It says:

Empwake v0.98 running as pid 60

Opening display...

and then silently exits with status 0. (OK, it just occured to me that this exit status tells us nothing, since you probably fork another instance of the program that does the actual job (in order to detach from terminal), and this code is from parent that exits after the fork anyway...) Anyway, the new process does exit immediately, too, as

./empwake; ps -ef

does not show it.

Edit: this happens whether the player runs or not (I tried this over serial console, via telnet with player running and 'regularly', through preinit.d).

Thanks for your effort!