", you might ask? Not only was the site published under the same address as Crixa Labs, but he also incorporated his porn company under his mother's name.
After being exposed, Mark began freaking out on X, declaring himself "the most persecuted game dev in history."
Conclusion
Whether or not you agree with Mark about wokeism or DEI, he remains a talentless, sexually degenerate grifter who only speaks up about these topics to direct attention toward himself and his wallet. Having not been involved in any successful projects since 2005, Mark has no leg to stand on when discussing anything related to games or the gaming industry.Mark has a habit of DFE'ing, so any archives of his old posts are appreciated.
X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/Grummz (archive)
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/Grummz/
EM-8ER: https://www.em8er.com/ (archive)
foxyfighter.com: https://web.archive.org/web/20010721163950/http://www.foxyfighter.com/
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