Nerding Day: CrazyJim

I'm in the middle of a project about Billy Mitchell right now, who, if he is reading this, has never cheated and is without a doubt one of the greatest gamers who has ever lived. But that project has gotten me thinking about the other great video game players of history. There's Daigo Umehara of Evo Moment #37, not to mention the also-incredible Justin Wong. There's that guy who played a lot of Minecraft and probably cheated at it. But do you recall the #1 gamer of all?

No? His name is James "CrazyJim" Sager. If you were alive and conscious and spent a lot of time on Battle.net playing StarCraft and WarCraft III twenty years ago, then you… probably still don't remember him. CrazyJim remembers, though. He remembers the way a man clinging to a piece of driftwood floating on an endless ocean remembers the feeling of solid land beneath his feet as the sun slowly bakes his brains inside his skull. Sometimes he thinks he dreamt it entirely. But no — no! It was real. It had to have been real. CrazyJim was #1 world in like every game he played serious.

A lot to unpack in this screenshot of CrazyJim's website. Let's take it one step at a time here. Ignore the drug lords and terrorists for the time being. We'll get to them, I promise.

CrazyJim's main claim to fame is that he was pretty good at some real-time strategy games in the '90s and early 2000s. He says he was the number one ranked player in StarCraft and its expansion, Brood War, as well as WarCraft III and Diablo 2. Now, I had a friend in high school who claimed to be the best in the world at Dead or Alive Ultimate for the Xbox, but as far as I know he is now married with a child and works at a bank, so either he got tired of the public recognition, high salary, and constant blowjobs of the pro gamer lifestyle and decided to settle down, or else he was just bullshitting me. I'm going to need that proof, CrazyJim.

Again, this is an extraordinarily information-dense image. It looks like something we would launch into space to assert our dominance in video gaming over aliens.

On the left, we have a 2002 screencap of Battle.net, Blizzard's online gaming service. Jim has helpfully circled and pointed to the update of note, which congratulates him for being the first player to reach 1,500 wins in WarCraft III. That's real, I checked. So whatever else we uncover about CrazyJim, nobody can take that away from him. He can always hang his hat on his WarCraft III accomplishments.

But we're only about two fifths of the way through this image. Next to his real, documented success, Jim begins boasting wildly like a child on a playground. He starts by claiming that he was also ranked number one in a few different Blizzard games, and then things spiral out of control. He beat the NES game Ninja Gaiden. He won twenty-six times in a row "a few times" in Killer Instinct. When he was 15 years old, he "tried" to make the world's first massively multiplayer online game. This is not the dispassionate listing of the triumphs of a world champion. This is the anxious word vomit of a man trying to pad his resume for a job that does not exist.

They say that life is like walking down a long corridor in which doors are always closing behind us as we pass — these are our regrets, the things that can never be. I sometimes regret playing as many video games as I did in my youth. I could have spent that time writing, or socializing, or doing anything that would have provided me benefits later in life other than an encyclopedic knowledge of Sonic the Hedgehog. Jim, on the other hand, regrets not playing more video games, dropping out of college to move to Korea, and becoming a StarCraft god. Sliding doors, man.

When we talk about the all-time duos, a few names come to mind: Batman and Robin. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. CrazyJim and CrazyDre, who were #1 in the world at StarCraft 2 2v2. Well, they weren't actually #1 in terms of rankings, but they were definitely the best! And if CrazyDre hadn't taken a paying job at Tesla to provide for his family rather than continue playing StarCraft 2, they would have reached the top. Anything can be an accomplishment if you use your imagination!

Jim was told, presumably by someone, that he had the #1 score in the 1989 Nintendo World Championships (that didn't use Turtle Tip) in Pittsburgh. Now, far be it from me to call Jim a liar, but the Nintendo World Championships didn't actually start until 1990. So Jim is most likely doing what we'll call "creative misremembering," like when I tell a date that I was was ranked the #1 lover in the 2010 World Sexual Kumite (that didn't use g-spot stimulation). In fact, I still hold several world records: fastest orgasm (3.2 seconds), fastest thrust with orgasm (.12 seconds), and most consecutive orgasms delivered in a single tournament (56).

CrazyJim told Turbine, developer of Asheron's Call, "don't do it that way, you'll never make a dime."

So given all of that, why haven't you heard of him? Jim's explanation for the absence of most of his accomplishments from the internet is that, "believe it or not, the Internet does decay." He was famous, though. He was.

Honestly, I'm not sure what's more depressing, the claims that can't be substantiated due to the actually rotting internet or the ones that nobody would care to substantiate anyway, because they're not really accomplishments in any conventional sense of the term.

That's all well and good, CrazyJim, but how do I know that you're who you say you are? You could be someone pretending to be #1 gamer CrazyJim. The only thing that can convince me you speak the truth is blurry, poorly-lit photos of you next to some barely-identifiable materials sent to you by the game developer Blizzard twenty years ago. Well? I'll wait.

Huh. Short wait.

CrazyJim isn't just a gamer. He took his skills at playing StarCraft and made his own games. Kind of a lot of them, actually. First, let's look at Throne and Crown, a game Jim describes on Steam as "Critically acclaimed music sound track Rares Bosses Statistics Leveling choices affect story Cut Scene adventure Puzzle nature calming."

Ok, so it doesn't look great, only has one review, and that owl just said it's quite good at "using just about anyone for service." But — and crucially, this is not a joke — there's absolutely going to be an indie darling within the next few years that has this exact aesthetic but then turns out to be about watching your parents die or something.

That's kind of what all of Jim's games look like. Consider Starfighter General, a space combat slash sim slash madness simulator that he describes as "INFINITE PLAYER MMO! New techs never seen in any video games! Pinball Permadeath! Also A base and fleet building simulator. The bar of quality is raising!"

Tell me that doesn't look like an avant-garde title ala Cruelty Squad critiquing the futility of capitalism. I mean, if you can even parse what's happening. Maybe another screenshot would help?

If anything, that made it worse. One more try.

Space Magic! What is it? Is it real? Is it useful? What's happening? How did we get here, and how do we make it stop? Let's see if Jim can clarify what Starfighter General is all about on its Steam page.

If your six year old started talking like this, you'd say "that's nice honey, but you really need to think about scope. Also you should probably add some gacha game elements to catch whales because funders want to see things like that." Coming from an adult man, it's depressing. Jim is the Mark Borchardt of game development minus the charm and supportive best friend.

Now, there is no law against releasing badly-made video games. If there were, then the creators of Big Rigs would be international fugitives. Neither is there any legal barrier to making incoherent claims that you were once pretty good at decades-old titles. More than that, as a society we tend to treat those who make such claims — especially via the medium of JPEGs hastily edited in Microsoft Paint — as deserving of pity and possibly assistance rather than scorn.

And so, you've been waiting for some sort of twist in the narrative. Well, here it is, from another one of Jim's domains, "fatherspiritson.com."

I don't know whether CrazyJim had a deep connection to Christianity from his youth or else turned to it when he found himself bereft and defeated, bitterly lamenting the life of WarCraft fame he evidently feels was his birthright. Regardless, religion provided a convenient explanation for why his games — which, again, are made by one of the greatest developers alive today — failed to sell at all. It's not that he's an obnoxious, show-off jerk or that his games are dogshit. There's simply a conspiracy to suppress Christian video games.

The funny thing is, aside from Throne and Crown, a game where you can receive the time-limited blessing of the literal Christian God for a small stat buff, most of Jim's games aren't explicitly Christian.

Jim calls Dungeon Run a "hit Christian game," three words which can only be used to describe it in the loosest possible terms.

Was it a hit? It does seem to have done a fair amount of traffic back in the late 2000s on a Flash portal, sure. But I'm a millennial who won't shut up about how the internet used to be good fifteen years ago and I've never heard of it. Is Dungeon Run Christian? In the sense that it was made by one, I guess. And yes, it is technically a game, though it looks more like a parody of an early mobile title that would have been the focus of an episode of The Big Bang Theory where the guy who loves science gets addicted to it.

Speaking of things that look like parodies of themselves, Jim has written a few articles over at Wolfshead Online, a site whose politics and aesthetics are so on the nose that it would feel hacky if you wrote it as a joke about right-wing maniacs. A pixel art banner ad reading "Keep your (filthy woke) politics out of video games?" A "no DEI" image that isn't actually an ad or a link at all, just a huge, permanent fixture eating up screen real estate and proclaiming the site's dutiful hatred of three letters that Ben Shapiro told them to? It's beautiful.

They do not want Christians making video games with good Christian values like: avoid fireball, attack wizard, collect gem. Gauntlet is the greatest Christian video game of all time but they wouldn't let you make it today, because of DEI. You would have to call it Gay-ntlet and it would be about fighting skeletons of indeterminate gender using the power of diversity.

Complaining that he's being repressed is one of Jim's favorite hobbies. For instance, he's an enthusiastic Twitter user, despite his belief that the platform is silencing him. This is especially egregious considering that he is paying the cost of one and a half copies of Dungeon Run monthly to Elon Musk.

Jim, my boy! You're the #1 gamer and game developer of all time. Complaining about a differential of 46 views in a reply to Chuck D on the site formerly known as Twitter is not befitting a man of your stature. Neither is retweeting Rob Schneider, for that matter.

Quick sideboard here: I can understand why Jim turned to the politics of endless grievances against immigrants/transgender people/vaccines/Hill-llar-y C1inton/Fauci/whatever a Twitter user named CatTurd tells him to develop high blood pressure over, but how do you explain a guy like Schneider? He had an incredible run in the 90s, riding high on being a present white man who happened to be near Lorne Michaels, and he was set to coast forever on his status as a legacy Sandler friend. What's he got to be mad about? Did he feel that he deserved more? That it should have been him extending his largesse to his less-successful fellows? Did he come to resent his status as a punchline? Was he always like this and it just didn't come out until he felt secure enough to live his truth?

Or can you trace it all back to the time he fell down some stairs and hit his head during the filming of Judge Dredd?

We may never know. But here's what we know about CrazyJim. He was once pretty good at StarCraft and has never let go of that accomplishment. He truly believes himself to be one of the greatest living game developers today. He thinks that China is punishing him for exposing their government's organ harvesting schemes by ruining his ranked score in League of Legends.

CrazyJim is Terry A. Davis with less talent and fewer racial slurs. He's crazy, but not quite crazy enough. He's the Diet Coke of crazy. And, most importantly, he Didn't Start the Baron.

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