QOL – Year One
This month marks one year of my involvement at Quest Online (QOL). And to celebrate this landmark event, I decided to start a dev blog over there.
Unlike most in the biz, I don’t have any interesting stories to tell about how I started out working for some big name or how I started in the mail room and worked myself up to QA, then programmer, then head of a studio, then a millionaire who owns a company or how I was racing Ferrari’s with my best buddy after making my first million etc. No, that’s not me. My story is much less exciting to say the least. Some of it is in my bio here on the site and on one of the widely read write-ups by Jeff Green which appeared in the now defunct Computer Gaming World magazine.
Basically, since the early days of owning a gaming console (yes, that’s what they were called long before the PC came to be) I wanted to make games. I have always been fascinated by sci-fi, science in general, space travel etc. Once games like Elite, Echelon, Stellar Crusade, Star Flight, Star Fleet et al came out and I got the chance to play them obsessively, I was convinced that I wanted to make games. And they had to be space games. Over the years, I have amassed an unhealthy number of games (trust me, there’s more sitting in storage) as I advanced my knowledge not only of the games that I play and collect but of the industry itself. Along the way, I made a good many friends and a few enemies.
My education history is just as boring. While not as colorful as being a millionaire high school or college drop-out who got his big break with that first idea, it is as boring as having several degrees and going to work on a farm. While an exceptionally strong math background, an insanely creative acumen, various IT related certifications (IBM, Novell, Compaq, Dec, MS etc) and awards – and tacked on for good measure, a Ph.D. (from an entity that was later found to be unaccredited in the US; but that’s neither here nor there) are nothing to scoff at, when you’re looking to go into programming – and having absolutely no experience whatsoever on how to even begin (if you know who author Lee Adams is, then you’re either as old as I am or you’ve been where I’ve been) – several years of hard and mostly foreign course work still qualifies you for a merit badge for trying. I think.
During all those years of studying, working and dealing with the challenges of my early life, my mind was firmly set on achieving one single goal: I wanted to develop my video game.
This was tantamount to me waking up one morning and deciding that I was going to start working on building a rocket to Mars. But since having no experience whatsoever I had no hopes of even getting a combustion system in place, I was going to start by going to college to be an engineer first. But in the meantime and against all odds, I was going to start building that rocket right away. Madness doesn’t even begin to explain it. And so off I went. To build a game. Despite having absolutely no idea where to even start, let alone what programming a video game actually entailed.
Despite all that, by the time I was done with my studies – all the while working, traveling, dealing with life’s challenges etc – I was able to build an entire neural net based AI system – from scratch and without any formal knowledge (OK, that’s not entirely true since I first started poking around with Borland’s Turbo Prolog) of the subject, other than what I was picking up on the fly. At the time, it fit on a single 5.25″ floppy disc. I was nowhere near where I needed to be with game development. My degrees taught me absolutely nothing [about game development] other than how to add 2+2 and come up with 6 – all the while keeping a straight face when saying that the answer was in fact the correct one. FYI, that’s called a bug. Fibonacci had nothing on me.
But this is all I ever wanted to do. I have never worked for any person or company in the biz. Ever. I worked and fought very hard to maintain my independence so that I could continue working on my games. Along the way, once I stopped consulting and you know, making steady money for a living, I decided to go all in and formed my own company, 3000AD Inc. My first game, Battlecruiser 3000AD, conceived back in 1983 (no, that’s not a typo) – as nothing but crazy ideas on paper – was the company’s sole asset.
Eventually life, family, age, history and everything in between caught up with me. And before I knew it, I was married, had a kid and eventually started taking what I do a lot more seriously. Before I knew it, what began as a dream became a fulltime job.
Somewhere along the way, I also found God. When you consider that my wife and I both come from a predominantly Christian family, this shouldn’t be as surprising as it sounds; but the fact is that it sure surprised the heck out me because as time went on, I found absolutely no reasonable nor plausible explanation as to how I got where I am today without some sort of Divine Intervention.
Yet somehow, somewhere along the way – amidst all the ridicule, crazy internet person attacks, detraction (there is this one guy who has an entire defamatory website dedicated purely to this) etc – I managed to see – my game – from start to finish. Even when that game which had taken so much from me – including the better part of my life – was not the stellar reception that I had envisioned, it was still my game and a fulfillment of a dream that I had.
For anyone who has followed my life and indeed my twenty year industry career, it should be evident that when I set my mind to doing something , I just do it – regardless of what anyone says, thinks or does. If I believe in something, nothing – short of the Second Coming – will deter me from staying focused on that one thing. I don’t make excuses for mistakes, instead I embrace and learn from them, deal with the knocks as they come and press on. All this knowing that if I were to ever fall, that I couldn’t rely on anyone but myself to pick me back up.
Through building my own company from scratch – with my own money (I don’t and have never had investor involvement in my company) – I have taken my own share of knocks. Those knocks started with my first game – the original Battlecruiser 3000AD released by Take Two Interactive in 1996 – which, contrary to popular belief actually did make money and was in fact listed in the company’s original SEC filing. But given the fact that the game was released by the original Take Two management while still in Beta, that single act and ensuing drama (which I played a big part in when I defiantly went public; then subsequently released the game for free after reaching an out of court settlement with Take Two) overshadowed most everything that was groundbreaking about the game as well as all the work that had been done. That was dream shattering, to say the least.
The media had a field day with that one. And it was even more noisy back then due to the fact that there weren’t as many games being developed. So special attention – the bane of marketing – was paid to any game which publishers focused the noise machine (a.k.a. marketing) at. To this day, that game- though freely available – is still one of the most downloaded games on the net; and its many derivatives which followed continue to maintain the bar for hardcore space combat games. My entire career was built on that first game- a game which everyone expected to fail. Heck, to this day, much (including excerpts in published books, thesis, articles etc) has been written about the ground breaking Artificial Intelligence that I developed for the game. The fact that it actually worked was surprising in and of itself. To the extent that several who didn’t understand it (back then AI wasn’t even a buzz word!) nor able to conceive the concept – including one Keith Zabalaoui a then industry vet who, having never seen a single line of game code, let alone actually played the game – were quick to discount it. At the time, I was young, inexperienced, foolish and someone was messing with my dream. So I started releasing snippets of my source code to the media, colleagues, Usenet etc.
To this day, in much the same way that my series of space/planetary games are the only ones that do what they do, that game is probably the only one in the history of game development for which an entire neural net based AI language and kernel (upon which it runs), was developed. From scratch. And by someone who – at the time – had absolutely no formal knowledge of nor experience in actual game development. Today, there are many who can build a game in a weekend using readily available tools and assets made available by others. They have it easy.
The game’s eventual release disaster in Q4 1996, seemingly saw the media and many disgruntled gamers, discard the game’s strengths due to the fact that it barely ran for long periods of time without crashing, shipped without anything remotely resembling a decent manual etc. It wasn’t until several years later when Interplay, through the graces of one Brian Fargo and Phil Adam, decided to take a chance and help me with the release of a sequel in the form of “Battlecruiser 3000AD v2″, that the IP finally started gaining traction. Why? Because I had stuck with it and eventually saw my original vision to its conclusion. Even so, despite making quite a bit of money and gaining accolades, it still wasn’t well received by some in the media, blinded by the inherently stupid notion that it was too hardcore to be any fun. But since I already had quite a following, I decided to stick with it.
And so I built my entire business model around making these hardcore games that a group of people were paying me to make. They kept buying them, so I kept making them. Fourteen games and more than twenty years of hardcore gaming later, I’m still here doing just that.
So it was that I came to see some of my own history in the Alganon game and indeed the company itself. Alganon was a game that the original creators had high hopes for, despite seemingly having absolutely no clue on exactly how to pull it off. Despite the fact that the primary creators, between them, had no less than three failed attempts at developing and launching a successful, let alone a profitable MMO game, they were determined to see this one through. But for whatever reason, it was not to be.
So it is that in a bit of revisionist history, I find myself as the head of a company (QOL) that was trying to save an unfinished product (Alganon) that had a less than stellar launch and thus prevent millions of dollars from going down the drain. And one year later, both company and game – both of which were largely written off and declared DOA a year ago by most everyone but us, continue to soldier on.
Only history will tell how this all will play out over at QOL, but one thing is certain, nobody – least of all me – is going to give up on this game before we see it complete its journey.