Moving away from John's bad takes on Kyle and Bebop, the domain auction for Giant Spacekat's former website made me decide to go back into the archive and take a look at the forward face of John's "company."
The Internet Archive started logging giantspacekat.com in 2014, though it was just a placeholder site until sometime between February and March 2015, when
it finally debuted in all its majesty. The site was just a standard Squarespace template, with barebones info about the company and its game. Pretty much just marketing fluff, but there are some interesting tidbits.
For one, here's the only picture of John on the site, looking ghoulish as ever, especially next to Amanda Warner. Mannish hand, niblet teeth, white as a sheet. It almost looks like Amanda's recoiling in horror. Maybe she is:
Perhaps even funnier is the portrait for Natalie O'Brien. Pictures really do say a thousand words:
For some unknown reason (okay, I know why, it's incompetence), the site has the games listed in two or three different locations. One (accessible through the "Games" link) has all the projects on one page, another (accessible through the links in the footer) gives each one its own URL, and the third (accessible from the "Revolution 60" link, adde later) gives each one a different URL, but with a sidebar to link you to the other pages. It's exactly the same information, they just doubled/tripled up the whole thing. Awful.
The only listed projects are Revolution 60, Cupcake Crisis, and the Giant Spacekittens "division" that Cupcake Crisis would have fallen under if it had ever released. I don't think this logo has ever been posted here, so here it is for posterity, along with the Giant Spacekat logo that sure looks an awful lot like the Napster logo:
On a side note, I find the description of
Giant Spacekittens amusing. They talk about how they hate how gendered video games for kids are and not wanting to make kids conform to society's demands, and then immediately afterwards mention how their first game is all about encouraging/browbeating girls to be engineers. Replacing one set of demands with another, that's the Giant Spacekat way!
There were only two update to the site over its existence. The first came sometime between April and September 2015, when John added a dedicated Rev60 button to the header; this is also where you can find the third location of all the games info as mentioned above. The second was sometime between September 2015 and January 2016, when John made the links at the top of the page wordier for no reason.
After that, the site was never updated again. Compare the
January 2016 version to the
November 2019 version, and you'll see no difference. No word about how the "studio" was defunct, no additional press articles (not even about how stunning and brave John is for standing up to Gamergate!), no updates on Cupcake Crisis or an announcement of its cancellation, nothing. Not even a mention of John's very important congressional campaigns!
But hey, at least you can still go to
their Tumblr page for the latest updates! Except not really, because its lifespan is pretty much exactly the same as the website itself. First post in February 2015, last post in September. There's also
the Twitter account, but that's similarly dead, with the last action being to retweet John's delusions of organizing a Wonder Woman screening for WWDC in 2017. (Also, poor Natalie getting sick in March 2016, must've been that years-delayed pregnancy.)
Sometime between November and December 2019, the Squarespace account
finally expired. Obviously John didn't notice this in the last two years with the domain itself going up for auction this week, and unless he actually learned about it and had Frank buy it at the last second, it's no longer his.
So there you have it, a relatively comprehensive look at a now-defunct website, and the death of John's dreams of being a rockstar game dev. I might take a look at his also-defunct personal site,
briannawu.net, in the future. Dunno when that domain will be up for grabs, but it seems like John still owns it for now. Something to keep an eye on, anyway.
