Trivia / Mekton

• Development Hell: Mekton Zero, full stop. Mike Pondsmith actually outlines a good portion of the development so far in the 2018 Mekton Seminar from GenCon.
  • The books were originally being created in Quark 4. When they went to add seats to their license, they found they couldn't because Quark 4 had been discontinued and they had to upgrade to Quark 6. The upgrade process, in Mike's own words, was "buggy."
  • After upgrading to Quark 6, they had attempted to use some new, better fonts (for readability and style). The end result was the files ended up not working, and the team blamed the fonts. It was at this time that the decision to shift to Adobe InDesign was made.
  • R. Talsorian purchased an in-house Print-On-Demand machine so that they could make sure the book came out correctly when printing for the physical copies. When they fed it the book files, the POD spat out numerous errors, which effectively meant they had to start redoing the whole book from scratch.
  • When they were yanking the text out of their prior files (to expedite the whole process of redoing the book), they found out that it was not a font issue that plagued their Quark 6 files, but rather a save corruption issue. It was at this point, towards the end of June, that the decision was made to refund all still-present Kickstarter backers while still honoring their pledges.
  • And probably the largest single reason many people thought the project was completely dead was one of their community personnel decided to neglect keeping the kickstarter updates coming in a timely manner. This itself wouldn't have been much of an issue considering how much Mike Pondsmith considers Mekton Zero his project, and had he known about that, it probably would've gotten remedied very quickly. The problem was, as noted above, Mike Pondsmith had to juggle Mekton Zero AND Cyberpunk 2077, and that meant he was flying back and forth, which limited his ability to keep proper tabs on Mekton Zero and the kickstarter.
  • Ultimately, the issues above and issues finding a supplier to make miniatures promised to the kickstarter backers would see Zero put on the back burner in favor of getting both The Witcher Roleplaying Game and Cyberpunk Red into print and circulation.
• Executive Meddling: The Algol 1530 sourcebook was cancelled and the whole Algol setting discontinued because the then chief editor "didn't like it"
  • Has since been counter-meddled by Mike Pondsmith; Algol is apparently the default setting for Mekton Zero. Of course, whether Zero ever reaches publication is another matter...
• Vaporware: The various new editions bandied around since the late nineties, none of which have ever come to fruition. At this point, Mekton has arguably become more famous for being Vaporware than its actual gameplay.
  • In 1997, Mekton Double Zeta was announced, using RTG's new Fuzion ruleset. It never happened, and in fact they probably never even got around to writing it, as RTG were concentrating on their licensed titles at the time.
  • Around 2000, Mekton was licensed out to Atomic Rocket Games, who planned to put Zeta back in print, print new setting material, and possibly even create a new edition. This never happened and the license lapsed again.
  • The latest and most infamous of these is Mekton Zero. In 2004, Mike Pondsmith announced Mekton ZERO, but nothing else would happen until 2012, when he teamed up with CD Projekt RED to begin work on Cyberpunk 2077. At this point, Pondsmith once again announced Mekton Zero as a Kickstarter project, for a 2014 release. 2014 came and went, and in 2018, Pondsmith refunded all the Kickstarter backers. He is still, as of 2022, saying Mekton Zero will come out eventually, despite having been announced twenty years ago now.
  • In 2019, Mekton finally defied vaporware status and released something, the game's first commercial release since 1994. It was the Mekton Zeta core book, exactly as printed in 1994, except much of the original art had been removed.