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The year is 2012.
I, a fresh-faced twenty something who was actually just literally twenty years old, am in a convention hall full to the brim with all kinds of video game paraphernalia. Over in the corner is a Capcom employee handing out full-sized shields to promote Dragon’s Dogma, a humble little action RPG that seemed destined to be a cult hit from the very moment it was announced. In another section is a larger than life display for Borderlands 2, a game with writing so bad that every single member of its writing staff would later be tried for insurrection against their profession. A swarm of bodies is waiting to play Firefall, a game I only bring up to earn brownie points for remembering something you definitely forgot.
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Image courtesy of Polygon
Tucked in between all of that hustle and bustle is a (oddly comfortable) model of a bus torn asunder by an explosive device. Inside the damaged vessel, a couple of men will soon tell me that they are making a new Spec-Ops, which I regard as an especially terrible idea. Did you play the PlayStation Spec-Ops games? They were kind of like what I imagine SOCOM to have been if it was rendered by a smart refrigerator and then retold to you by some friends in an elaborate game of telephone. This game was different, one of the men, Cory Davis, told me. It wasn’t like those games. It was like that book, The Heart of Darkness. You know, that book you probably read for your independent reading assignment in high school? The one that you definitely didn’t give up on after 20 pages to play World of Warcraft, reasoning that you could probably get enough of the gist of it from Sparknotes to write a passable essay? Yeah, that one.
Spec-Ops: The Line, as it was called, was heavily inspired by the seminal work of Joseph Conrad. It was a prototypical six out of ten elevated to an implausible 77 out of 100 (7.7 out of ten, for those who like consistency and also dislike the particularness of some mathematicians (I don’t apologize for my people)) by a likeness to a book that a large percentage of the audience probably didn’t read but had probably heard of (or at least watched Apocalypse Now). It is also a great case study in this, the age of Palworld, a game that is “inspired by” Pokemon in a way that many here find to be off-putting and many others not here find to be kind of fun, maybe.
There is clearly a line between inspiration and plagiarism, but where is the line between inspiration that upsets an industry and inspiration that makes an industry shrug and say, “Who cares? It’s fun!”.
I am here to find that (Spec-Ops: The) line.
(I’m going to put a line below each section, too; feel free to find that line if you would like a more beginner-friendly line-finding experience)
Finding the Line
If you didn’t read the above introduction, the goal here is as such: I want to find the line between acceptable and unacceptable inspiration, or “inspiration”, in media, specifically video games. To find this line, I have selected three examples to explore:
The answer to that last question is yes, by the way. I know you should never start a project like this with preconceived notions in favor of one of the many possible conclusions of your exploration, but who are we kidding here? I have a bias. Let’s acknowledge it now and see if it changes by the end of this experiment!
The Punching Bag
Zoomers don’t even know what it was like to play video games in the golden age of The Simpsons. You couldn’t walk five feet without tripping over a licensed piece of shovelware shat out in the hopes that fans of America’s favorite family would put aside their good sensibilities and part with a sizable sum of cash. Remember Bart vs. the Space Mutants? Virtual Bart? The Simpsons Wrestling? Unfortunately, I do remember renting and playing each of every one of these like it was a sacred pilgrimage that must be made.
Image courtesy of Eurogamer
In 2000, work commenced on yet another entry into Matt Groening’s (unfortunately) eternal canon: The Simpsons: Road Rage. Originally being developed as a kart racer ala, um, Konami Krazy Racers, Road Rage was an attempt to get Homer and crew off the mat (literally) and into a more appealing venue that might actually get copies to fly off non-discounted shelves. According to an oral history of the game’s development written by Inverse’s Brian VanHooker, the approachable kart racer (think, um, Pac-Man World Rally?) was nixed when Matt Groening himself groaned (Groened?) about how every other mascot in the world had a kart racer. Even Cubix! Additionally, as Road Rage producer John Melchoir notes in VanHooker’s article, kart racing is a solitary act, and humor wouldn’t flow naturally with just one person in the car. Thus, the team went back to their idea hole and dug out the most tried and true idea of all time: Plagiarism!
Crazy Taxi is a bonafide AAAA ten out of ten experience for the SEGA Dreamcast that anyone with sufficient taste has on their personal Mount Rushmore of games scored by The Offspring. It was in arcades prior to its Dreamcast release in 2000, giving the teams at FOX Interactive and Radical Entertainment plenty of time to scope out its quality. Scope they did, as The Simpson’s: Road Rage is the kind of software you would expect to get if you sucked all the B.D. Joe out of Crazy Taxi and replaced it with the cast of an already declining animated sitcom. Everything you knew and loved about the best ride sharing game ever made was here, except for polish and The Offspring. Even the patented directional arrow at the top of the screen made the cut!
Reviewers savaged the game, labeling it as the cheap imitation that even the developers acknowledged it was (eventually). Metacritic has the game at a 64 on the lead platform (and, inexplicably, a 67 on the Gamecube), and you would be hard pressed to CTRL+F that page without finding at least a couple dozen mentions of Crazy Taxi. The obvious similarities would ultimately lead to a lawsuit between SEGA and FOX Entertainment, with a settlement for an undisclosed amount of money being reached outside of court. Whatever the amount was, Michael Pole recounted in Brian VanHooker’s aforementioned oral history that it wasn’t enough to offset the game’s financial success.
“...we had a great lawyer who fought tooth and nail and, at the end of the day, there was a number that was paid to Sega that was insignificant to the money that was generated by the game and everyone moved on. Sega came for their pound of flesh, but I think they walked away with a quarter-pound instead.” - Michael Pole, Former Senior Vice President of Product Development at FOX Interactive (via Inverse)
So, Road Rage was a success! A success with a black eye, but a success nonetheless. At the very least, some fragment of justice was served in the court of public opinion and in the literal courts. Well, I guess it was settled out of court, but I’m sure lawyers were there so that’s kind of like court. Whatever!
The Appropriate Homage
There I was on that showroom floor, face-to-face with a true blue game designer in a makeship exploded bus. I can’t tell you how many times he mentioned Heart of Darkness. Well, I could if I still had my voice recorder, or even if I was willing to dig up a link to the article I wrote about my interview with Cory Davis (I tried; the domain was sold and I refuse to consult the Wayback Machine!). The point is: He mentioned the book a lot! If I came away from my time on the showfloor with Yager Development with anything, it was that the developers of Spec-Ops: The Line were literate.
Anyways: Spec-Ops: The Line and Heart of Darkness. How much inspiration was there? My friend, the game’s answer to Colonel Kurtz is named John Konrad! Like the author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad! That shit might as well have been slapped on the cover next to the ESRB rating.
This openness was met with, well, fine reception. It wasn’t the best game. It also wasn’t the worst game! Critics noted its heavy-handed inspiration, with Eurogamer’s Christopher Donlan even referring to it as occasionally “smothering” in his review. Though the connection to classic literature merited numerous mentions, those mentions typically erred on the side of favorable: Spec-Ops was at the very least transformative, taking the classic tale of European colonialism and making it a slightly less classic tale of American occupation.
In the end, Spec-Ops got off easy for its depiction of Joseph Conrad’s work because the developers never pretended it was anything else. They cited the novel as a major inspiration and used it to tell something resembling a unique story. A heavy-handed story that paled in comparison to that which I imagine the novel told (remember: Sparknotes!), but a unique enough story nonetheless.
It also helps that the game was, you know, functional! Unlike The Simpsons: Road Rage, the design was competent enough that some fun could possibly be extracted if you were psychopathic enough to look past the game's ham-fisted reminders that you, the player, were bad.
The Shrug
2017 was a big year for Nintendo, as I’m sure anyone unfortunate enough to have clicked on this thread remembers (hi, @chocolate_supra !). It was a pretty big year for other publishers, too! After all, that was the year that the unstoppable behemoth that is Fortnite: Battle Royale was unleashed upon our world’s youth. You might recall, though, that Fortnite was not alone in battling its royales.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (or PUBG: Battlegrounds, as it’s known now for whatever fucking reason) swept through the industry like annoying sidekicks through the Sonic the Hedgehog series (still there, @chocolate_supra ?). You couldn’t visit any landing page for any media outlet covering video games without seeing the recognizably dull visuals of fatigued men hopping out of planes and duking it out in the wild. Though not the first of its kind (PlayerUnknown developed a mod for ARMA 2 and consulted on H1Z1), PUBG popularized a number of concepts that would go on to define the genre: Hopping out of a flying vehicle of some kind! A rapidly-shrinking circle that makes life Hell for anyone who exists outside its vicinity! Overly long bouts of looting that end when a twelve year old who is staying home from school sneaks up on you with a shotgun! These ideas were so beloved that they became the basis for another game from another publisher: Epic’s Fortnite: Battle Royale.
In case you don’t remember (and you would be totally forgiven for forgetting), Fortnite began its life vaguely imitating Minecraft before vanishing into the ether for a long enough time that emailers to Giant Bomb’s Giant Bombcast jokingly announced its cancellation (citation needed, but I promise it happened). After PUBG’s surprisingly impactful debut in 2017, Fortnite reemerged as a battle royale game of its own. Fortnite: Battle Royale saw players jump out of a flying bus to fight it out in the wild while a rapidly-diminishing circular region corralled them together for one last showdown. Games of Fortnite typically ended when a twelve year old staying home from school snuck up on players with a shotgun.
Hey! What the fuck! I already wrote that joke. Epic! You literally just made PUBG! You bastards!
Oh, there’s crafting. Problem solved! Proceed.
Likely due to its cartoonish designs and low price (“free”), Fortnite completely overtook PUBG and became the biggest damn video game released in the new Millenium. PUBG sued Epic Games to no avail, and its star dimmed while the victor gorged itself like one of those gluttonous Lumas in Super Mario Galaxy. Though there was certainly some public sentiment that what Fortnite did was, as the kids say, “fucked”, those concerns have largely been washed away by the tide of a society completely willing to shrug off plagiarism if it means they can still kill their friends while dressed as a Funko-fied version of Goku from DragonBall Z.
It’s also worth mentioning that Epic Games has been sued multiple times for using dance moves popularized by a number of different professionals, but who cares? The Carlton Dance is now nothing more than a silly emote your murderous Sportsmate can perform after shotgunning some stupid adult who had the audacity to download a free game for children to play in their free time.
The Conclusion
I already told you my conclusion! Plagiarism only matters when a game is bad, ala The Simpsons: Road Rage. When a game is fun, it's an understandable imitation that speaks to a developer’s ability to apply existing concepts in a new and engaging format. Yeah, Fortnite blatantly infringed on PlayerUnknown’s most known property, but where else can you “Hit the Griddy” after epically owning some defaults with your gussied up virtual body pillow? Yes, Palworld liberally borrows from the biggest intellectual property known to man, but it’s kind of fun so lay off, you prude! Why do you have to rain on our parade? Just because we borrowed all of the floats from the parade a town away? Fuck off, old man!
Seriously, though: This is weird! I know everybody watched that Hbomberguy video. Youtube told me! We all watched and nodded in agreement as Harrison reminded us about Filip Miucin, the pathetic influencer who completely cribbed content from other content creators to elevate his own profile. We all tutted about the Internet Historian and his reappropriation of a story that wasn’t his to tell. We all shook our fists at James Somerton, even if we had no idea who that was! As a people, we all gathered around the glow of our computers and agreed that plagiarism was bad, actually, and that our society was better off for calling it out wherever it occurred.
And now?
Plagiarism is fine, actually. You see, games like Palworld are a miracle. The developers took existing intellectual property and twisted it to make the very important observation that it would be silly if Pikachu had a gun. It’s stealing, sure, but it’s stealing that made me have a good time, so it doesn’t matter. My personal enjoyment is the most important denominator in this equation.
In summary, the line is exactly where I thought it was. It may as well not even exist, as we already have a much more objective barometer that measures the exact same thing: Metacritic. Or Opencritic, I guess. Is Game Rankings still a thing? Regardless, the line is the same line that people use to determine whether or not they are going to fork over $70 for the latest AAA fuck fest: Is the game good? An answer in the negative begets cries of copyright infringement, lazy developers, plagiarism, et al. An answer in the affirmative begets celebratory Xeets and an army of players willing to carry water for a zany tale of swords, sorcery, and slavery.
Sigh. Another evening wasted answering a question I already answered myself six hours ago.I should have just saved myself time and copied my work from a better writer.
Hbomberguy, if you’re reading this: Call me.
I, a fresh-faced twenty something who was actually just literally twenty years old, am in a convention hall full to the brim with all kinds of video game paraphernalia. Over in the corner is a Capcom employee handing out full-sized shields to promote Dragon’s Dogma, a humble little action RPG that seemed destined to be a cult hit from the very moment it was announced. In another section is a larger than life display for Borderlands 2, a game with writing so bad that every single member of its writing staff would later be tried for insurrection against their profession. A swarm of bodies is waiting to play Firefall, a game I only bring up to earn brownie points for remembering something you definitely forgot.
Image courtesy of Polygon
Tucked in between all of that hustle and bustle is a (oddly comfortable) model of a bus torn asunder by an explosive device. Inside the damaged vessel, a couple of men will soon tell me that they are making a new Spec-Ops, which I regard as an especially terrible idea. Did you play the PlayStation Spec-Ops games? They were kind of like what I imagine SOCOM to have been if it was rendered by a smart refrigerator and then retold to you by some friends in an elaborate game of telephone. This game was different, one of the men, Cory Davis, told me. It wasn’t like those games. It was like that book, The Heart of Darkness. You know, that book you probably read for your independent reading assignment in high school? The one that you definitely didn’t give up on after 20 pages to play World of Warcraft, reasoning that you could probably get enough of the gist of it from Sparknotes to write a passable essay? Yeah, that one.
Spec-Ops: The Line, as it was called, was heavily inspired by the seminal work of Joseph Conrad. It was a prototypical six out of ten elevated to an implausible 77 out of 100 (7.7 out of ten, for those who like consistency and also dislike the particularness of some mathematicians (I don’t apologize for my people)) by a likeness to a book that a large percentage of the audience probably didn’t read but had probably heard of (or at least watched Apocalypse Now). It is also a great case study in this, the age of Palworld, a game that is “inspired by” Pokemon in a way that many here find to be off-putting and many others not here find to be kind of fun, maybe.
There is clearly a line between inspiration and plagiarism, but where is the line between inspiration that upsets an industry and inspiration that makes an industry shrug and say, “Who cares? It’s fun!”.
I am here to find that (Spec-Ops: The) line.
(I’m going to put a line below each section, too; feel free to find that line if you would like a more beginner-friendly line-finding experience)
Finding the Line
If you didn’t read the above introduction, the goal here is as such: I want to find the line between acceptable and unacceptable inspiration, or “inspiration”, in media, specifically video games. To find this line, I have selected three examples to explore:
- One game that's obvious inspirations made it an agreeable punching bag.
- One game that’s obvious inspirations were central to its identity but deemed acceptable.
- One game that’s obvious inspirations were noted but ultimately shrugged off completely because everyone was having a good time.
The answer to that last question is yes, by the way. I know you should never start a project like this with preconceived notions in favor of one of the many possible conclusions of your exploration, but who are we kidding here? I have a bias. Let’s acknowledge it now and see if it changes by the end of this experiment!
The Punching Bag
Zoomers don’t even know what it was like to play video games in the golden age of The Simpsons. You couldn’t walk five feet without tripping over a licensed piece of shovelware shat out in the hopes that fans of America’s favorite family would put aside their good sensibilities and part with a sizable sum of cash. Remember Bart vs. the Space Mutants? Virtual Bart? The Simpsons Wrestling? Unfortunately, I do remember renting and playing each of every one of these like it was a sacred pilgrimage that must be made.
Image courtesy of Eurogamer
In 2000, work commenced on yet another entry into Matt Groening’s (unfortunately) eternal canon: The Simpsons: Road Rage. Originally being developed as a kart racer ala, um, Konami Krazy Racers, Road Rage was an attempt to get Homer and crew off the mat (literally) and into a more appealing venue that might actually get copies to fly off non-discounted shelves. According to an oral history of the game’s development written by Inverse’s Brian VanHooker, the approachable kart racer (think, um, Pac-Man World Rally?) was nixed when Matt Groening himself groaned (Groened?) about how every other mascot in the world had a kart racer. Even Cubix! Additionally, as Road Rage producer John Melchoir notes in VanHooker’s article, kart racing is a solitary act, and humor wouldn’t flow naturally with just one person in the car. Thus, the team went back to their idea hole and dug out the most tried and true idea of all time: Plagiarism!
Crazy Taxi is a bonafide AAAA ten out of ten experience for the SEGA Dreamcast that anyone with sufficient taste has on their personal Mount Rushmore of games scored by The Offspring. It was in arcades prior to its Dreamcast release in 2000, giving the teams at FOX Interactive and Radical Entertainment plenty of time to scope out its quality. Scope they did, as The Simpson’s: Road Rage is the kind of software you would expect to get if you sucked all the B.D. Joe out of Crazy Taxi and replaced it with the cast of an already declining animated sitcom. Everything you knew and loved about the best ride sharing game ever made was here, except for polish and The Offspring. Even the patented directional arrow at the top of the screen made the cut!
Reviewers savaged the game, labeling it as the cheap imitation that even the developers acknowledged it was (eventually). Metacritic has the game at a 64 on the lead platform (and, inexplicably, a 67 on the Gamecube), and you would be hard pressed to CTRL+F that page without finding at least a couple dozen mentions of Crazy Taxi. The obvious similarities would ultimately lead to a lawsuit between SEGA and FOX Entertainment, with a settlement for an undisclosed amount of money being reached outside of court. Whatever the amount was, Michael Pole recounted in Brian VanHooker’s aforementioned oral history that it wasn’t enough to offset the game’s financial success.
“...we had a great lawyer who fought tooth and nail and, at the end of the day, there was a number that was paid to Sega that was insignificant to the money that was generated by the game and everyone moved on. Sega came for their pound of flesh, but I think they walked away with a quarter-pound instead.” - Michael Pole, Former Senior Vice President of Product Development at FOX Interactive (via Inverse)
So, Road Rage was a success! A success with a black eye, but a success nonetheless. At the very least, some fragment of justice was served in the court of public opinion and in the literal courts. Well, I guess it was settled out of court, but I’m sure lawyers were there so that’s kind of like court. Whatever!
The Appropriate Homage
There I was on that showroom floor, face-to-face with a true blue game designer in a makeship exploded bus. I can’t tell you how many times he mentioned Heart of Darkness. Well, I could if I still had my voice recorder, or even if I was willing to dig up a link to the article I wrote about my interview with Cory Davis (I tried; the domain was sold and I refuse to consult the Wayback Machine!). The point is: He mentioned the book a lot! If I came away from my time on the showfloor with Yager Development with anything, it was that the developers of Spec-Ops: The Line were literate.
Anyways: Spec-Ops: The Line and Heart of Darkness. How much inspiration was there? My friend, the game’s answer to Colonel Kurtz is named John Konrad! Like the author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad! That shit might as well have been slapped on the cover next to the ESRB rating.
This openness was met with, well, fine reception. It wasn’t the best game. It also wasn’t the worst game! Critics noted its heavy-handed inspiration, with Eurogamer’s Christopher Donlan even referring to it as occasionally “smothering” in his review. Though the connection to classic literature merited numerous mentions, those mentions typically erred on the side of favorable: Spec-Ops was at the very least transformative, taking the classic tale of European colonialism and making it a slightly less classic tale of American occupation.
In the end, Spec-Ops got off easy for its depiction of Joseph Conrad’s work because the developers never pretended it was anything else. They cited the novel as a major inspiration and used it to tell something resembling a unique story. A heavy-handed story that paled in comparison to that which I imagine the novel told (remember: Sparknotes!), but a unique enough story nonetheless.
It also helps that the game was, you know, functional! Unlike The Simpsons: Road Rage, the design was competent enough that some fun could possibly be extracted if you were psychopathic enough to look past the game's ham-fisted reminders that you, the player, were bad.
The Shrug
2017 was a big year for Nintendo, as I’m sure anyone unfortunate enough to have clicked on this thread remembers (hi, @chocolate_supra !). It was a pretty big year for other publishers, too! After all, that was the year that the unstoppable behemoth that is Fortnite: Battle Royale was unleashed upon our world’s youth. You might recall, though, that Fortnite was not alone in battling its royales.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (or PUBG: Battlegrounds, as it’s known now for whatever fucking reason) swept through the industry like annoying sidekicks through the Sonic the Hedgehog series (still there, @chocolate_supra ?). You couldn’t visit any landing page for any media outlet covering video games without seeing the recognizably dull visuals of fatigued men hopping out of planes and duking it out in the wild. Though not the first of its kind (PlayerUnknown developed a mod for ARMA 2 and consulted on H1Z1), PUBG popularized a number of concepts that would go on to define the genre: Hopping out of a flying vehicle of some kind! A rapidly-shrinking circle that makes life Hell for anyone who exists outside its vicinity! Overly long bouts of looting that end when a twelve year old who is staying home from school sneaks up on you with a shotgun! These ideas were so beloved that they became the basis for another game from another publisher: Epic’s Fortnite: Battle Royale.
In case you don’t remember (and you would be totally forgiven for forgetting), Fortnite began its life vaguely imitating Minecraft before vanishing into the ether for a long enough time that emailers to Giant Bomb’s Giant Bombcast jokingly announced its cancellation (citation needed, but I promise it happened). After PUBG’s surprisingly impactful debut in 2017, Fortnite reemerged as a battle royale game of its own. Fortnite: Battle Royale saw players jump out of a flying bus to fight it out in the wild while a rapidly-diminishing circular region corralled them together for one last showdown. Games of Fortnite typically ended when a twelve year old staying home from school snuck up on players with a shotgun.
Hey! What the fuck! I already wrote that joke. Epic! You literally just made PUBG! You bastards!
Oh, there’s crafting. Problem solved! Proceed.
Likely due to its cartoonish designs and low price (“free”), Fortnite completely overtook PUBG and became the biggest damn video game released in the new Millenium. PUBG sued Epic Games to no avail, and its star dimmed while the victor gorged itself like one of those gluttonous Lumas in Super Mario Galaxy. Though there was certainly some public sentiment that what Fortnite did was, as the kids say, “fucked”, those concerns have largely been washed away by the tide of a society completely willing to shrug off plagiarism if it means they can still kill their friends while dressed as a Funko-fied version of Goku from DragonBall Z.
It’s also worth mentioning that Epic Games has been sued multiple times for using dance moves popularized by a number of different professionals, but who cares? The Carlton Dance is now nothing more than a silly emote your murderous Sportsmate can perform after shotgunning some stupid adult who had the audacity to download a free game for children to play in their free time.
The Conclusion
I already told you my conclusion! Plagiarism only matters when a game is bad, ala The Simpsons: Road Rage. When a game is fun, it's an understandable imitation that speaks to a developer’s ability to apply existing concepts in a new and engaging format. Yeah, Fortnite blatantly infringed on PlayerUnknown’s most known property, but where else can you “Hit the Griddy” after epically owning some defaults with your gussied up virtual body pillow? Yes, Palworld liberally borrows from the biggest intellectual property known to man, but it’s kind of fun so lay off, you prude! Why do you have to rain on our parade? Just because we borrowed all of the floats from the parade a town away? Fuck off, old man!
Seriously, though: This is weird! I know everybody watched that Hbomberguy video. Youtube told me! We all watched and nodded in agreement as Harrison reminded us about Filip Miucin, the pathetic influencer who completely cribbed content from other content creators to elevate his own profile. We all tutted about the Internet Historian and his reappropriation of a story that wasn’t his to tell. We all shook our fists at James Somerton, even if we had no idea who that was! As a people, we all gathered around the glow of our computers and agreed that plagiarism was bad, actually, and that our society was better off for calling it out wherever it occurred.
And now?
Plagiarism is fine, actually. You see, games like Palworld are a miracle. The developers took existing intellectual property and twisted it to make the very important observation that it would be silly if Pikachu had a gun. It’s stealing, sure, but it’s stealing that made me have a good time, so it doesn’t matter. My personal enjoyment is the most important denominator in this equation.
In summary, the line is exactly where I thought it was. It may as well not even exist, as we already have a much more objective barometer that measures the exact same thing: Metacritic. Or Opencritic, I guess. Is Game Rankings still a thing? Regardless, the line is the same line that people use to determine whether or not they are going to fork over $70 for the latest AAA fuck fest: Is the game good? An answer in the negative begets cries of copyright infringement, lazy developers, plagiarism, et al. An answer in the affirmative begets celebratory Xeets and an army of players willing to carry water for a zany tale of swords, sorcery, and slavery.
Sigh. Another evening wasted answering a question I already answered myself six hours ago.I should have just saved myself time and copied my work from a better writer.
Hbomberguy, if you’re reading this: Call me.
shortcut that ultimately led him to becoming Punished Filip.