About Us
tessmage.com
First conceived back in late 2005, tessmage.com was created by Tessera -- an
artist, musician and avid PC gamer. Tessera currently resides in New York. Our
server is located in Florida, USA.
Originally, this web site was devised as a way to counteract the unfair
censorship which was talking place on Blizzard Entertainment's World Of Warcraft
forums. Back at that time, Tessera was leading a minor revolt of sorts, amongst
hundreds of people who played the Mage class in Blizzard's popular MMO. During
the course of that confrontation, Blizzard resorted to several underhanded
tactics in their efforts to squash that mini-rebellion... it was an embarrassing
(for Blizzard) spectacle, which Blizzard no doubt perceived as a possible threat
to their revenues. The situation in early 2006 became increasingly heated and
confused... finally culminating with Tessera being permanently banned from the
Blizzard boards. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that all three of the
public relations employees who were responsible for undermining Tessera's
efforts were themselves eventually fired from their jobs at Blizzard
Entertainment. It has even been alleged that one of them... a megalomaniacal PR
agent known as Tseric... went completely off the deep end and ultimately wound
up in a rehab. This rumor has not been verified, however.
Interesting side note: the name "Tessera" comes from his primary World Of
Warcraft character, which was a female human mage at the time. It was with that
mage character that he launched his attacks against Blizzard and their
negligent/unfair treatment of the mage class. After a short time, that character
became somewhat famous amongst WoW players and so, he adopted the name "Tessera"
as his permanent online name. To this day, Tessera still goes by that name...
even though he has long since abandoned the WoW community. Tessera continues to
play WoW on occasion... but only on his own private server, which features quite
a bit of customized and adult-oriented content. Tessera has sworn that he will
never give another penny to Blizzard Entertainment and thus far, he never has.
Oh... and for anyone who still doesn't know, the name "Tessera" is not a
girl's name. Tessera himself is very much an adult, heterosexual man (some would
even call him lecherous), who simply enjoys playing female characters for their
"eye candy" value. No, the name "Tessera" actually means "four" or "fourth" in
Greek. He gave his mage the name "Tessera" because she was the fourth character
that he had ever created for WoW... get it..? And because that character
became so well-know, the name "Tessera" has stuck to this day.
So initially, this web site was simply a place where Tessera could rant
against the unfair business practices of Blizzard Entertainment, without having
to worry about being censored and banned by anyone else. For the better part of
a year, that was pretty much all that took place on this web site: lots and lots
of anti-Blizzard rants by Tessera, along with occasional side trips into all
sorts of other issues.
In 2006, the game TES: Oblivion was released by Bethesda Softworks. Tessera
took a liking to that game and was pleasantly surprised to find that there were
a sizable number of fan-made mods being released for it. Being the oversexed
sleazemuffin that he is (just ask his long-suffering girlfriend), Tessera
naturally gravitated towards some of the "nude mods" being released by others.
But before long, he found himself feeling disappointed with the realism and
texture quality of even the best of those mods. Having been an artist himself --
ever since he was a kid, in fact -- it logically followed that before long,
Tessera was creating his own high-quality "re-skins" for the female Oblivion
character models. One day, he posted some screenshots of those early efforts on
a now-defunct Oblivion fansite... and the reactions from other Oblivion fans
were very positive indeed. So positive in fact, that Tessera decided to release
some of those early Oblivion mods, by offering them for downloading from this
very web site. This all took place back in late 2006.
More high-quality re-skin (texture) mods followed, for several other games --
including Hellgate: London, Age Of Conan, Dragon Age: Origins, and Vampire --
The Masquerade: Bloodlines. As time went by, Tessera's skills at creating
high-quality textures for those games continued to increase. Each new mod looked
even better than the one before it, with the goal always being to introduce as
much realism into his skin textures as possible. Predictably, this ambition to
explicitly produce highly detailed and realistic skin textures caused some
people to feel squeamish... due to the sad fact that even in this day and age,
there are still quite a few people out there who perceive nudity as being
somehow "dirty" or "pornographic." But there are also plenty of other people who
have enjoyed the attempted realism in Tessera's work, thus his reputation for
producing high-quality texture mods began to spread.
Eventually, Tessera's work was even noted by people within the gaming
industry. In late 2007, Tessera was approached by a major European gaming
publication (PC Action magazine). Originally, they wanted to feature Tessera's
work, along with the work of a few other "nude modders," within their Christmas
2007 special issue. But at first, Tessera did not want his work to be included
within that article... weird though that may sound. This led to a bit of a
stalemate, because the editors of PC Action absolutely refused to publish that
article unless Tessera's work would be featured. Ultimately, everything worked
itself out and the article was eventually published several months later -- in
their May, 2008 issue. A lengthy interview with Tessera, originally conducted
via e-mail, was simultaneously published on PC Action's commercial web site. To
the best of our knowledge, that interview is no longer available on their
site... although a transcript of it can still be found on the tessmage.com
Forums.
In the case of one particular game, VTM: Bloodlines (or "VTMB" for short),
there was also yet another conflict taking place -- between Tessera and another
Bloodlines modder known as "Wesp5." For several years, Wesp5 had been the sole
producer of fan-made patches for Bloodlines. But his work had become
increasingly inappropriate, due to Wesp5's unbridled tendency to introduce all
sorts of frivolous, arbitrary and completely unnecessary game modifications into
his work -- along with the legitimate bug fixes that his "unofficial patch" was
supposedly intended to fix. A growing number of Bloodlines players were
beginning to resent all of those unnecessary changes that Wesp5 was essentially
ramming down their throats. If you wanted his bug fixes, then you were also
being forced to accept all of Wesp5's arbitrary changes as well. This situation
eventually became intolerable to Tessera and so, with the assistance of a
professional and highly-skilled programmer known as Acrimonious, the two of them
put their heads together and eventually produced The True VTMB Patch in early
2007. The goal of this patch was to provide Bloodlines players with an excellent
alternative to any of Wesp5's work. Soon after its initial release, the True
Patch (so named because it is truly a patch and not a mod) became quite popular
amongst sophisticated Bloodlines players, who simply wanted to play Troika's
original masterpiece... but without any bugs, nor with any other changes.
In 2010, Tessera went even further and assembled the finest legitimate
Bloodlines patch to date: the True Patch Gold Edition, which fixes hundreds of
bugs that the original True Patch failed to address. There is currently no finer
fan-made patch available for Bloodlines, anywhere. Its streamlined coding, along
with its commitment to fix legitimate bugs in the game and do NOTHING else, has
convinced literally thousands of Bloodlines players to install the True Patch
and scoff at the idea of using anything else. That's not a case of us blowing
our own horn... it is indeed a fact, and we are happy to see that all of
Tessera's selfless efforts to repair this gem of a game have not been in vain.
So why all of this talk about Tessera..? The answer is really quite simple:
before you can understand why tessmage.com exists in its present format, you
first need to understand a few things about its creator. We've painted a picture
of someone who is obviously an unabashed liberal, an outspoken rebel, an
anti-authoritarian and a non-conformist... and just about everything that you
will find on this web site reflects that all-too-unusual mindset.
Today, tessmage.com has morphed into a game-related web site which is
intended for adults only. But it has also become far more than that. We are one
of the last remaining independent "fansites" on the web. At one time, the web
was littered with independent fansites... but in recent years, nearly all of
those small fansites have been pushed aside by the big, corporate gaming sites.
And yet we accept no commercial advertising, instead relying upon private
funding and donations in order to support our costs. Our uncensored Forums
feature discussions about far more than just PC gaming... everything from
movies, to sex and politics, to liberal activist causes and anti-corporate
rants. You name the subject and it's a good bet that were already talking about
it. We are no longer just a gaming site, nor are we a modding site. We're sort
of an "anything goes, so long as we're all adults" site. Naturally, this site is
heavily dominated by Tessera's work (he is the site owner, after all), but
there's still plenty of other content around here, which most free-thinking
adults should find to be both interesting and entertaining.
So come on in and enjoy yourselves. We're happy to see you here..!!!
