I'm glad it's not doing well, not because I wish ill on anyone involved in its creation (because that would be cruel to the point of sociopathy) but because of what I think it represents for the industry as a whole. Bethesda went down a dark, ugly path with this game, and if they had been rewarded for it, they would've kept right on walking.

Fallout 76 has struck me as a deeply cynical product from the moment it was announced: an attempt to turn a popular, thoroughly single-player experience into a multiplayer "service" that could be perpetually monetized via an in-game economy on top of its $60 price tag.

Every single aspect of its design that we were made aware of prior to launch was a transparently bad idea, either actively eschewing the series' existing strengths in favor of highlighting its most glaring weaknesses (the combat, complete with bizarre, broken VATS implementation; the clunky, needless time-sink of settlement building), or introducing new elements that ran contrary to what made the series interesting in the first place (awkwardly confining the entire narrative to notes and recordings; making immersion an impossibility by wiping all NPCs from the game world in favor of 23 other voice-chatting, objective diamond-chasing, teabagging humans).

On top of that, there was Bethesda's utterly galling pre-launch announcement that the game was going to contain some major bugs at release, as though 1) this represents an even remotely acceptable state for a $60 game to be in at launch under any circumstances, and 2) Bethesda wasn't already well known for shipping games absolutely riddled with bugs, strongly suggesting that Fallout 76 would be even more broken than their typical release.

There were also the notable canon disparities, fixed by hasty retcons or enthusiastic and forgiving fans. The 50 gb patches that could easily eat up data caps for any unfortunate enough to have them. The beta that contained speed hacks and deleted itself. The microtransactions.

It all hints - screams, really - at an attitude that people were going to buy and play this game no matter what, because Fallout. I personally know at least one person who had this precise attitude, and it frustrated me, because if Bethesda succeeded despite every obvious failure in design, PR, and customer care along the way, they would receive a very clear message that this is an acceptable way to design, market, and release a game. It isn't.

This was game design taxidermy: taking the corpse of something familiar, scooping out everything that once kept it alive, stuffing it with filler, and propping the result up for display (and sale). Hopefully this poor but thoroughly deserved reception comes to mind the next time they start wondering what a good game would look like with a bad one shoved into it.

Greb broke all the rules, in every sense: he was a rough and dirty fighter, and his lifestyle was the antithesis of a professional athlete's. He was a drinker and a prodigious womanizer, yet compiled an astonishing record of almost 300 fights in a hectic 13-year career. He scorned training, arguing that fighting so often kept him fit enough.

His most famous victory came in May 1922, when he battered Gene Tunney over 15 rounds. It was Tunney's sole defeat, and he trounced Greb in a rematch in February 1923. Greb won the middleweight title from Johnny Wilson in his next fight, and his five successful title defenses included a ferocious battle with Mickey Walker, which, reportedly, continued later that evening when the pair met outside a nightclub.

He lost the title to Tiger Flowers in February 1926, and Flowers beat him again six months later. It was Greb's last fight; he died on October 22, 1926 following a nose operation.

BH