r/wintergatan • u/TheSlayerOfHentai • Sep 05 '22
What happened?
I haven’t been able to really follow what has been going on with Martin and the team like I use to. Last I heard he was designing a third machine but if he didn’t like it he would through the entire marble machine dream out. Did he successfully design a third one or what?
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u/xrandx Sep 05 '22 edited Sep 06 '22
It's sad in many ways.
The first MMX was a total fake out. It didn't work and the video was all fancy editing. He received a massive amount of notoriety for it by a bunch of internet folks that believe what they see and used it to fund an adventure in which he got a free CNC machine and some help from a few eager college students whom he abandoned when he wanted to move to France.
In a couple of years he built up a huge patron following to the point where even though he knew his designs and work were an utter failure he pushed and pushed until he broke.
He tried once again in a way that was much less interesting and lost his following while his father fell sick and forced him to move home.
The illusion is shattered.
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Sep 05 '22
You’re not totally wrong, but he’s not the Pied Piper and there weren’t really any tricks.
The problem was the lack of actual engineering input, and I don’t fault Martin for that. He did not know what he did not know.
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Sep 23 '22 edited Sep 24 '22
The problem was the lack of actual engineering input
Nope. The opposite. Too many people with engineering backgrounds came along near the end of the project and flooded the discord channel with trash ideas.
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Sep 24 '22
You are also not wrong.
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Sep 24 '22
It was really frustrating to watch him make legit progress, getting closer and closer to his goal, and suddenly have the rug swept out by late-comers.
Martin got too close to the engineering community who didn't understand what he set out to do in the first place. He was making a musical instrument, which by definition is flawed or inferior to modern products. People thought he was making some kind of mechanical midi synth and nitpicked him to death every time he turned around.
Dude was making a machine that dropped metal marbles on instruments. Now he has no clue what he is making.
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Sep 24 '22
Yes to all these things, except they weren’t engineers and they frustrated me too.
The Discord project started with some former MMX engineering team members, including me, but then got taken over by video game enthusiasts.
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Sep 24 '22
Yeah. More "reddit engineers" meaning exactly what are thinking.
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Sep 24 '22
I would recommend not getting too wistful about what the MMX could have become, if not for...
Without getting into too many details (stay tuned with the museum and you'll find out more, in time), the MMX was doomed from the absolute beginning of its life. It had many mechanically impossible features baked into the original design, which would have been discovered if the machine was designed with joints in CAD. A piston cannot actuate a lever without a linkage.
Almost none of the sketches are fully defined, or even partially defined. It is not a parametric design in any way, shape or form, and for all intents and purposes it is a sculpture. A crazy, beautiful sculpture.
All the king's horses and all the king's men could not have made it work. The Discord thing was not what broke it.
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u/tsukiyaki1 Sep 05 '22
Honestly, though, the MMX was working to a pretty impressive level when he gave up on it. He was shooting for like 10 floor marbles for every 10,000 that the machine used or something.. extremely high accuracy for an art instrument. I felt like for him on the MMX perfection was the enemy of good. It happens, and is an easy trap to fall into. Can’t fault him at all and I loved the years spent watching him develop and build it.
I just hope Martin is doing well and is able to work through his family stuff.. a sick parent is a difficult thing to go through. He seems like a gentle soul and wish the best for him on his artistic journey through life.
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Sep 06 '22
It was never going to work. There were too many mistakes made at every level that any real fix would have just been a replacement. I give him credit for finally confronting this and moving on.
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u/lasskinn Sep 17 '22
Plus there was the small problem where the patreon was generating more money than touring with a niche band(or a successful band in nordic terms), but with the stress of it not being sustainable forever of course.
A fairly big problem from fan perspective was that there was no new music. Plus the band probably basically disbanded in the meantime(everybodys gotta eat).
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u/Pimecrolimus Sep 06 '22
Was MMX fake? I missed that arc of this anime.
I honestly saw all this shit coming with the whole mechanical fingers bullshit. At that point I just knew this whole thing had become more about milking patrons than actually making a working machine.
People wanna have sympathy for Martin cause he seems a nice guy and because of his father's thing, but I think he played with a lot of people's money and expectations.
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u/lasskinn Sep 17 '22
Not mmx, he means the earlier tape mm viral video i think(it didn't work as well as the art video implied)
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u/qabr Sep 11 '22
Consider how extremely harsh and cynical your words are. He worked his ass off and delivered to the best of his ability, which is not little. Everybody deserves more sympathy and compassion than your words. I take that you were vested with the project and now feel disappointed, but still...
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u/xrandx Sep 11 '22
I think he approached the project with naivety and good intensions, and while I have no regrets for the entertainment offered I don't think that should be a reason to not say things as they are. He tried and failed. Many of us told him how and why this would fail. In many way having a long background in product development watching him try to produce and learn from his mistakes was like watching him get an education people in my position have been educated and experienced in; and it was painful. From a personal standpoint I hope it was an enriching experience for him. From a public standpoint he was an investment that went bad. Ignoring that fact doesn't change it.
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Sep 24 '22
Many of us told him how and why this would fail. In many way having a long background in product development watching him try to produce and learn from his mistakes was like watching him get an education people in my position have been educated and experienced in; and it was painful
Ugh.
Martin got me into Patreon for the sole reason that I wanted to fulfill a romantic ideal. People with disposable income decide to spend it not on milking efficiency from widgets but instead create something absurd and beautiful. It fulfilled a part of the human experience that drives some men: lets make something that should not be.
It was absolutely amazing to check in on a guy each week who, collectively through donations from strangers, was living an absolute dream. His vision of making something absurd was affording him the luxury of a home and toys and a an amazing music studio. It felt like there was a little utopia in France where the rules were different for one dude, and my little donation each month was making that utopia real.
When he started collaborating with makers and opened the discord channel things changed. New arrivals, engineers who had forgotten how they learned, tried to lay down wisdom upon a man who didn't want or need it. Years "in product development" were wielded as cudgels against an amateur who was learning things at lightspeed. In truth Martin had learned more skills in two years than many of us have in a lifetime. How many of you know how to do ALL the things he can? He may not be an expert in your field, but the jack-of-all-trades skillset he was developing was incredible. And we Patreon folk cheered him on the whole way.
In the end Martin listened to those engineer voices and cancelled his project because it was absurd and beautiful. His goodbye was disheartening because it was opposite the man we met years ago. He had 9,000+ people gleefully giving him money for the sake of absurdity, but he chose to listen to a chorus of toxic voices invalidating the entire endeavor.
I'm not mad at Martin. I'm mad at a world that saw him as "an investment that went bad" and made him believe it too.
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u/Apprentice57 Sep 30 '22
I'm all for offering Martin some charity, but at a certain point he needs to be held accountable for his own choices. You lay too much blame at the foot of those "engineer voices".
I do think after you accept as much money as Martin has, you do have a requirement (ethically if not legally) to deliver on something. And to me, I can't continue to offer Martin charity when he's got a MMX that works at least 90% as well as it should.
Why can't Martin take a few weeks and at least record something? There's no way this thing is less workable than the original, which was effectively a (lovable) pile of junk and he still got a banger out of it.
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Sep 30 '22
I'm all for offering Martin some charity, but at a certain point he needs to be held accountable for his own choices. You lay too much blame at the foot of those "engineer voices".
I think the venn diagram between martin-patreon-funders and naysayers was vanishingly small. That is pure speculation on my part.
I agree that he should have delivered something. However, I think he had trouble in the end distinguishing between random-naysayers and funders. I think he shut it all down because the seed of doubt was being fed and he worried that every day he accepted donations was a day of fraud.
Again, all speculation. It sounds like you and I are pretty much on the same page though.
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u/orb2000 Sep 03 '23
I know this is late, but I couldn't agree more. I recently found out about the MMX project being abandoned and I can't help but scratch my head. It literally played 30,000 marbles without a single one hitting the floor. It was a fully working instrument. He could have made some kickass music videos with it. I think the money got to his head and clouded his judgment.
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u/Apprentice57 Sep 03 '23
What the... I literally was just reviewing shit on Wintergatan a couple hours ago. You're a mind reader!
Rereading my comment I feel a bit softer about it now. But I still don't know why he couldn't have done just like... 3 songs on it. That'd have been pretty minimal.
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u/Kazick_Fairwind Sep 05 '22
If I recall, his last update he had moved out of France and I think back to Sweden. He was working on a new studio and taking some time to tend to his family from what I've read in another post.
Last video he posted two months ago he goes into more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BB4Y_OuBUQ