From id to Ooblik

...this rabbit hole, the world of FPS pc gaming, has no bottom. The possibilities are endless if one has a mind to learn, persevere, explore and adapt. Adaptability is critical, given the changes in FPS pc games since Wolf 3D in 1992. There have been several dispensations between then and now. Like seasons except they last years. Doom and Quake and their sequels were great in the 1990's. In my opinion, Quake 3 Arena was the best of that era. No, I didn't forget Duke Nukem and all it's effects. Simply put, the game-play wasn't on a par with Doom and Quake. Again, my opinion, Duke Nukem was "cheesy". However, it's effects marked a departure from what id Software was churning out.

Everything changed when Valve released Half-Life on November 19, 1998. The single-player mode of Half-Life incorporated tasks, adventure and a greater sense of purpose/mission than any FPS that preceded it. Remarkable game. Extraordinary. Those accolades are for the single player alone.

Multiplayer for FPS pc gamers began with Quake to my recollection. I played it a few times, on LANs and  the internet. It was a beginning. That's my way of being polite. The players' bodies would move as they navigated a map but not their arms, legs, hands, feet or head. Playing Quake online in 1996 was like shooting at cardboard cut-out's. As i said, it was a beginning. For the record, Doom also had a LAN-based co-op with 2 to 4 players.

Half-Life and Quake 3 Arena took the FPS multiplayer to a whole new level. A large part of this newness was map editing and creation. Ben Morris (apparently a programmer/designer) created a map editor called Worldcraft. He developed it for Quake. Worldcraft version 1.0 went on sale for $34.95 via mail-order on December 3,1996. Buyers received the program on CD. Valve hired Morris and acquired Worldcraft in July of 1997 with the intent to use it for the development of Half-Life and later release it with Half-Life. The result was version 1.2. Eight versions and 21 months later (version 2.1 -- April 1999) Worldcraft was released as free software but it only worked with Half-Life. Previous versions supported Quake, Quake 2 and Hexen 2. By this time Ben Morris had left Valve. Subsequently, version 3.4 was released and the name was changed to Hammer World Editor.

Why is this important? Think about it for a moment. Hammer and subsequent SDK's (Source Development Kits) released by Valve as free downloads enabled and encouraged mapping, modding and skin creation by the pc gamers themselves. Imagination and creation went wild. It was a wonderful time to be a gamer. New user-created custom content popped all over the place in the multiplayer world of Half-Life. We had never seen anything like this before. The players were creating their own pc gaming venues and player skins. Amazing!

The gravity of all this may be lost on some of you. That's understandable. You kinda had to be there. I was and I'm real glad I was. There's a story told by a gamer named KinetiK who received a Quake 2 custom map called "killingbox2.bsp" from his friend, Drexoll. KinetiK then asked another friend, Ooblik of FrogFree Clan, to recreate this map for Half-Life. On April 5, 1999, Ooblik made the map and named it "Killbox". I didn't get wind of this story until many years after stumbling into a killbox server for the first time. To say I was blown away would be grossly under-stating. Prior to seeing killbox my favorite Half-Life map was Datacore, a rather constricting map with a few semi-open areas. In killbox the whole map was an open area! It produced much carnage. Many players hated killbox. Calling it a "frames per second nightmare" or noting that no skill went into the making of it. Some suspect the real reason killbox had so many detractors was because so many players got "owned" in this map due to the lack of hiding places. Be that as it may, for every one killbox detractor there were 25 killbox addicts. I smile.

Thank you Ooblik! Thank you too KinetiK and Drexoll!

To be continued...