How 3D Realms’ and the retro FPS community’s darling weaponizes a Nazi forum against a trans woman

Joan Marie Arroyo Alcon
4 min readOct 2, 2023

TW: Transphobia, harassment, stalking and other sorts of bigotry ahead

Shannon O’Neill, known online as Major Arlene, is a prominent retro FPS community member, who’s been as well promoted and platformed by 3D Realms on their Realms Deep event multiple years under her developer team Hellforge Studios. The problem here, however, is that this reputation amongst the retro FPS community is unwarranted and undeserved, because, recently, we exposed Shannon as a person being able to weaponize the Nazi harassment forum KiwiFarms against me, a trans woman, and the implications this has on the retro FPS industry and community are pretty damning.

The evidence has been disclosed in a couple of videos, especially, the video above made by BigBad75.

The basic understanding of this is that MajorArlene kept me ostracized from every single community she was involved in, including even the 3D Realms one and Doomworld, and the reasons have been revealed when I did a sting operation with a Discord alt account, in which MajorArlene would reveal that she’s been pulling information about me from KiwiFarms, thus having a justification to further harass me, such as the time where she stalked me when I was promoting one of my games, Sass VS Fash, on another livestreamer’s livestream on Twitch, even when she was unprovoked:

Major Arlene has been exposed to go target not just trans people like me, but also Jewish people like Tormentor667 during the whole Blade of Agony debacle. All while masquerading her malicious act as an act of progressivism. Arlene, or Shannon, is not an ally to the LGBTQ community nor any other marginalized groups. It should have been evident to companies like 3D Realms who regularly platform her game company Hellforge Studios, but it seemingly isn’t.

We reached multiple times to 3D Realms and other similar game companies that were related on this issue. Nearly all of the time we were treated with a deafening silent treatment, often being ignored. We brought it up on two of the annual Realms Deep livestream chats, the 2022 one and the 2023 one. However, on Realms Deep 2023’s livestream chat, while nobody in the chat was seemingly responding to our mere question about Major Arlene, and while everyone was praising the games presented there, including Hellforge Studios’ game The Age of Hell, we were banned from their livestream chat silently, given no explanation nor reason for our chat ban.

It is undeniable that I had a past in the alt-right, yet I manage to do my best to be more inclusive and tolerant and fix the damage I’ve done while I was there. However, it is simply unjustified to use similar fascist tactics as a so-called progressive on the retro FPS community to not just weaponize a Nazi harassment board like KiwiFarms on me, but neither it is silencing me and gaslighting me into believing I’m “mentally ill” enough to make these accusations.

So, effective now, we’re calling for a boycott of all 3D Realms, Hellforge Studios and other game studios’ games and products as described in this other video:

As it currently stands, 3D Realms and other game companies hold a clique strong enough to protect, platform and promote stalkers and abusers like Shannon, and it seems the only way to truly respond to this harassment aggression is by hurting their wallet.

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Joan Marie Arroyo Alcon

Trans marketing employee at day, trans game developer and artist at night. ACAB.