❖ Version History ❖

13th of November, 2021
In yet another terrible turn of events with producing The Great Chase, we have once again been approached by the Chinese government with complaints about the details shown on various cards of our game. If you have been keeping tabs on the journey thus far, you would know that there were some issues regarding the placement of border lines across areas of China and the surrounding bodies of water. These edits were demanded in order to show China with more border reach than is currently recognized by the United Nations across contested areas of both land and sea. I say that these changes are being demanded because production of our game is being held hostage until these changes are met. It is not a matter of negotiation, it is: “make these changes, or China cannot make your product”. Understanding the severity of the impact this would have on the timeline, I have done each and every thing requested of us (even though making these changes is making me increasingly uncomfortable as I become more and more involved in international border disputes, while also getting further and further from my delivery deadlines for the wonderful people who helped make this project happen).

In any event, a few weeks back in the last week of October I met the requests and sent them back into the world with the hope of putting these issues to rest and getting our game finally created. But, alas, here we are again today to talk about the incredibly tiny details of this issue, as, we have once again been hit with a fresh round of delays due to Chinese bureaucracy. Today, there are three problems we set out to tackle:

1. There is a mission card with text that involves fictional acts of war between China and Taiwan (email regarding this complaint shown above, card shown below).

2. There is an issue with the GMT+8 Map card still, where a dashed line must be more prominent in the sea, and an area of the time zone line must intentionally cover certain pieces of land/islands

3. There is an issue with the GMT+8 & GMT+10 cards, specifically regarding: Yonaguni Island. This island must be removed entirely from the map cards and the time zone line must cover where it once was. This area is also a contested border between China and Japan, and it is not allowed to be shown.

To give you a little bit of perspective, here is an image of the mission text from the card that is causing problem number one from our list above:

The text must be entirely removed from this card and redone in such a way to feature some other form of storytelling or conflict, as, this topic is too touchy and close to home for China to feel comfortable. to accommodate this, we are going with another quote that features the text: “Their best path for the entire flight ran right through the heart of Russia”.

The map card issues are a far more intense fix regarding the fine details of complaint going on. This scenario deals mostly with the location / existence of Yonaguni Island & where the time zones lay around it:

To help explain the horrible quality image above, the Chinese government is trying to insist that we remove Yonaguni Island from our map, which is a mere 3-pixels wide in the original artwork renditions. For a size comparison, I have had this map card as my phones lock screen background for several months now, and Yonaguni Island is probably about the size of a felt pen tip (when I was first sent back the edit notes I literally sat down for 15 minutes trying to identify what was different between the two photos beyond just the purple time zone lines). But, this is the length that we must go in order to meet each and every one of these demands.

After yet another couple of weeks wasted trying to solve crazy problems, I have once again returned these files to Regent in China with my fingers crossed. I can only hope that we will finally be free of these demands and that we get the product we’ve all paid for. I wish that there were more I could do to get it to happen faster as we once hoped.

~More to come soon my friends~
Thank you eternally for your patience with us as we navigate this together!