Who is the real Timelord?

First off, who is writing this? I am Saga Musix, an administrator over at The Mod Archive. In May 2013, The Mod Archive administration was contacted by two people pretty much at the same time: Robert Gergely and Jared Cravens. Both persons claimed ownership of all modules released under the moniker Timelord.
That's correct, this is not your usual case of two people releasing music under the same artist name independently — in this case, two people here claim to be the same artist. Needless to say, this soon turned out be a very complicated issue, and other websites (e.g. AMP) have decided to stay neutral in this complicated matter. However, since I have listened to Timelord's music for years and I liked it a lot, I was interested in finding the answer to this question: Who is the real Timelord?

We are talking about music released almost twenty years ago, so without doubt this question was going to be very hard to answer, if it could be answered at all. There is still a small chance that I am wrong with what I am writing here so I don't claim to be able to publish the ultimate truth, but let's say I'm 99.9% sure that I'm right.

Meet the competitors

Here's the story from Jared Cravens' point of view. Passages that are going to be more important later on are highlighted.

I am the creator and copyright holder of the 21 MODS you have listed under the handle of Timelord. You may verify this by contacting Asle at Amiga Music Preservation one of the many places I uploaded my MODs to many years ago, and/or Christian Wirth (aka RaDMan) at ACiD Productions — the old ACiD demo group of which I am a known former member and still keep contact with.

Asle at AMP will verify that Robert Gergely, who used to be a sysop at my 1st ISP back in the 90's, BlackBox, has attempted to steal my identity and my music going back decades now, and to this day claims my work as his own. Additionally he has of late been trying to hack in to my AMP account, and on a near weekly basis vandalizes the Wikipedia articles which list my music.

This has literally gone on since the early 1990's and it is a battle I fight again and again whenever Mr. Gergely seems to get the urge to play at being me.

Jared Cravens (private e-mail conversation)

On the other hand, here is Robert Gergely's description of the whole case:

My music was used in a commercial video game called Uplink by Introversion software. This game wasn't really very successful until its release on the Steam Platform in mid 2006.

I was browsing the uplink forums when I came across something kind of shocking, a user name timelord was thanking people for enjoying his music and re-directing people to the AMP site, which contained my tracks and a fake interview filled out by a Jared Cravens who was trying to claim credit for my work.

Here is the forum post: https://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=34729&highlight= (it's near the bottom)

Robert Gergely on The Mod Archive forums

This forum post on the Uplink forums from 2006 is the first time Robert claims to have heard of Jared. From his point of view, this thing hasn't been going on since the early 90s as Jared claims.

Arguments and evidence

I have collected a lot of arguments and checked which one could be used as evidence. Some of them are not really strong enough to serve as evidence, but are good pointers anyway. Here is a list of what I found:

• Robert registered an AMP account under Jared's moniker "BDUAres", effectively stealing his identity. Once I pointed this out, Robert admitted:

  My intention behind registering this, an ill thought-out one I admit, was to PM Jared ironically using his own username asking him why he was doing all of this. Robert Gergely (private e-mail conversation)

  Prior to registering this account, Robert submitted his very own interview to AMP and tried using the AMP forum's "Reset Password" function to gain a new password for the "timelord" account on the forum, assuming that it was his account. However, this procedure sent a password reminder mail to Jared's address (as he in fact owns that account) and it must have made Jared aware of Robert being active again. This kind of explains why both people contacted The Mod Archive on the same day.
  Now, calling Robert's usage of the password retrieval procedure "hacking" is clearly exaggerated, and the forum logs do not reveal any kind of other "hacking" (like trying to guess his password) as Jared claims. The only person using the password reset functionality before this incident was evidently Jared himself.
• One of the previous Timelord web pages, evillive.insync.net/~tl/, contains Robert's email address (vortex.org belongs to Robert).
  Why it's not a proof: This URL was never referenced in any Timelord modules.
• Robert has provided me with unfinished versions of some of the Timelord modules.
  Why it's not a proof: In theory, they could be faked by taking the original module and removing / rewriting patterns and samples.
• The Hornet Archive has a copy of the original "Impulse" release. In the file IMPULSE.TXT that comes along with the S3M file, Robert's real name is mentioned. The integrity of this file has been confirmed, i.e. it's the same file that has been uploaded there in 1996.
  Why it's not a proof: If everything was as Jared claims, Robert could have "stolen" Jared's module shortly after its release, added his name in a secondary file and uploaded it to Hornet...
• Several years ago, Jared has filled out an AMP interview sheet, which was publically available up until recently. In this interview, he lists two groups he has been part of, ACiD and GOTHiC, but it misses other groups found in module sample texts, like MAD and LOGiC.
  Why it's not a proof: Okay, his memory might be fading...
• Robert has been paid and credited by Introversion software — the payment happened years before Jared made an occurence on the Uplink forums.
  Why it's not a proof: If Jared was right, this could have just been yet another opportunity for Robert to impersonate him behind his back.
• Robert is still making music, while Jared was not able to prove that he's an able musician so far.
• Robert has provided me with detailed lists of songs he sampled from. It's easy to verify that his samples are indeed from these songs, and this is usually knowledge that only the composer has (unless we are talking about well-known samples like the Amen Break or whatever).
  Why it's not a proof: If someone has impersonated another person for twenty years, they sure had enough time to listen to obscure records and locate these samples as well — even if it was just by chance. Still, being able to locate a rather generic oneshot snare sample in a record is a rather unlikely thing for someone who didn't sample it in the first place.
• There are a few Timelord S3Ms which contain samples with garbage data at the end of the sample. Some of this garbage data actually turns out to be readable ASCII text — e.g. IRC logs for an IRC channel Robert was in (the only "proof" I have for that are logs from his side showing that he was connecting to the server found in his IRC hostmask).
• If Robert has impersonated Jared for the last 20 years, why didn't Jared bring this to the public (AMP in this case) before 2006?
• Robert has confirmed that he worked at several ISPs at that time, but he was only a customer at Blackbox, not an employee as Jared claims — The Blackbox ISP was run by a single person, namely Marc Kraker Newman, and he was the only sysop / employee there (Marc confirmed this to me, and he also confirmed that Jared was in fact one of his customers).
• In his mail sent to The Mod Archive, Jared claims to have uploaded "his" modules to AMP (see quote above). If he already was aware of Robert stealing his identity since his early internet days, why did Jared not take care of clearing Robert's contact information from "his" very own modules that made its way in there? That's correct, even the AMP version of said modules contain e-mail addresses like st56g@jetson.uh.edu (an old student account at the University of Houston — Robert has proof that he studied at this university, but there's no proof that he owned this address — Jared, on the other hand, was about 30 years old at this point) and rob@blkbox.com as well as Robert's old phone number!
• In a mail sent to AMP in 2006, Jared appears to be very surprised when hearing about Robert.

  I think I understand what you are trying to say- this 'Rob' guy is saying he wrote my music, and you are caught in the middle. After being both amused and frightened at the same time by this guy, I also realized that short of hoping my old disks from more than 10 years ago are still readable there is very little I can do to put up an argument against someone wanting to steal 'credit' for my music. Not that there was any 'credit' that went along with it other than my own enjoyment as none of it was written to make any money or to garner any airplay and it did neither. Jared Cravens (private e-mail conversation with Crown)

  This is a direct contradiction to his claims that this story has been going on for years. Note that I received this excerpt from Robert, to whom Crown has forwarded this mail. I'm still waiting for Crown's confirmation on the authenticity of this quote.
• In the raw (unedited) version of Jared's AMP interview, which he sent to Crown of AMP, he lists three now disfunct websites that he claimed to own:
  • http://www.phoenix.net/~dspyre/timelord.html — no sensible Web Archive backup exists.
  • http://spider.netropolis.net/timelord/ — ditto
  • http://hypodermic.insync.net/~tl — this one redirects to vortex.org, which is owned by Robert. According to him, "hypodermic" was another name of the "evillive" server found in the arguments above. Both "hypodermic" and "evillive" were not available to customers, only employees of InSync (confirmed by Andrew Smith, another former sysadmin at InSync).
  So while this part of the interview never made it to the website, Jared still claims to have owned a website which effectively must have been Robert's.
• In the very same interview, Jared claims to have owned the email address timelord@nol.net.
  While it's not a 100% proof, Basehead (who was in contact with Robert, see below) says that this address looks familiar to him, so he most likely contacted Robert on this address. Robert has also sent me a big archive of e-mails he sent out from this address in 1996, including one sent to Basehead (which Basehead confirmed to be legit).
• In his AMP interview, Jared greets some old friends of Timelord, including Basehead:

  I'd like to say hi to Dan aka Basehead, Dr Harry from Harry's Asylum, and to all the oldtimer's still making music! I would have to send shouts out the other old Gothic & Acid members and to Future Crew as well! Thanks for listening! Jared Cravens, AMP interview (archived copy)

  I have received confirmation from both Robert and Basehead that they have been phoning each other back then. This fact alone is not a proof at all, but Basehead could also confirm that he never was in touch with a person called Jared, but the Timelord he has been takling to was called Rob. So Jared claims to know Basehead, but Basehead doesn't know him. Where does this come from?
  Well, everything you can read in Jared's interview can be based on publically available information (e.g. module sample texts). Regarding the demoscene, he only ever mentions 2nd Reality, which is like "the" demo from that period that you'd have to know if you had the slightest idea of the demoscene.

Conclusion

After all these years, many facts can no longer be verified. I have received a lot of material from Robert that was supposed to help confirming his identity, but not all made it into this article, as many things were proving little, if at all. As it should be obvious by now, I am strongly convinced that Robert Gergely is indeed the person that made all the 23 modules that have been released under the moniker "Timelord" in the 1990s.
Luckily and thanks to some third parties, some things which Jared probably expected that could no longer be verified (such as his claim of Robert being a sysop at Blackbox) could still be identified to be lies after such a long time.
At this point, I'd like to thank everyone who was involved with clearing up this mess, especially Asle at AMP, Basehead and Marc Newman — thank you for your effort and contributions!

A last question that could be asked is: Why would Jared do all this? There are several theories:

• For the money (Uplink game)
• For the fame
• Because he actually used the moniker Timelord at some point and was annoyed or upset by a person from the same city using the same name. Robert's theory for this is:

  According to Jared's greets he references a Dr. Harry. I've never talked to any "Harry" at Harry's Asylum and don't recall ever calling that board. So if he is referencing that guy, it's possible that he was Timelord on that BBS. This lends credit to my theory that he also used this handle in Houston. Maybe he did all of this because he was upset that I have achieved something with the same "name"? Robert Gergely (private e-mail conversation)

If you have any doubts about any arguments I have been making, or if you have any more material that could serve as evidence, do not hesitate to contact me.

Saga Musix 2013 — Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported