Soon after the release of "Endless Mission", in October 1999, the software giant Microsoft, which has not been involved in the game business, released an online game called "Asheron's Call", which soon became a UO game. , EQ Chamber of anti-little online games, which has attracted the attention of the game developer Turbine. Since then, Turbine has become an important force in online games in Europe and the United States, and has also contributed a number of boutique online games to online game players, including "Dungeons & Dragons Online" and "Lord of the Rings Online (The Lord of the Rings) of the Rings Online)".
Turbine was founded in 1994. At the beginning, its name was Cyberspace. It was founded by researchers from several universities. Before the establishment of Cyberspace, its main founder, Johnny Monsarrat, was a Ph.D. from the prestigious Brown University in the United States, and had already made some achievements in the field of intelligent robot research. But Monsarat hopes to challenge himself in the field of game development-unlike many other people who embarked on the road of game development because of their passion for games, Monsarat believes that game development in the unknown area of the technical field can give Bring greater challenges by myself. It seems that at that time, every programmer with independent programming ability was eager to make a game of his own, but many people did not have the courage to challenge themselves.
Monsarate has the courage to challenge himself. After some thoughts, he and three friends from the Brown University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory-Jeremy Gaffney, Kevin Langevin and Timothy Miller ( Timothy Miller) set up a company called Cyberspace in his own home and began to develop games-they are not going to flood the market with consoles and computer games, but to enter the technically immature field of online game development and development.
Before entering Brown University, Monsarate joined a club called "Assassin League" at MIT. Don't be fooled by this name. This club is just a small theater organization formed by Dungeons and Dragons fans— —Playing Dungeons and Dragons on the stage, Monsarate was also a screenwriter and actor at the time. Therefore, after starting the development of online games, Monsarate hopes to develop a fantasy online game with the theme of Dungeons and Dragons, so that thousands of people can play elf warriors or magicians in a fantasy world. adventure.
However, Monsarat is not good at building game worlds, and several founders are better at program development. Therefore, at the beginning, the main work of the team was the development of the technical level. At the beginning, the situation was very bad. The entire company only had one laptop, and then reluctantly bought a desktop computer for UI development. This is all the company's assets. None of the four of them quit their original scientific research work at the time, but only carried out development between work. Until September 1994, Monsarat used an unusual way to "raise" a sum of funds for the company and made a decision. Determined to fully develop the game.
In September 1994, when Monsarate was walking on the streets of Providence, he accidentally encountered a car accident-luckily he was not life-threatening, and he received a large amount of insurance compensation. In January 1995, Monsarate quit his job at the university and became the first full-time employee of Cyberspace. Timothy Miller, another founder who had done computer graphics research at Brown University, prepared a lot of materials and guidance for him. Monsarate began to write a 3D graphics engine for games with all his strength. At that time, 3D graphics technology Very advanced, no successful works have appeared on the market, and the technical challenges that this brings are exactly the original intention of Monsarate to develop the game.
At the same time of development, in order to ensure the early development cost, Cyberspace also took the game business plan to look for investment from some investment institutions, and got a certain amount of attention. But in the end the team also decided to rely on the help of family and friends to complete the preliminary fund-raising work, and strive to find those dreamy developers who are willing to accept lower wages in order to reduce development costs. But this kind of person is not easy to recruit. After interviewing more than 70 people, only one programmer, Chris Dyl, was willing to join the team, so he became the first employee besides the four founders. Today, more than ten years later, this young man who had dreamed of joining without worrying about his salary has become Turbine's CTO, and his efforts have been rewarded accordingly.
After gradually getting on the right track, the team hoped that the company would have a strong name, so the company name was changed from Cyberspace to Second Nature Interactive. As a team with a lot of Geek spirit, several members later proposed to change the company name to "Sleepless Geeks Incorporated", but this name has already been registered, so they thought of using "Turbine". Replacement. One year later, Second Nature Interactive changed its name to Turbine, and has since become a new force in the online game market, beginning to emerge in the game market.
In the summer of 1995, Monsarate’s apartment was no longer able to meet the daily work needs of the growing team, so the company moved to its mother’s house in Providence. At first, only the living room was used, and then the bedroom and basement were also occupied. Now, Monsarate’s mother’s house has become a place where the six team members work and live, and the mother has to move out of her house to find another place to live in order to support her son’s entrepreneurship. The summer of 1995 was very hot, and the house in Providence did not even have air conditioners, but in this way, the development team made the product engine gradually improved with continuous efforts, and made it ready for demonstration. The DEMO version. At this time, Toby Ragaini, the core character in the development of the "Call of Arthur Dragon" game, joined the team.
Toby Lagani was also a researcher before joining, working in a nearby genetics laboratory. In Monsarate’s mother’s house, he felt the passion of Turbine’s 10 team members for game development, and agreed to accept a monthly salary of $800 to join the team. Although there was a DEMO at the time, the entire game did not yet have a systematic framework, so everything had to be reorganized.
After a series of discussions, the final division of the team was clarified: Brown University dropout Tim Brennen, who had assisted in the development of Windows NT at Microsoft, led a team of engineers to design server, network, and player data; g Reese Dier is responsible for the development of the 3D graphics engine and the realization of server-side physical effects; another Brown University alumnus, Andy Reiff, is responsible for the implementation of all system rules as a game system programmer; Jason, a graduate of the music department ·Boss (Jason Booth) is responsible for coordinating the art team and graphic design team to ensure the normal progress of the work of both parties; Sean Huxter, who has a lot of animation and modeling experience, is responsible for leading the art design team; Toby Lagani became the chief designer of the game, responsible for the design of the core game world and rules. Although this team does not have professional game development experience, most of them are scientific researchers who are familiar with Internet technology, and many of them also have MUD game experience, all of which have brought some help to the development work.
The initial design of "Call of Arthur Dragon" is to support 200 players online at the same time, hourly billing. Although this design is very ridiculous today, in 1995 this was indeed a standard online game mode that could guarantee cost recovery. Cyberstrike using similar modes and AOL's "Neverwinter Nights" were on the market in 1995. Both have also been successful. Based on the goal, the game's launch time is initially determined in the fourth quarter of 1997 - that is, two years later. However, with the progress of game development and the advancement of online game technology, many of the designs and goals of "Call of Arthur Dragon" have also been overturned. When the expected time to market arrives, the game is still in the development stage. It was finally released in October 1999.
In 1995, Turbine had another problem besides the game itself, which was that it had not found a publisher for the game, so Turbine began to promote its game to the outside world and actively cooperated with game publishers. In September 1995, Monsarate attended the GDC Game Developers Conference with a one-page game leaflet. At the meeting, he established contacts with major online game publishers such as AOL and CompuServe. At the same time, he also received some Helpful suggestions and feedback.
However, the completion of the game is still very low. No publisher is willing to represent this game. Turbine must first make the game more attractive to talents. Because the small town of Providence was difficult to recruit, Turbine moved the company to Westwood, south of Boston, and moved into an office building. The scale of the company has also gradually expanded. By mid-1996, it had grown to 30 people, and its operations were gradually standardized. Monsara, who has focused his main work on management and foreign-related business, hired a senior game player, Richard Powell (Rickland Powell) as executive vice president to assist in the development and management of the game business, and hired a Harvard University An MBA elite Dan Scherlis (Dan Scherlis) assisted in business negotiations.
By the end of 1996, Monsarate began to gradually leave the front-line management position, appointing Dan Scheris, who was more professional than himself, as the company's CEO, and became the chairman and CTO who was better at business. With the best possible talents, the development progress of "Call of Arthur Dragon" has also been guaranteed. The increasingly perfect game began to attract more and more publishers' attention, and at this time Turbine found it through its own efforts. A more financially rich publisher: Microsoft, which is initially involved in the online game business.
Wealthy wealth is only one reason to choose Microsoft, and more importantly, to recognize their predictions on the online game market. At the beginning of 1996, representatives of Microsoft’s newly established MSN game community predicted at a developer conference that the prevailing hourly charging model would be eliminated, and the monthly fee system would become a new trend, but they were booed at the meeting. , But the Turbine team also at the meeting agreed with their prediction. So at E3 that year, Turbine's executives tirelessly introduced "Call of Arthur Dragon" to Jon Grande of the MSN gaming community, and demonstrated the game's 3D graphics on the computer at the venue. The effect has successfully attracted the attention of the other party. After visiting Turbine's office team, Microsoft signed a preliminary letter of intent with it. Although the formal contract was not signed until 6 months later, the advance payment paid by the letter of intent ensured the normal operation of the team during this period and even achieved some milestone results.
Leaning against the big tree is good for the coolness. In addition to the financial support provided by Microsoft, Turbine also received more technical assistance through its partnership with Microsoft. On the one hand, Microsoft provides some free development tools including Visual C++, Visual SourceSafe and a bug tracking database called RAID. On the other hand, Turbine has also learned a lot from the cooperation with the world’s largest software company. Experience in professional software development. The most important thing in this cooperation is that Turbine has successfully retained the ownership of the game source code, thus ensuring the independence of the company's development and avoiding the fate of some other teams being controlled by the publisher.
Unlike stand-alone games, the technical architecture of online games is very complex. In addition to the graphics engine, it also includes user interfaces, servers, network service functions, user authentication, game management tools, etc. From the very beginning, Turbine planned to develop a set of reusable engines and tools that could be more easily applied to more online game development. After having sufficient budget guarantee, the development team is committed to implementing this key technology, ensuring the modularity of the technical architecture and data independence to facilitate code reuse.
This modular structure played a huge role in the development of "Call of Arthur Dragon", not only ensuring the possibility of more profit in the future, but also making the development of the game more convenient. Take the creation of a game world as an example. It is a difficult task to fill the Dereth world where the game is located. Generally, the development team will hire many designers to create content manually, but Turbine does not have enough budget in this regard, so the development team created A series of world construction tools to maximize the guarantee to complete the task.
This series of world building tools includes a tool that is convenient for art teams to create game environment modules. Designers can add specified terrain features and random monsters to the created map. In addition, there is a tool called Dungeon Maker. You can create dungeons more easily. Jason Boss and UI designer created an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for these tools for Mike Ferrier, so that planners and designers without programming skills can easily create more with these tools Dungeon. These all make it easier to add content to the game.
"The Call of Arthur Dragon" takes place in a world called Auberean. The legendary magician named Arthur Dragon accidentally opened a portal to an unknown world and brought back from a world called "Olthoi" Research on insect creatures, but things quickly got out of control. Creatures in different worlds never entered the world in which humans lived. Most humans chose to escape from this world through the portal newly summoned by Arthurron, but Arthurron himself Stayed there to make up for the mistakes he made and save the world in which mankind lives, the player has to assist him in completing this difficult task together, defeating monsters, completing tasks, and exploring the dungeon.
One of the core systems designed by the development team for the game is the Allegiance system, which is mainly influenced by the direct sales organization Amway, and it was the first design formed by several founders such as Monsarate. New players in the game can offer allegiance to players of the same level or higher, and those who are loyal can provide protection for the new players, and in return they will get a certain percentage of the experience gained by the new players during the upgrade process. Under the influence of this system, old players will actively develop new players to join the game and ensure the growth of new players, so that game promotion and environmental maintenance can be effectively carried out among players.
In addition to this innovation, "Call of Arthur Dragon" also has many differences compared with other online games of the same time. For example, there is no concept of career choice in the creation of game characters. Players can match skills in the game according to their preferences. Cultivate your ideal career, which greatly improves the freedom of the role. The application of skills is very important in the game, and even lower-level players can defeat higher-level players.
At the beginning of 1999, the game began to enter the Beta testing stage and finally lasted for 8 months. The performance after the release proves the necessity of Beta testing. During the testing process, testers will submit bugs to Microsoft’s bug tracking database called RAID. Microsoft also has a team dedicated to tracking user-submitted bugs and important Added to RAID, and then repaired by Turbine. During the test, the server was required to be able to pass the stress test of 3,000 players online at the same time. In order to meet this standard, the development team made some modifications to the physical server side and simplified the collision model. These are all for the server after the game is officially operated. Excellent performance laid the foundation.
On November 2, 1999, 9 months after the release of "Endless Mission", "Call of Arthur Dragon" was officially released. Prior sufficient testing made the game's operation calm and did not appear like many other online games of the same era. The state of server crashes-in the first few weeks after the official release, the server has not crashed once. It must be said to be a great result in the market at that time. In addition to sufficient testing, this is partly due to the game. The dynamic load balancing server technology used.
With stable service performance and strong publicity from Microsoft, "Call of Arthur Dragon" attracted a large number of players, and the number of players reached 80,000 at the end of the year. A year later, while the UO and EQ games are infinitely beautiful, "Call of Arthur Dragon" also achieved 200,000 sales and 90,000 online results, becoming the third online game in the game market. In 2002, the number of online users of "Call of Arthur Dragon" reached its peak of 120,000. Although the online ranking was surpassed by "The Dark Age of Camelot" soon, it still maintained a group of loyal fans for a long time. .