User:ConSiGno/Sandbox-Little Temple Group

"Hmm, I'm starting to get skeptical..."

- Vader

Little Temple Group, or LTG, was a mapping team formed in 2012. They announced the founding of the group on November 22, 2012 on Doomworld Forums with an announcement for Projekt Xero. Their second project, Dimensions, was announced December 31 of that year. However, some forums members became suspicious of the group's insistence on using one account, consistency of writing styles across members, and winding, elaborate stories. Thus, a handful of members led by Catoptromancy, loosely titled the Temple Commission, began an independent investigation into LTG in late January 2013. It was later revealed that the team was likely the work of one person, only known as "Brandon".

The drama that ensued soured only a few, with most of the community congratulating the investigators for their work.

Controversy
Most of the team's work had fallen under the radar until a forum post on January 25, 2013, when the team announced maps designed by an 11-year-old relative of one of the members, named Gabrielle Bélanger. Memfis and Vader pointed out that the mapping designs were similar to those found in Dimensions demo posted earlier, including the same use of 2s lines for buildings (instead of 1s lines separated by void). Gabrielle was allegedly French, but used machine translations from English phrases in her map names (e.g. "dessiner pont" instead of "pont-levis" for "drawbridge"). The posts that followed began to unravel LTG into admitting that Gabrielle "had some help", but the degree of help is not known. LTG began its own members, losing credibility and believability as a distinctive group.

Abiageal O'Meara
Abiageal O'Meara was allegedly commissioned by the Little Temple Group for the team's music needs. The samples she submitted were linked to Doomworld Forums and Odamex Forums on November 26, 2012. The songs were not well received, described as "awful" and "unfinished" on IRC. She had kept a blog, supposedly unknown by the rest of the team, where she stated the following:

"A few weeks later, I find out that they’ve canceled [Dimensions] too and gotten into some trouble. They wouldn’t tell me what so I had a friend who is technologically inclined to nose around a bit. Apparently the “people” I had been working for in these last three or four months is just one person. Not sure how I feel about it. I don’t care about the money though they, or he/she, did say I would get some kind of money. I know one thing, I’m done working with large mapping teams for games AND project leaders that are in a “group”."

- Abiageal O'Meara

This was posted as evidence on Doomworld that LTG was the work of one person. LTG insisted that one of the forum members had tipped O'Meara off on the controversy, but O'Meara herself stated that a friend of hers had discovered this independently.

Temple Commission Findings
"It is highly unlikely, to the point of virtual impossibility, that LittleTemple somehow stumbled across her completely unknown account and had her start writing music on the same day she registered it."

- Esselfortium

On Febuary 5, 2013, Esselfortium posted the preliminary findings on Doomworld Forums. Evidence presented included YouTube videos (now deleted), extensive writing analysis, forum and blog snippets, and proof of sockpuppet accounts on other forums. The responses from LTG revealed even more inconsistencies, suggesting that Abiageal O'Meara did not exist at all. Furthermore, requesting the email address for LTG brought up an unrelated email address belonging to a "Christopher Gibbon", who, until then, had been unknown.

Christopher Gibbon
ConSiGno contacted Christopher Gibbon and learned that a local neighbour of Gibbon, only known as Brandon (who was also mentioned by O'Meara in her blog), had compromised his email passwords, either through social engineering or through a key logger, and had attempted to create accounts to promote his music and literary work, with the pen name of "Marcus". Brandon's work closely matched the works of Gibbon; Gibbon claimed that Brandon is good at "mimicking" his victims. Among other allegations, it was learned that Brandon exhibited resentful stalker tendencies since 2009, and had a criminal record, including trespassing and breaking and entering. Gibbon also confirmed the existence of Abiageal, claiming that they swapped emails for a literary project, but expressed concern that she too might be a fabrication. Gibbon had written a novel in 2010 titled Dangerous Drop. It has since been removed from the Internet and can no longer be purchased from Smashwords.

Gibbon lives in Oregon, and is not diabetic.

Confession and Dissolution
"chris gibbon really is a real guy. and he isn't me. all we did is just use his email."

- Little Temple Group

LTG's last post was on February 3, 2013, When the account admitted that only two people were in the group - Kamila Zielinski and Marcus Dudek. They admitted to using the email address of Chris Gibbon, and claimed Abiageal was a "friend" of Chris. Given that Chris had identified that "Marcus" was Brandon, but this had yet to be revealed on Doomworld until now, LTG had effectively written themselves into a corner. Some DWF members were still not convinced Brandon was behind the operation, having found evidence of previous novels of Gibbon's matching characters and traits of the alleged group. Upon further communication with Gibbon, he congratulated Doomworld on the outing of LTG, and vowed to change his passwords.

BurntApples
A month after LTG was "exposed", another account named "BurntApples" was created on Doomworld Forums with a whole new set of names. These names included "Jehanne Lefévre" under the alias "XRII", who claimed to do music for Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, and was "discovered on YouTube" by BurntApples. This account had the same mannerisms and walls of text as LTG posts, and was immediately labelled as suspicious. It was banned later in March 2013 when professional music analysis by two Doomworld members linked BurntApples to LTG. BurntApples then moved to ZDoom forums.

BurntApples' project was titled FATE --- Step into the Darkness. The project seems to be abandoned, with the last post on the thread dated September 2013.

Members
Below are the claimed members of LTG.


 * Kamila Zielinski - Project lead, level design, game design
 * Elizavetta Zielinski - Level design
 * Marcus Dudek - Level design, art
 * Valentine Zajac - Level design
 * Abiageal O'Meara - Music (commissioned, never paid)
 * Gabrielle Bélanger - Level Design

Projects
Little Temple Group did put out some demos of their work; they may be lost, however.

2012

 * Projekt Xero
 * Dimensions

2013

 * FATE --- Step into the Darkness