Zybourne Clock

About

The Zybourne Clock is an abandoned game project proposed by members of the Something Awful forums. The concept, as well as the storyline was mocked incessantly by members of the forum since the idea was posted.

Origin

In 2003, in the Something Awful Forums, user began to draft up a game. The game revolves around the concept of time travel. Shii.org has archived script drafts and fanart. The entire game was planned to be be completed in less than a year, however only one person on the team had previous game development experience as a professional developer. He was banned from the project for criticizing it.

Spread

On February 25th, 2008, YouTuber drdougbeach uploaded a game trailer (shown below, left). The video gained over 103,500 views in 11 years. On November 8th, YouTuber basdf uploaded "Zybourne Clock Interview" (shown below, right) which accumulated over 26,200 views in 11 days.

As the topic became more and more popular, users start posting fanart and fanfictions featuring the game's characters and main concept.

On April 4th, 2012, An AMA post titled "I was the lead "level designer" of The Zybourne Clock before it turned into a huge meme from Something Awful" to r/IAmA.^[6]

Fallout: New Vegas

In 2010, Obsidian included a reference of the dead project on the game Fallout: New Vegas. Johnny, along with 4 balls and five aces cards on the table can be found on the cliff-side overlooking Goodsprings source if the player has the Wild Wasteland trait.

Brigadour

In November 2016, Johnny Five Aces was added as a playable character to the game Brigador.^[1]

Concept Drawing

On December 10th, 2019, Twitter user @kunert_ebooks^[5] tweeted a picture of the original concept drawings with the caption, "going through my stuff at the parents house for the holidays and holy shit, look what I found (yes I did the bad internet drawing)" (shown below, left). The tweet gained over 3,700 likes in three days. He continued to tweet, "Lots of ppl saying they want to buy this so here you go. Hate to part with it but I've got credit card debt. Also have student loan debt, so I'll donate a big chunk of it to Bernie too:Johnny Fiveaces, Original Zybourne Clock Concept ArtIf you're bidding on this, you already know what it is" (shown below, right). As of December 10th, 2019, bid was up to $4,420.69 on eBay.^[4]

Resurgence on Dude Soup Podcast / Funhaus

On January 23rd, 2020, the weekly hour-long podcast Dude Soup, which features an in-depth comedic take on gaming and online news, discussed Zybourne Clock on their show alongside guest Freddie Wong (a "keeper of lore and internet memes"). After the Zybourne Clock concept art of Johnny Fiveaces was put up for auction in December 2019, the failed game had a bit of a resurgence that inspired the group to discuss the topic (shown below).

Wong, who just so happens to own that aforementioned concept drawing of Zybourne Clock, recently bought the piece of early internet memorabilia on eBay for a whopping $5,100. In a Tweet following the purchase, Wong described how he felt it was important to safeguard as an important artifact of internet culture.

I bought the Johnny Fiveaces art.

I genuinely believe it is pure art, and an incredibly important artifact of internet culture. As its steward, I will protect and treasure it forever. pic.twitter.com/33fzmsbcz1

— Freddie Wong (@fwong) December 18, 2019

Later in the show, Wong brings out the newly framed artwork to show it off to the group before they dive deeper into the game and the random artifacts leftover from its origin, including the remnants of a prelude script for the game that was never used.

Search Interest

External References