Mr. Smart was born to a British mother and an American father.
Mr. Smart's mother was white and his father was black. When
it's mentioned that Mr. Smart appears black, he always seems to
point out "I come from a mixed origin, I am proud to be whatever
I am, black, white or mixed." (posted 5/9/97)
-The American father (now deceased) was career US military.
-Mr. Smart grew up in England (and still has a very pleasant
British accent).
-Mr. Smart as a kid was a computer hacker, writing computer viruses.
(I'm not making this up. Derek actually said this.) This activity
foretold the future and predicted BC3K, the biggest virus ever
produced! Pictures of some buddies that participated in this
early hacker activity with him were distributed by Derek in the
Exposed Years.
THE EARLY YEARS (before BC3K release)
The main source for this section THE EARLY YEARS (before BC3K release)
is the 11 page story at the end of the BC3K manual.
-When Mr. Smart was in London he started working on his game
1988-1989.
-Mr. Smart admits he had no PhD at this point in time. (see Mr.
Smart's
Anthology Of A Flamewar - The Last Dance)
-Mr. Smart moved to the USA in 1989.
-In October 1992, Derek signed with BC3K's first publisher. In a post
made before Interplay was announced as a distributor, Mr. Smart said
that BC3K had a total of 4 publishers (IIRC).
-By January 1993 the publisher (Intracorp?) had dropped BC3K.
-By March 1993 another publisher had picked up and dropped BC3K.
-In early 1993 Derek came out with BC3K demo 3.0. The manual is
available in the archives/1DerekHistory/1Before1997/93demoManual.txt
Derek says, "The purpose of this demo is to ensure that GALCOM
operatives remain confident that this program will be worth the wait.
A whole bunch of features have been disabled such as trading, docking,
personnel deployment etc." It seems this is a ploy to claim that
unimplemented code was just "disabled". It serves Mr. Smart well
over the years.
-A new publisher (Mission Studios) picked up BC3K and lots of work
was done and paid for. But, it was dropped again by the end of 1994.
This began the search for another publisher to pay off Mission
Studios and to cover the rest of the development.
-On May 10, 1995 Three Sixty Pacific announced that they'd signed
with Mr. Smart to complete BC3K, here's one poster's reaction
(archives/1DerekHistory/1Before1997/ANewPublisher.txt)
"After seeing the huge demo about a couple years ago (about 12 meg
or so in many pieces) and all the hype in the readme's, it has made
me wonder why anyone will pick it up at all. The game just really
stunk."
editorial note: You have to hand it to Mr. Smart, he is persistent
and determined. It's just too bad that such fine attributes have
been wasted producing such a sad example of gaming. I think it might
point out a major Mr. Smart weakness, a lack of objectivity that
leads to lots of other problems including an inability to execute
to expectations that he has set.
-360 Pacific didn't last long, by August 1995 Take2 had picked up BC3K
and paid off Mission Studios.
-August 1995 Take2 announced "Yes, BC3000AD has been in
development for a long time (o.k. a really, really long time), but the
game is in Beta now and it WILL be worth the wait."
-December 15, 1995 Derek announced "THE RELEASE DATE OF
BATTLECRUISER:3000AD HAS BEEN PUSHED BACK TO JANUARY 15TH 1996."
(see archive/1DerekHistory/1Before1997/BC3KTardiness.txt) This
post is also the earliest post I've found where Mr. Smart claims
a PhD.
-2/12/96 is the first date I've found for Derek posting on the
Usenet. Prior to that, he posted very frequently on AOL and I
think also on Compuserve. Most of the posts in these forums have
been lost except for some much later posts salvaged by Fthx that
are available in the archives. There's also a few that were
cross posted to Usenet by someone else, like the example directly
above. However, there's plenty of evidence that the flame war was
going on in AOL, at least, before it spilled over into Usenet.
Since it was pay by the minute and in it's very own forum, the
flaming was relatively mild and sporadic.
-2/16/96 was Mr. Smart's first flame on Usenet, "Here we go again.
What's the matter with you people." Only a mild one but, a first is
a first.
-2/21/96 was Mr. Smart's first Derekism spoken on Usenet,
"Give me more credit than I am due." The most famous Derekism
today is probably, Some people have even questioned my insanity.
But, I never doubt.
-Sometime before May 1996 Mr. Smart suffered some personal trauma
or sadness when his wife left him. He said it was because of
time and effort he'd put into BC3K.