Sep 10

Daughter-In-Law of the Friday Diversion

Legends (…Or, if you prefer, Bride Of the Son Of the Friday Diversion)

If you had hung out with Deane and I in ‘99, you would have either played Tribes, heard mention of Tribes, wondered that ‘Tribes’ was and why we kept talking about ‘spinfusors’, or wished, for the love of God, that we would shut up about freaking Tribes.

Well, shortly after Tribes 2 came out, Dynamix spun off GarageGames, a company to help support small and independent game developers. The jewel in their product line was the Torque toolkit, the software engine used to create Tribes, Tribes 2, and, apparently, other Sierra Games like Trophy Bass (those must be some crazy, crazy bass). Through GarageGames, Torque is available as full source code to small developers for as little as $100. Compared with the licensing arrangements made between big studios for untold sums for similar engines that drive games like Unreal and Quake3, that’s an unbelievable deal that really levels the playing field.

Legends is sort of a re-creation of the original Tribes on a more modern version of the Torque engine. I haven’t tried the game yet, but it looks like these guys are trying really hard to capture that delicious Tribes flavor, and that they really have a passion for the combination of action and strategy that stunted my social life around the turn of the century.

by Joe   September 10, 2004 4:25 PM   |
  tags: 
Tribes, Tribes 2, Dynamix, Legends, Friday Diversion

Comments

by Deane,   September 10, 2004 5:21 PM  

Ah, Tribes. We played a lot of Tribes. Usually when we should have been working.

We worked at an ISP at the time, and one day Joe got the great idea that we should run a game server -- the reasoning being that we could get more gamers to subscribe because the server they'd dialup would be right next to the game server on the network, so they'd have a better ping.

So, one day, Joe goes out and buys Tribes and Quake 3 Arena with company money and the company's blessing. We thought we had died at this point. (Of course, it was '99 -- pre-bubble burst -- and we totally bought into the dot-com professional "lifestyle." I remember clearing tables out of the center of the room to play Nerf football in the middle of the day. We were idiots,)

So, anyway, Joe spent three days working on a Web interface so you could go to our Web site and see a screencap of what map was running on the Tribes server at that instant in time. It was so very cool. And we got paid to do this. Amazing.

I was a freaking animal with the rocket launcher.

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