Lies, fraud, tacky mansions, and Roblox: "My mother is very proud."

November 19, 2022 6:45 AM

"There's no way anyone could get away with such an obvious lie, it would be too easy to check. But it turns out if something is easy to check, NO ONE ACTUALLY DOES." [1h 57m] Hbomberguy spends half an hour finding the true origins of the Roblox "Oof" sound effect that plays when you die, then gets sucked into the outrageous (yet utterly banal) world of egotistical lies of veritable videogame industry icon, Tommy Tallarico.
posted by AlSweigart (25 comments total)

Hbomberguy has real skill at turning deep investigation into enjoyable content, as in this video and his previous anti-vaxx grifter Andrew Wakefield. This Roblox video also touches on the theme of looking past "great man" history and frauds who steal credit, as in his Dragon's Lair history videos. It's a two-hour video, but the pacing and editing made me end up watching it in one sitting.

Previously, previously, and so many other previouslies.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:50 AM on November 19, 2022 [8 favorites]

I started digging into this one last night. Gonna take me a while to finish it but I always enjoy hbomberguy's videos.
posted by iamkimiam at 6:56 AM on November 19, 2022

I've met a few pathological liars like this, and it's scary how many notes that resonate here: they'd take full credit for team efforts (you'd always find them in the center of group photos), they'd lie about their accomplishments. They had a sort of charm that would make you give them the benefit of the doubt. Their lies never seemed too outlandish (as long as you didn't lay them all out at once), and they seemed confident. They loved to talk nonstop, mostly about themselves and "great ideas" (always some science fiction trope or TED talk pop sci fare). They were all tall white men, but as the recent Elizabeth Holmes post shows, you don't need to be tall and white and male: you just need to be privileged.

They all abused their partners, in one or multiple ways. One was outed as a serial rapist. None were ever so much as charged.

It's at the point where if I meet a guy who brags about being a computer hacking black-belt with a physics degree from MIT, I tell women to not be alone with them.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:06 AM on November 19, 2022 [17 favorites]

After watching this video, I wonder if "Tommy Tallarico" is even his real name.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:18 AM on November 19, 2022

Don’t have time to watch the video, but as soon as I saw Tallarico’s name at the end, I had a feeling that it’ll be good. That dude is infamous in various gaming-adjacent spaces.
posted by May Kasahara at 7:32 AM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was thinking about posting this but didn't get around to it, thanks AlSweigart. Hbomberguy is one of the only Youtubers who can make multi-hour videos that don't feel boring and plodding to me, and this one was excellent.
posted by wesleyac at 9:59 AM on November 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm still steamed at the cousin of Steven Tallarico for his mismanagement of the Intellivision Amico project.
posted by emelenjr at 10:37 AM on November 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

I’m getting unreasonably distracted by the can light falling out of the ceiling in his expensive mansion at 21:00
posted by sjswitzer at 12:24 PM on November 19, 2022 [11 favorites]

thank you sjswitzer for noticing it too. I thought I was the only one.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 1:29 PM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

As the kind of person who had G4 on constantly in 2002 and 2003, I had a soft spot in my heart for Tommy. These allegations can't be forgiven as mere "coarseness."

What's really sad is people loved him and he used all that up. Doesn't seem like he'll learn his lesson either.
posted by ob1quixote at 3:04 PM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I watched the video close to its release, when it wasn't yet clear what it was going to be about, and it was a RIDE. Holy crap. Like, I vaguely knew Tommy Tallarico was involved in Roblox-related drama, and I mostly remembered him as the idiot who might've gotten fooled into backing the Amico (but also became increasingly unhinged once people began to call him out on it). It turns out the actual truth was so, so, so much worse.

You begin to wonder if there's anything he's ever said that was true. Does he even own that house? I can't conceive of a way he could fake that without some kind of generous benefactor willing to lend him an incredibly gaudily decorated house for various occasions, but how can you trust anything he says? EVERYTHING ELSE was a lie, why wouldn't this be?
posted by chrominance at 4:04 PM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

the cobwebs at least prove the awards had been there a good while, unless they were fake too. how deep does the rabbit hole go? why are we blaming rabbits for this? it could be more of a snake burrow.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 4:28 PM on November 19, 2022

Gosh between this story and the current Musk meltdown, I'm starting to think that "taking credit for things" is a way better strategy for success than "actually accomplishing things" is.
posted by Western Infidels at 5:00 PM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm starting to think that "taking credit for things" is a way better strategy for success than "actually accomplishing things" is.

The Al Capone theory of sexual harassment:

The U.S. government recognized a pattern in the Al Capone case: smuggling goods was a crime often paired with failing to pay taxes on the proceeds of the smuggling. We noticed a similar pattern in reports of sexual harassment and assault: often people who engage in sexually predatory behavior also faked expense reports, plagiarized writing, or stole credit for other people’s work.

Just three examples: Mark Hurd, the former CEO of HP, was accused of sexual harassment by a contractor, but resigned for falsifying expense reports to cover up the contractor’s unnecessary presence on his business trips. Jacob Appelbaum, the former Tor evangelist, left the Tor Foundation after he was accused of both sexual misconduct and plagiarism. And Randy Komisar, a general partner at venture capital firm KPCB, gave a book of erotic poetry to another partner at the firm, and accepted a board seat (and the credit for a successful IPO) at RPX that would ordinarily have gone to her.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:05 PM on November 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

Thanks for posting this, finished all my dishes and learned something about video game history. The thought that you can lie about easily checked things for twenty years in a pop culture realm like video games and no one will notice or care because it "doesnt really matter" is true (it happens in music journalism too, people are concerned with other things first before accuracy). But that in certain spheres, like carrying money over the border, like lying to investors, it can have real legal consequences. One would hope for the president of the US too but alas. It doesn't surprise me at all that this pathologically lying narcissist is hanging out with the white supremacists online and going down that rabbit hole. Probably a Trump supporter too, why are so many of them like this.
posted by subdee at 11:57 PM on November 19, 2022

Tallarico’s first big project was Earthworm Jim, and given how Doug TenNapel turned out it’s absolutely no surprise that Tallarico has ended up down the right-winger hole too.
posted by egypturnash at 4:07 AM on November 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

My son mentioned something about them removing the "oof" sound as the default death sound effect but I didn't realize it was a licensing issue at the time - https://twitter.com/roblox/status/1552037832578846720

Snooping on Tommy Tallarico's youtube, it appears that he makes it seem like he owns the rights to the sound - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9PhJzRrzj0

What's odd to me is that my assumption is that this work would have been work for hire for the Messiah game, and that the game owners would have owned the work products his studio created. So wouldn't they have been the ones with the ability to negotiate with Roblox?
posted by mincus at 5:23 AM on November 20, 2022

If I understand correctly, Tallarico's company designed the sounds and licensed them to Shiny rather than creating them as work for hire. As to why, I'd imagine "we'll create the sounds and license them to you, and then we can also license them to other developers and get paid multiple times for the same work" is significantly cheaper than "we'll create these sounds as work for hire and you'll own them".
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:35 AM on November 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Tallarico’s first big project was Earthworm Jim, and given how Doug TenNapel turned out it’s absolutely no surprise that Tallarico has ended up down the right-winger hole too.

Yeah, I knew a bunch of video game nerds and just general nerds and programmers from that era and, in hindsight, it's pretty clear to me that there were a lot of people in that general cohort that were awful human beings even back then and a lot of us were just ignorant or too tolerant of their bad behavior because that's just how things worked back then. Or didn't work.

Over the past 5 years or so there have been a bunch of weirdly and sadly ended friendships among my extended circle of friends.

One person I know was a very smart and fun programmer and weirdo who unfriended a bunch of people due to having a hard line free speech absolutist position that decided that punching active and self declared Nazis was wrong no matter how harmful said Nazis were.

Another old high school friend that was in our alternative/darkwave music cohort and found religion, and they pretty obviously hate women - and probably always hated women because if his lack of connection and empathy with them - and he has basically gone full on spiteful incel. Which is super fucking weird and tragic to me because he had everything going from him from looks to education and even likeability, but he had a bad habit of not just being himself and just letting people like him. Like he could have been a David Bowie archetype. The dude had looks and style and could be really entertainingly affable and erudite when he wanted to be.

If I think about it I could write up a whole list of people I used to know from the mid to late 90s through the mid 2000s who are or were in the general video game industry and fandom or were people in the tech industry that I would not be at all surprised to learn that they went totally mask off, quiet parts out loud before, during and after the Trump epidemic.

And I can note and observe in hindsight that a lot of the people I would put on this list all had traits of narcissism, megalomania and being way too proud of material things or collecting niche things just like Tallarico.

I've met, been friends with and/or worked with or for Tommy Tallarico's type before, and one of the clear common threads and indicators is how empty, needy and starving for approval they are and how they compensate for it with material things, displays of wealth or collecting things.

It was such a common trope that it's now a huge red flag and warning to me if I'm ever subjected to a "Behold... my stuff!" kind of interaction or one-sided conversation that mainly involves pop culture collectibles.

Sure, it's not a 100% reliable indicator and I don't mean to throw all people who collect pop culture things under the bus, but at this point if I meet someone that has, say, more than a couple of Funko Pops still in their boxes and proudly on display or otherwise it gets forced into the conversation I'm instantly on guard and I have questions.
posted by loquacious at 11:16 AM on November 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

I can see the appeal for tacky themed rooms if you have the money to waste. And yeah, I know people who collect vinyl or pop culture detritus or something who will single out a supposedly rare item they recently acquired, but seem otherwise fine people.

The red flag for me is when it's on Gamer TV but he decides to tell everyone it was on MTV Cribs, because ... more people have heard of MTV Cribs, I guess? That sort of attitude where someone will say something solely to get the reaction they want?
posted by RobotHero at 3:58 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

if you have wandered into the thread and reached this comment and you're not sure if you want to invest your time in this video: yes, yes you do.
posted by elkevelvet at 11:13 AM on November 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

A+ will watch additional videos.

This was bizarrely riveting. I haven’t seen this guy’s work before, but I am an instant fan. His look of exasperation/frustration/anger at this shitheadery is something I feel deep in my bones these days.
posted by hototogisu at 3:25 AM on November 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

I finished it tonight and yes, riveting is the word. “It's always Joey!” cracked me up. As well as the petty lying about his Guinness records. It's all so cringe. What must he think!?

I just recently rewatched Breaking Bad and I swear there was a bit in there where they talk about “structuring” and I just laugh thinking about Tallarico thinking he's real clever saying that he's giving the money to his friends to hold and then asked for it back *before* he left customs. Talk me through that one, Tommy.

hbomberguy is great as usual. He's one of my funny people…the way he says things, the exasperation and incredulity…he really makes me laugh.
posted by iamkimiam at 5:39 PM on November 25, 2022

Just finished the video. When I started the video, about 2.2 million (!) people had watched it since it was created on Nov 17th. In the time it took me to watch it, about 8,000 more people had viewed it. I didn’t know if I wanted to spend almost two hours watching it, but I’m glad I did.

I was in the video game industry in the 90s, first on the development side and later on the publishing side. Aside from the obvious credit-stealing and narcissism of Tallarico that was the heart of this video, I found the Conclusion section in the last 8 minutes at the end to be most compelling. There was a lot of BS credit hogging in the first two titles I worked on at the time.

The publishing house would credit every damn body in their company, it seemed, because they were the ones who made the box materials and manual, so they all got to be in it. But then on the development side, it was often just the President of the company and maybe the Lead Designer that would be included. Artists, musicians, writers, developers and programmers — men and women who were the real creators — commonly never got credit, while some damn paper-pushing guy in accounts management at the publishing house got billing in the credits.

On my third or fourth project, I was a Project Director and fought for inclusion of detailed credits from the development side, and we were able to get them included in the manual thereafter. I’ve been able to get a some credits on MobyGames only because I sent them copies of those manuals, but haven’t been able to get credits on others from before we were credited. When I shifted to the publishing side, I carried that practice over, and made damn sure that everyone in the development team was credited.

Speaking of our dev house president, he passed away a few years ago, so nil nisi bonum and all, but he was also a raging narcissist. He basically had wangled his position because he had inherited money from his deceased father. There’s no doubt that his charisma allowed him to gather a team of highly competent people around him, and to secure a development contract with Sega. And he was a skilled programmer. So I have to give him legitimate props. But that company was an almost daily case study in dysfunction due in large part to his toxic leadership.

After a particularly bad series of decisions, the four others of us that constituted senior staff met one night to draft a list of problems with the company and recommended solutions. When we presented it to the president, he dismissed all of it. The next day, I made a call to a friend who ran a publishing house who had previously offered me a job and said yes. Shortly thereafter, the other senior staffers also left, and shortly after that, the company was shuttered.

Im glad that we are now in an era when people get credited for their work on the games that bring so many people enjoyment. People shouldn’t have to rely on a deep dive by Hbomberguy to get credit for their creative work.

(Speaking of whom, the only other video of Hbomberguy’s that I’ve seen is the one on antivaxxers with the takedown of disgraced ex-doctor Andrew Wakefield. It is an extraordinarily good, history- and evidence-based takedown of the whole antivax trend of the last 20 years.)
posted by darkstar at 9:14 AM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

> After watching this video, I wonder if "Tommy Tallarico" is even his real name.

Well...

On several things shown in the video his name is given as Tommy V. Tallarico. His middle name is Andrew. His more famous cousin, Steven Tyler... has the middle name Victor.

So basically yes you were correct to wonder that.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:54 AM on December 15, 2022