Rick Hummel was part of the game development team that worked on the Ace Lightning video game. While working there Rick created a program that could bring the characters of the Ace Lightning game to life. Rick was purportedly mocked, ridiculed and eventually fired for inventing the program. In order to exact his revenge on former coworkers, Rick programmed Lord Fear and his gang to "take over the world" in order to prove his intellect, and injected his program into a copy of the Ace Lightning game which came into the possession of Mark Hollander.