Grummz: Odious Pervert, Failed Pornographer
All the information for this story is publicly available, at least it was until Grummz panicked and began trying to purge following a post from friends of the site, Western Kabuki.
Unfortunately for Grummz, the Internet never forgets. You can view the entire timeline here.
Grummz
Meet Mark Kern, better known as Grummz, which is what I will refer to him as for the remainder of this piece. If you aren’t familiar with Grummz, allow me to share a brief summary of what has long been known about this perverted little weasel, and then we will dive in to talk about everything that has just waiting there on the internet for someone motivated enough to go looking.
Who is This Bloviating Pervert?
Grummz is the would-be Gamer Messiah. A self proclaimed chieftain of the culture war who coasts on accomplishments that are old enough to rent a car. Grummz worked at Blizzard Entertainment between 1997-2005, and has producer credits on StarCraft, Diablo II, and was credited as a “Team Lead” for World of Warcraft. The substance and import of his contributions are murky at best—none of his former colleagues from Blizzard or otherwise ever seem to have much to say about him, and when they do it is usually not positive—his name is also entirely absent from the exhaustively researched Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment by Jason Schreier. You might think someone who was there in the early days and worked as a Team Lead on the development of a game as seminal as WoW may have some stories to tell. It’s a little strange. Well, on the surface it’s strange. Once you spend any amount of time getting to know the man, it makes perfect sense. After spending thirty seconds in his Twitter feed you’ll understand why almost anytime someone comments on their experience working with Grummz it is to comment on his extreme ineptitude, incompetence as a manager, or alleged mishandling or misapropriating of company funds. Despite all of this he is quick to remind people of his supposed instrumentality in shipping the MMO that changed the gaming landscape forever, and often uses it as a cudgel to dismiss dissenters and critics. How could you possibly hope to know as much about the games industry as the guy who helped perfect the MMO?
Question: How did this odious pervert become Team Lead on a title as seminal as WoW?
Answer: The person who had the job before him developed an ulcer.
An Abbreviated History of Grummz Post-Blizzard
The Firefall Bus And Other Sins
After departing Blizzard in 2005, Grummz co-founded Red 5 with fellow Blizzard alumni William Petras and Taewon Yun. Red 5 would go on to ship only one game: Firefall before shuttering in 2016. The doomed studio commissioned an immobile tour bus West Coast Customs built for a cool $3 million. He would go on to be fired mere months after the calamitous debut of the tour bus that had to be towed to go anywhere.
Em-8er(Not The Porn Game)
Em8er is Grummz current project. It feels unfair to say Em-8er has been in “development hell” because that implies that any amount of active work is being done on it, but other forces may be at work impeding or otherwise delaying the release of a final product. The only thing preventing Em-8er from releasing and wowing gamers is Grummz himself. The project has crowdfunded over $600 thousand(that we know of), and since its announcment and initial crowdfunding run in 2016 has nothing to show except a bug-filled demo. Certainly not the output of a man who takes so much pride in reminding the internet that he was there when the MMO was perfect.
Grummz has sold subscriptions to Em-8er since at least 2019, including the two years he admitted he did not work on the game at all, but failed to inform his backers of until called out later, claiming it was due to medical issues in his family. And to be clear: there is no issue with taking time away from work to care for an ailing family member, but there is an issue when you do not inform the people bankrolling you for a specific job that you are taking a multi-year hiatus from your project.
There is much more that could be said about Em-8er, but has been covered broadly and if you’d like to know more I’d reccomend watching this video by McDizzle Gaming on YouTube.
Grummz, Failed Pornographer
Beginning in 2001—while an active employee at Blizzard—Grummz began moonlighting as Debbi Chan/Foxyfighter. He created, commissioned, and produced catfight fetish porn under these names for over two decades. He also produced and filmed live action catfight porn with professional porn stars in the 2010s using RED Dragon cameras, which just so happen to be the same type of cameras Red 5 purchased for their studio. They even made a promotional video in which Grummz states Red 5 purchased three RED Dragons. What a strange coincidence.
Not long after Grummz began filming porn in the 2010s he and his wife became separated, something he has acknowledged publicly on Twitter, and while there is no direct evidence we were able to find linking these events together, the timing raises some understandable questions. Fellas, do you think your wife or significant other would get upset if she(potentially) found out you were filming catfight fetish porn as a side hustle?
The porn Grummz filmed was published under his Debbi Chan persona, and evnetually his own mother would be listed as CEO of DBChan LLC, his porn company before its dissolution. I have not watched any of the archived videos, only still images. While some of it was discoverable none of it was ever uploaded to Usenet or any private porn trackers. Which says more about the level of quality the smut Grummz was producing than I ever could.
A Short Rant About Grummz Talent—or Lack Thereof—as an Author
I’ve had the misfortune of reading some of the catfight fiction Grummz published as Debbi Chan/Foxyfighter, and it’s atrocious. Granted, I’m not a catfight fetishist. The only literature from this niche genre I’ve read was penned by a man who spent two decades writing words for people to jack off to in the same style that you’d tell a bedtime story to a toddler. It may be the most wretched drivel I’ve ever subjected myself to, and I’ve read all of Ready Player One. These catfight stories are full of graphic depictions of violence being inflicted on women, which I suppose comes with the territory, but within these cursed pages you will find: sandpaper dildos, clit torture, and in the final paragraphs of one story the main character and her lover are drugged, tortured, sexually assaulted and eventually murdered by their rival female. Again, I have no frame of reference for how this type of fetishist content is typically constructed, maybe it’s all this poorly written and reads more like a man exorcising their woman-hating demons than something you’d crank your hog to, but if this is standard fare you need to demand more of the perverts creating your smut. Grummz’s prose reads like a man that actively hates women and who also writes them badly. No one can write women this bad on purpose. This guy might hate women, but he definitely does not know how to write women. If you posted an excerpt of this shit on r/MenWritingWomen the mods would ban you for trolling. Are you familiar with the concept of “show, don’t tell”, Grummz? Pick up a copy of The Elements of Style, you fucking hack. You’ll thank me later.
The Breast Milk Situation
Grummz has been accused of stealing breast milk that a Blizzard employee claims was taken from a refrigerator at the Blizzard offices. This could not have been Grummz as it happened after his departure, but it is funny to joke about.
However, we found dozens of breast milk photos among his posts.
Potential Financial Improprieties
Grummz has a history of being accused of mishandling and mismanagement of funds, current and former backers of Em-8er have complained about the lack of progress and following an update to the Em-8er website last year, the inability to manage their subscriptions (this was finally fixed after several months of being inaccessible), but denying your customers the ability to cancel or otherwise their subscriptions to your non-existent video game any amount of time seems like the sort of thing that could land someone in legal hot water. And as mentioned above, as does collecting funds for two years while zero work is being done on your project. Again, this stagnating project has raised over $600,000, been in development for over eight years and has nothing to show for it except an unimpressive “vertical slice”(Grummz description).
The official account of Voxelnauts, the blockchain utilizing Oculus game that never released, accused him of sending money to his family in a post made in December of 2015.
In 2012 Red 5 wired $50,000 to League For Gamers(LFG), a now dissolved non-profit founded by Grummz as “An advocacy group for video games”. Only, the transaction was never recorded with the state of California, LFG was eventually dissolved, and then a for profit company was incorporated in Delaware under the same name. Curious.
In 2016 Grummz is slapped with a lien for more than $260,000 in unpaid taxes.
The way all of Grummz various business entities are organized and managed paints a portrait of a man able to get others to buy into his vision, but woefully unable to match the ambitions that birthed that vision. He is a serial bungler and possible tax cheat. If you are still giving him money that’s your perogative but given that he has not been able to deliver on anything he has promised in over twenty years of documented failure, I would urge you to consider giving your hard-earned money to a creator who respects their backers and fans because Grummz clearly does not.
Why We Fight
Grummz is a noxious presence in the gaming community who embellishes his past achievements to maintain a facade of some kind of authority on what gamers want in their video games. He is a hypocrite who has siphoned money from people gullibile enough to buy into his empty promises. He uses reactionary tactics to illicit an emotional response out of both his fans and his haters to keep himself in the conversation, and has spent the last couple of years trying to court the attention of Elon Musk. Which as of late he has suceeded in doing.
Grummz is a man who serves only his own interests, and is willing to put anyone, his fans, even his own mother in the line of fire to try and stay ahead of the curve. He spent over two decades LARPing as a female erotica author while publicly spouting misogynistic, transphobic and hateful speech. He uses his sizable platform to organize harassment campaigns against female community leaders and journalist. He even targeted one of my own friends; fellow Hard Drive author and one of my editors, Matt Fresh, after he called for pitches from people in the LGBTQ community and stated his distate for Nazis. Matt’s family fled to Canada to escape the Holocaust
This odious pervert is not worth your time, your money, or your attention, and it is our hope that knowing just who this man is that you feel the same. I’m sure some people reading this are probably fans or potentially supporters of Grummz. Hi, I hope you reconsider your support of this man who clearly has no respect or regard for anyone except himself and his own coffers. Men like Grummz should be mocked, derided, and made social pariahs. This isn’t about right or left, this is about right and wrong, and Mark Kern AKA Grummz AKA Foxyfighter AKA Debbi Chan has proven himself to be nothing more but a charlatan who spouts whatever he thinks will earn him the biggest meal ticket. This isn’t a man who believes in anything except lining his pockets with the money of those gullible and malleable enough to buy what he’s selling, only discovering after the fact that they’ve been left holding the bag.
Update: The original version of this post mistakenly listed two authors. This was written entirely by Johnny Amizich