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The History of the Game
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Note:
Many pages referenced here are linked to web.archive.org. That
site can be very slow, so viewing the archive can work out better.
This article is not
guaranteed to be entirely accurate, but it has been written as
accurately as possible. Feel free to click the e-mail link and
let him know if there is something incorrect.
www.bolt-action.com
on Web Archive (archive1, archive2)
www.wulfram.com
on Web Archive (archive1)
www.erida.com
on Web Archive (archive1, archive2)
A question is frequently asked and
frequently answered, sometimes incorrectly, about the history of
Wulfram. How old is Wulfram? Why is it Wulfram II(2)?
Where is Wulfram 1?
Well, way back in 1996 a group of
developers named Rick, Bernt, and Jon (who has been a name in
software/game development for many years to this day) decided they were
going to make a hover-vehicle warfare game called Standoff. The
group was collectively known as Bolt-Action Software. They didn't
have the game quite fleshed out yet, but they were getting there.
The game had a blue and red team, a single piloted vehicle, and few
base units and the starships which dropped cargo boxes and could be
moved around and fight eachother. There was only a single
defensive unit structure called the Sentry, which fired flak shells at
the enemy (sound familiar?). As for weapons, tanks came with
built in missiles and an autocannon. Missiles could be replaced
by grabbing some from a refuel pad. The teams were effectively
nameless and the flags were very different. The blue team even
had the Pope as a team flag!
By 1998, the Total Entertainment
Network (called TEN) decided to host the game. Wulfram was
born! Visually, the differences between Wulfram and Standoff were
minor. Biggest difference was that more weapons were fleshed
out. The vehicle came with 2 weapons still built-in, only now
tanks came with a pulse shell instead of a cluster of heat-seeking
missiles. Fuel pads now carried many weapons to load into the
vehicle: piercer missiles, thumper missiles, mines, caltrops, and
"seeker missiles" that were fully-guided missiles (sound
familiar?). The Sentry base unit were now called Flak
Turrets.
Games were launched from a lounge, and teams could be named whatever
you wanted them to be.
In late 1999, Shockforce came into being
and
was hosted at iMagic Online (later becoming iMagic Entertainment
Network or iEN). A new vehcile called the Scout was born, that
had a repair beam as a secondary weapon instead of a pulse
cannon. The gun turret was born and the seeker missile
became hunter missile. Team names became officially the Azure
Alliance for blue and the Crimson Federation for red.
Relations between Bolt Action and iEN went
awry at some point and the two companies went separate ways. The
game entered a sort of limbo, where it seemed to be the end of
Shockforce until Bolt-action renamed the game to Wulfram II and had
very laggy server put up to keep folks happy. They also announced
the release of a new version of Shockforce, which was going to be
called Erida. Folks playing Wulfram 2 dealt with the lag and
chaos that were beginning to become commonplace in hopes Erida would
arrive sometime soon.
However, Bolt-Action did not survive for very
long. After working on the development of a game called "Barbaric
Smackdown" in addition to Wulfram/Shockforce and trying to sell their
services as developers of landscape rendering engines they were
incredbly in-debt and going nowhere.
Bolt-Action bit the dust around late 2000, possibly
earlier, and Bernt Habbermier took it upon himself to continue
the development of Erida. Then, disaster struck, when a hard
drive failure destroyed all of Bernt's time and effort spent on the new
version of the game.
As a result, Bernt began to focus on Wulfram II as his
project instead of Erida in 2001. A Moderator department was
formed to manage the now hostile and largely abusive community and
donations were now accepted to help support Wulfram II. In 2002 a
Training Levels system was implemented and the Activist Department was
created. A fairly buggy Direct 3D rendering engine was released
as well. Squad Wars came into existence... and eventually the
game became the game we all play today.
-Occulodignatio
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