THE
TRUE HISTORY OF DMC-ROCKETRIDE.COM
(AKA DMCRR.COM)
By Matt Blevins
Many people tell the story. Few of them tell it correctly.
In the winter of 2002, my roommate, Justin, acquired a 500MHz laptop with a cheesy 13" display. I don't know what the occasion was (J's birthday, I think) but whatever it was, I think the gift was unexpected, because he asked me later if I could show him what to do with it.
We didn't have Internet access anywhere in the house except my room, so I thought it might be a good idea to set up a LAN that would connect all the computers in the house together to the cable modem, so everyone could surf.
So I went out and bought a Gateway/Router and enough Ethernet cable to do the job and built my first home network. Though the whole thing was quite novel, there wasn't any practical use for it other than surfing the web (not all that fabulous an experience in those days).
Well, later that same weekend I was feeling benevolent, and was needing a testbed for the new network, so I went out and bought copies of the popular FPS (First-Person Shooter) game Half-Life for all the computer-users in the household. I had never played Half-Life before, but I had seen it in use on the LAN at my place-of-employment, so I knew it was ideal for network-testing.
After some test games on the LAN, we quickly realized that Half-Life was potentially a life-eater--the package deal I had purchased actually had three multiplayer games to master: Half-Life (HL), Opposing Force (OP4) and Team Fortress Classic (TFC)--more than 18 different building-sized 3D environments to explore.
If only the game was limited to those first 18 maps, I might have escaped unscathed. But the very concept of Half-Life is so different from any other game, it's hard to imagine any other game even competing with it.
The thing about Half-Life that makes it so appealing is that it's an open-source game. That's a fancy way of saying that anyone with a little computer-savvy can make alterations to the basic game with very little effort. This was a radical departure from the conventional thinking of the era that said you couldn't make money selling the game if practically anybody could get in and alter the game-code (i.e., the programming of the game itself).
The economic models that forecast doom for open-source games couldn't have been more wrong. Not only was Half-Life one of the best-selling games of its time, the original version still out-sells games that were produced even last year (there's a newer version called Half-Life 2 now, which benefits from being a superset of the old HL and the new. In other words, thay kept all the things that made the original HL so successful, and added to it, making a new supergame that has all the old features and some amazing new ones.)
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