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Below is the quote but you really have to see for yourself; http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/102/18
The interview with polix can be found on the topic on SSForum.
Heirs to an Empty Kingdom: The Continuum Team
Released in '97, Virgin Interactive Entertainment's (VIE) SubSpace was a victim of its novelty. Just barely scraping the traditional MMOG qualifier (64 or more players on one server), the top-down space combat game - along with Meridian 59 and Ultima Online - laid the foundation for online gaming. The game played a bit like Counter-Strike or Team Fortress, only with spaceships: Players battled over flag capture points and for bragging rights, and thanks to a robust chat system, people didn't even need to log out to torment their victims.
However, in 1997, those ancient times
Before Broadband, back when some people were still paying by the hour for flaky internet access, the idea of paying an additional fee to log into a virtually non-persistent world with little record of your existence beyond a name and a win-loss record just didn't take. By 1998, VIE had lost its funding from parent company Virgin, and the SubSpace license went un-purchased, leaving the remaining community with little support.
Players were able to create their own servers, but without a unified developer to patch the game in an official capacity, cheating ran rampant, which pushed the game even further underground. If SubSpace was going to survive, it needed something bold to happen. Enter Priit "PriitK" Kasesalu. Kasesalu, who would later go on to design Kazaa and Skype, reverse-engineered SubSpace and renamed it Continuum, the version of the game most people play today. Since then, Kasesalu maintains a few servers, but has handed over the day-to-day responsibilities to the community he saved.
One of the leaders in the community is Scott "PoLiX" Binford. A nine-year SubSpace vet, Binford runs SSCentral.com and acts, in a way, as the game's publicist. "I am a lone man in some ways ... keeping what I can together while trying to get a new face and grow the site again." Binford says he, like many other of the game's diehard fans, grew up playing SubSpace. "I've known many of the players I consider friends since the time I began, and some I have worked with for years now building the websites."
Sometimes, all the work he and the rest of the team does can be exhausting and frustrating. Binford admits he's thought about giving up his responsibilities "a few times. It has gotten frustrating being the last general site for the game ... But I still keep the sites up and running and keep my active user base happy. I know I am the media for the game, and without our websites, we would slowly die."
But the death of SubSpace is the last thing on anyone's mind. Even they were hit hard by World of Warcraft's arrival, but the team plans on rolling out the PR wagon to draw new people to the game. They intend to focus on how varied the game can be - "In what other game can you go from playing
an Unreal Tournament-style game to an Infantry-style game?" - as well as how working on a collaborative development can lead to paying jobs within the industry. "Many of our players ... have now gotten jobs in programming, or designing," he says, "and have said they found Continuum an easier jumping leap than any other game, as so much more programming is needed, and you're starting literally from bare scratch in many places."
Whatever the marketing outcome, Binford is extremely confident in the team's lasting survival. "Honestly, this game will never die as long as we keep playing it and enjoying it, so I see it lasting until our 20-year anniversary and beyond."
Released in '97, Virgin Interactive Entertainment's (VIE) SubSpace was a victim of its novelty. Just barely scraping the traditional MMOG qualifier (64 or more players on one server), the top-down space combat game - along with Meridian 59 and Ultima Online - laid the foundation for online gaming. The game played a bit like Counter-Strike or Team Fortress, only with spaceships: Players battled over flag capture points and for bragging rights, and thanks to a robust chat system, people didn't even need to log out to torment their victims.
However, in 1997, those ancient times
Before Broadband, back when some people were still paying by the hour for flaky internet access, the idea of paying an additional fee to log into a virtually non-persistent world with little record of your existence beyond a name and a win-loss record just didn't take. By 1998, VIE had lost its funding from parent company Virgin, and the SubSpace license went un-purchased, leaving the remaining community with little support.
Players were able to create their own servers, but without a unified developer to patch the game in an official capacity, cheating ran rampant, which pushed the game even further underground. If SubSpace was going to survive, it needed something bold to happen. Enter Priit "PriitK" Kasesalu. Kasesalu, who would later go on to design Kazaa and Skype, reverse-engineered SubSpace and renamed it Continuum, the version of the game most people play today. Since then, Kasesalu maintains a few servers, but has handed over the day-to-day responsibilities to the community he saved.
One of the leaders in the community is Scott "PoLiX" Binford. A nine-year SubSpace vet, Binford runs SSCentral.com and acts, in a way, as the game's publicist. "I am a lone man in some ways ... keeping what I can together while trying to get a new face and grow the site again." Binford says he, like many other of the game's diehard fans, grew up playing SubSpace. "I've known many of the players I consider friends since the time I began, and some I have worked with for years now building the websites."
Sometimes, all the work he and the rest of the team does can be exhausting and frustrating. Binford admits he's thought about giving up his responsibilities "a few times. It has gotten frustrating being the last general site for the game ... But I still keep the sites up and running and keep my active user base happy. I know I am the media for the game, and without our websites, we would slowly die."
But the death of SubSpace is the last thing on anyone's mind. Even they were hit hard by World of Warcraft's arrival, but the team plans on rolling out the PR wagon to draw new people to the game. They intend to focus on how varied the game can be - "In what other game can you go from playing
an Unreal Tournament-style game to an Infantry-style game?" - as well as how working on a collaborative development can lead to paying jobs within the industry. "Many of our players ... have now gotten jobs in programming, or designing," he says, "and have said they found Continuum an easier jumping leap than any other game, as so much more programming is needed, and you're starting literally from bare scratch in many places."
Whatever the marketing outcome, Binford is extremely confident in the team's lasting survival. "Honestly, this game will never die as long as we keep playing it and enjoying it, so I see it lasting until our 20-year anniversary and beyond."
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