When I heard this evening Dan Larimer in an interview tell his developer story and how he started programming some games, I felt confident to admit I did so, too. I have never been interested much in playing games, I had more fun programming (simple) ones, until i found Battlezone 1998, which for me opened up a whole new perspective on virtual reality - and I got sucked into it. :) - Later on I developed some AI enriched MPI Maps for that very game through a LUA API that was provided by some great programmer of the original battlezone programmer crew who helped keep alive the game which is being played until today. It's just that: a classic, and its very special in its kind, since it combines strategy with action 1st-person shooter gaming on a multiplayer platform. Before Bzone I had always found 1st-person shooters boring, dull and destructive, and pure strategy games not compelling enough etc. , but with BZone 1998 I met the perfectly balanced mixture of just this a multileveled 1st person commander strategy game that required my full attention span for hours without needing to stupidly shoot other players down. I loved the constructive aspect of the game and had often wished i could have shot with flowers instead with sp-stabers and lasers. Many players i met online felt the same, we often halted the action and befriended in order to show each other our the bases we had built, every time there were new tricks and surprises to be discovered, simply because of the unmet , very unique physics engine of this amazing software. Battlezone was not about shooting, but about strategy, attention, tricks and clever action. A playground to push adrenaline to its max and often better than sex. :)
This short video does not represent any of this, but I had it on my harddisk, and I thought archiving some BZone memories under the IPFS protocol was not the worst idea, when finding out via the very same tool that there were 3D-multiplayer games existing as far back as 1974(!) on the PLATO network. Heck, this is unbelieeeevable :)
The ~2015 remake Battlezone Redux
Trailer:
