DAAAAAAMMMN.
apparently ive been living under a rock. i was wondering what the fuck the facebook posts were about lately. lol. damn i feel so bad for jamie…jamie’s my homeboy…damn son. i hope everything works out for u.
Manny was NOT involved in any of this.
John ripped Manny off too. GPX and Manny have been AMAZING in helping us sort this out.
Also what John did was pay cash out to all the winners the first 2 days and then Sunday he was out of cash and promised everyone money. He took the entrance fees and payed the bands, guests etc… He was supposed to have put $20,000 aside for this event $10,000 was for winners.
TONS of SF4 guys got screwed and we are working on taking care of them too.
If you guys want this news to boom I suggest posting it outside of GD, people that post in GD stopped playing fighters for the most part years ago.
leave manny alone…manny is the man. that spanish man and his raspy voice. 
RI brings the HYPE!
I got screwed out of a good $1500+.
This is bullshit.
Smash or not I’d be ready to stab a nigga…
Dude, there’s absolutely nothing that can be said beyond how shitty this situation is. GameUniverse, I hope you sort things out (or can, considering the circumstances). I really hate seeing local shops go down - especially someone that was following a similar dream to my own when it comes to owning a game store. I would beat the guy down with a baseball bat if he showed his face around your parts again.
Now aside from my temporarily violent side, I don’t think GameUniverse should feel too much at blame. I understand most people think/feel that if you get scammed/conned that you were an idiot. This happens based off of how long we’ve been exposed to similar things in public media. What media doesn’t always explain is how close these con-artists normally get before they take what they came for. As they’ve said - John worked with them daily. It might be easy to fuck someone over online (eBay/Paypal transactions/etc); but, offline/irl it takes a bit of a headjob to be capable of fooling people day in and day out. Props to you guys at GameUniverse and I hope you guys can get back up and flowing. If I could, I’d help. But I’m not exactly in the situation to do so.
Holy shit this is an insane story.
Though I am far from you geographically, I could only imagine the impact this has had for your guys’ reputation, and your scene. I wish you guys the best.
never forget - studio traffic
w.e my friends got screwed out of their jobs.
uh…yeah this sucks, not really anything else to say.
Im the one whoran the sf4 tournament.
It was really unfortunate what has happened, im probably gonna lose my job if the store goes under, so john K has pretty much screwed us as well.
We are trying to pay the players, every day its thought of.
Most of the sf players that came (almost 100) over the 2 days I knew at a personal level and too all of them THank you for coming out, it was a blast.
To SUmmer Brawl and Big E, I head you guys had a great turnout! Cant wait to be at NEc, BIg E’s the shit
I can understand everyones frustrations, but I hope as you read this youll understand in our ABSOLUTE frustration
PS to anyone in EMP: plz dont kill me lolz im actually planning to make a trip to one of the arcadia tournies coming up
haha, yeah he kind of took us for a ride - unfortunately.
To give a little more inside from our end.
Glenn Dubois is one of our staff members in GPX, we love this little billy mays cosplay wearing man - so naturally when he asked us to help out with this convention called Game Unicon being done by his other bosses in MA, I said - sure.
We met with Jaime over the phone and they gave us all the info, I remember the conversation of me explaining to Jaime what they want to do with the hotel and how to negotiate to get what they want from the space for very little to no money.
after those conversations we spoke on and off about the show and what they wanted from us.
I liked Jaime from day one, seemed like a big hearted guy.
When we had setup our gaming in Anime Boston, we finally met with Dave Herzog and John Keough. He sat with me and met 4 other event chairman to which we do all their gaming and tournaments and was very excited and upbeat and started throwing numbers at me, trying to win me over to his show.
I told him very plainly, we can pretty much handle anything he needs, Glenn wants me to help so the rest is on him. He asked me for a ridiculous quote…
he wanted something in the realm of 650 TV’s and like 100 xbox 360’s…
O_o
I was thinking to myself isnt this the first time you did this show?
I told him, “you saw what we had upstairs…”
We had a huge setup in Anime Boston, they were contracted for 50 setups and I brought 64. projector walls included. and we had on our lists of total competitors across the 24 games we did tourneys for something of 3200 competing. I told him while I am sure you might have the same guy competing in like 10 different titles we still handled a huge number of people competiting and the convention is just under 20,000 attendees - if we could handle that with this small setup - he does not need to go crazy with his setup for Game Unicon. It’s a first year show don’t kill yourself financially.
My following suggestion to him was simple - “If I wanted money from you, I would just tell you sure, 650 tv’s will cost this much - take your money, run the show and move on”
He was not really receptive to this reasoning or the fact that the convention we are standing in had just under 20,000 and his first year show was just that - a first year show 1500-2000 at best.
He then told me he had over 300 people signed up for his Brawl tourney alone. That his show had 2500 pre-registered attendance already (May 23 2009 around 4pm).
I said not a problem - that was great and that I am here to help, he asked me to deliver on our end a large amount of screens and games, consoles, support, tourney support, panels, events - you name it - I shook his hand and told him, I’ll put it in a contract and whatever they ask for they get.
What had upset me after all this, we had a couple other events to work with the same weekend of GU, but I shook John’s hand - thats my word - so I turned down 2 other contracts and was unable to attend Blizzcon as a guest (I play wow, thats my gaming thing ^^ - ask triforce “Look at the damage”).
what I promised was ready to go, what he asked for kept shrinking…
it was not until ConnectiCon a week before GU that John approached me again - I was in the middle of our bragging rights SFIV tourney we had to run last minute for CtCon when he came over.
The show was in full swing he got 650 TV’s for $1 a piece…I was like wow, ok - but he still needed my equipment and consoles and wanted us their in case anything went wrong so our contract went to straight rental and the price lowered to match that expectation. I told him, if he needed more equipment I would throw in some to help, I would rather it be used then sit in the trailer (we were on a tour so we had a lot of equipment with us: GenCon, ConnectiCon, GU, etc.)
We arrived at the show early and ready to go - they had asked us not to move anything in yet until the staff responsible for it was ready - John arrived and someone asked me to go talk to him.
He was in his ops room directing people “ok sit, your next I got my Cuban boy here” and so on to each walking in.
he tells me his TV’s fell through…
I told him not a problem, you have 32 of mine how many more do you need.
he said I need 650…
O_o
I told him that again seems ridiculous and we are less then 24 hours from your event starting. I grabbed Jaime and he directed me to some of the staff that are setting up the spaces, Kevin and Dan - solid young men with good heads on their shoulders.
They showed me the whole space.
I couldn’t count more then 111 possible spots for TV’s thats including the 35 I counted in the Main space for Smash and the 32 we had in the trailer.
he told me no he needs that many and they have the money his exact words “I got the Money, Get me those TV’s”
I called up someone I have worked with in the past in Virginia with an outsource of equipment for me for my big shows. I told him quote me for 125 LCD’s (I added the extra just in case)
he was able to get them to me by 8am friday - he quoted me like $7k for the weekend, which I thought was reasonable, load them in a truck, get from VA to MA (it’s 6:30pm at this point) I took that to John he said do it!
I walked into Dave a few moments later and I told him, I took care of your TV Problem and I was not taking a profit on it, just straight up rental to get you what is needed, he was upset over the price - at this point I was a little shocked to be honest and didnt understand why - one of the problems was paying for the TV’s another was they were all LCD panels. (1920 x 1080 5ms LCD TV’s, could of gotten the monitors but not everything has console to VGA only 360 and the other consoles are composite)
after the back and forth I took a hit and had to pay for the labor that already loaded the truck. but I told my colleague to forget the order, and I would cover the labor…sucks I know.
I talked with GU staff and walked them to my room where I got the idea to talk to the hotel and ask for their crt’s. Dave and I had asked the hotel to do this (at different intervals) and the hotel got us somewhere in the 200 crt vicinity (from the unused rooms) - an enormous chunk of this didn’t get used because the space would not allow for it and some of the TV’s were in such poor condition they didnt work well.
but at least that was solved.
I was getting ready to setup and the hotel was moving stuff around so they asked us to wait when we finally handed our equipment to their staff, one of their guys (I wont name him, it was an accident) dropped three of our monitors - we had a couple that needed to be replaced and I asked Kevin to separate them - which he did, and I replaced those that night (yay walmart for having 1680 x 1050 5ms Dynex HD LCD’s that work just great for shooters and next gen fighters).
after that they told us they were missing some Gears of War 2 titles so we gave them 8, John told me his Halo’s from France were all bad, so I gave them 16.
and I think Dan had asked my VP Javi (Demarcus on these boards) for BlazBlue and KoF XII - so he brought down those as well.
in the end we lost all those games, and a few Japanese consoles and 1 PS3 160gig along with the 3 TV’s that were dropped and cracked in half >_< (we have insurance, no biggie I guess) but we had to pay a fat deductible since it was under 5k, and it was in the contract that Unicon is responsible for the equipment.
They came to me and said they needed help fixing some of the arcade cabs. Javi, Roman and Alex from my crew started working on it and it was a mess…someone killed the cabling, cracked the control box, and it seems the I/O port was burned. Alex, who is in the area all the time had worked on their pads a week before and the pads were not in good condition for some reason, he was understandably upset.
they worked on it as much as they could, then called me over because one of their boys was using duct tape to cover wiring. I stopped him, thanked him and understood John had been giving him a lot of hell and pressure to get it fixed and we showed him how to rewire it with specialty couplers. they went and got them and he did a really nice job after. but the I/O port was dead so all that work went for nil…
John had told me to charge him for the time we worked and he would add it to our contract, I was telling my crew to keep track of everything.
We didn’t charge them for it, since I felt we didn’t solve the entire problem.
by the end of the weekend all the players were waiting around for their prize money and I remember Jav had to step in and help Seb from Frame-Advantage and Nick from SF4-Answers in officiating because they needed help in SFIV, I think Dan asked him for some help. I like Seb and Nick - seemingly solid guys and they worked well with Javi, and one of our other boys was missing kurai Ryu - wtf Ryan I hope you enjoyed Japan!
By the end of the weekend, the Arcadia boys are waiting - I was there hanging with Red and Triforce while this got handled, we still needed our half of the contract paid as well.
We find out they are mailing the checks for the winners on September 30th and that Legacy was not paid for their winnings so he was covering their flights which were less then half the prize money. Flights to MLG Dallas.
This didnt get paid - and I was in the Arc the next day with Triforce and the boys, my guys went and got some Japanese food, I stayed behind on the phone for 8 hours…
This was so irritating, as I have negotiated million dollar contracts in 2 hours working for the city of miami and its events. this took 8 hours to get this guy to buy the stupid airfare he promised!
I really wanted some Teriyaki Beef damn it…sorry, sidetrack rant.
that tuesday the money I saw John pay to our paypal account was retracted…
call after call, he kept dodging us, I eventually spoke with Dave who was not too keen on speaking to me either and it seemed that he and I came to the realization John had been lying to both of us from the beginning.
We are currently in talks to potentially buy GU Dave wants to use some of that money to cover folks winnings, he is genuinely not a bad guy - John did one hell of a number on all of us.
Lesson learned,
We’ll see what happens to him now.
Wow, did I really write this much
Sorry and thanks (see you guys at Season’s Beating’s this weekend)
Hype it up.
damn epic. lol.
live and learn… then gets hugs…
and do background checks lol.
YES! that is what we are doing on any 1st year events asking us for help or equipment or chicken wings, no playing around lol.
We actually did our checking after the fact, oh man…
Kevin here (I ran all of the halo tournaments)
I’ve always loved running tournaments at GU because of how fair I was able to be to the players from prizepool payouts to rules/format etc. I first started running tournaments, ironically, to go against the shit that was pulled at GUCon – players getting screwed in every way possible. I started playing games competitively since I was 8 and I’ve seen way too many people get fucked over with ridiculous house cuts, horrible rules, etc. and it’s a shame to see such a player-friendly community go down the drain with something like this.
I knew it was going to be hell and a lot of last-minute bullshit but I didn’t think it was going to be anywhere near as bad as it was (staying up for three days straight setting the Gears and Halo rooms up for example). GPX saved my ass huge since apparently John wasn’t able to get me anything I needed in terms of games/extra TVs/wires/etc. Manny and GPX were great in two ways – they could give helpful suggestions of what to do with what we had, and they understood/listened if I needed different hardware/couldn’t use certain things, etc. I’ll vouch for GPX any day.
I’m pretty sure none of the Halo players’ checks that were issued on Saturday have bounced (I guess they were smart enough to cash them as early as possible). Thankfully, ~90% of the total H3 prize pool was awarded between Friday and Saturday so my players didn’t get duped out of much.
I was extremely close to telling John that I would not run the halo tournaments without him getting the prizepool money together BEFORE it started but with the amount of projects he was caught up in it felt like I was just going to annoy the shit out of him. I’ll listen to my gut next time and be 100% certain; that is, if there is a next time.
I’m very sorry to everyone who was affected by this. I’m on the list of people who got screwed as well (no paycheck obviously, + it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to run any more GU tournaments) but the worst part about it is seeing the local competitive community die because of something like this.