When I visited Beijing during the summer six years ago, the Imperial Vault and the Hall of Prayers at the Temple of Heaven weren't visible from each other. According to this site, they're only about 360 meters apart. Smog limited the visibility at ground level to less than a quarter of a mile, and it has gotten worse since then.

No. There were allegations about Mr. Whiting that were made when things were getting rancorous. He's probably referring to those. Even if they were true, the people working for Cheyenne and who went on to form Fresh Start had much better reasons to leave long ago.

I know one engineer on the project who was a devote Christian and expressed some reservations about Stargate's idea of Ascension, but he acted sanely and left soon after they stopped paying him.

I was gone by then, but based on what I know of the people who started it, Fresh Start's goal was to continue supporting a game they believed in. While still at Cheyenne, they completed and released Resistance quickly under terrible circumstances (circumstances that I fled), only to be betrayed by Gary Whiting with a bankruptcy filing the instant they brought the company its first revenue ever. Then they managed to form a company to continue supporting the game. They kept the servers up and even released new maps and improved some of the graphics assets.

This article is 100% Mr. Whiting's side of the story. While at Cheyenne I formed the opinion that he is a very shady individual, but I was pretty low on the totem pole, so I don't know what was really going on.

What I know for sure, however, is that Resistance would never have come out without the people behind Fresh Start, and it probably would have been completely unsupported from the moment of release (possibly unplayable, with the servers down) without the formation of Fresh Start. So I'm going to give them a pretty fucking big benefit of the doubt.

Oh, and based on the financial situation when I left, the people working for Fresh Start were probably getting paid next to nothing, if that much. So obviously "stealing" pays big time.

Suspending democracy is a great way to be told, forever, that the climate will be fixed at the end of the current five year plan.

The Empire Strikes Back for the Atari 2600 wasn't bad, for a 2600 game.

Yeah, after patching systems for the Y10K, Y100K, Y1M, Y10M, and Y100M problems, I think programmers are going to look at the Y1G problem and just say "fuck it, let's start over."