A word from HATCH

What an awesome weekend! I’m just now getting back to normal again with my first full nights rest after approx 16 hours of sleep over the previous 82 hours. Oh, I’m HATCH btw. Welcome to my first community report. This is gonna be a little different than what you might be used to, probably a bit longer, and a little more historic, but I hope that if you’ll lend me a little bit of your time you’ll be glad that you did.

So some of you may know me and some of you might not, but to keep things simple I’ll just say that I was here at the beginning, and if you are a flyer, a tanker, a truck driver, or a sailor, you have most likely been using a vehicle that I either built from the ground up, or that I audited/updated/or refined during my previous tenure with the company. While I WAS the main marketing and PR guy in the beginning before Al and Strategy First took over, and also managed the forums and part of the beta program at one time, I am not and never was an artist. I was one that helped the artists with the data for the visual representation of a model, and worked closely with them on the internal components to be as close to “real life” as possible. Then I took the artwork that they provided me and “built” the rest of the mechanical/physics based parts of the model “within it” to make the “visual” model act like what it looks like. The physics model was/is good enough, that if you followed the historical data closely enough, the model acted as you would generally expect and only required a little tuning here and there to match the historical specs, if not, heheh… Yes, if I had felt the urge, (or more realistically had the spare time back in the day), I could’ve made a Stug fly. If you care to read some of my discussions with the community about these vehicles, just do a forum search on my name and look for posts previous to Dec 2005.

After 10 years of water under the proverbial bridge, most of the details of why I left are not really important, only that by the time I left, it was different than in the beginning, missing some of the original belief, passion and focus in some pretty important areas. And with the amount of blood, sweat, and tears I had invested and the betrayal I felt, it was painful enough to warrant me getting as far away from it all as possible in order to move on. Which is why I have been completely out of the picture for the last 10 years.

Flash forward to late last summer. Out of the blue, Schilling sends me an FB message saying “ Dude! I miss talking with you, let’s hook up”. While talking with him, he say’s “Badger misses you too, you oughta give him a call”. The next day I am talking to Badger. Badger tells me about Xoom and the new “Rat Crew”, about all the cool stuff they are doing, and that I ought to check it out. Shortly after that, I have a short email exchange with Jim “Maypole” Mesteller (Playnet CEO), that ends with an invite to lunch. Jim, like Badger, fills me in about the new team and all the new going’s on about the place and asks me if I might be interested in joining the team again. Umm. Wow. Now I know that all of the people that were there when I was “culled” are no longer there (except Jim), but damn, haven’t I already been to this dance? Do I really want to put myself through that again? Gotta be honest with ya, I was very much honored, but strongly reserved at the same time. Awesome game, awesome community, you bet. Not a second thought. But putting my heart and soul into this project again, and possibly ending up in the same position… Holy Toledo!! Last time damn near killed me.

But deep down, even if estranged for a heck of a long time, I always considered WWIIOL “my baby” and so I couldn’t help myself and had to take a look. I have since met a LOT of new people in the online marketing and dev meetings, and have spent a HECK of a lot of time on the phone with Xoom and Badger. Quite frankly, I am pretty amazed at what I have found…

This new team has been planning a dev summit in Dallas, for quite some time and because of my recent involvement, I am invited. As mentioned in previous community reports, this is the first time that many of them will have ever seen each other in person. So there is some team socialization planned, upgrades to the infrastructure at the collocation facility, and short and long term game development discussions and goals. I’d love to go into the details of all that and probably will at a later time, but that is not what this tale is about. The only details that I am going to mention at this moment, is that these folks are seriously capable and I am impressed. I started playing online games with “Air Warrior” in 1993, became part of the online game industry in 1996 as tech support manager and later producer with “Confirmed Kill/WarBirds”, and then was a founding member of WWIIOL in April of 1999. I have had an inside perspective and a lot of hands-on experience with development and other supporting roles within mmog simulations for a long time, and am still in close proximity to some pretty incredible folks in the cryptocurrency community to this day. Point being, I think I’m a fairly good judge of character, and can recognize talent when I see it. But there is a LOT more to the equation than just character and talent…

So flash back to April 1999. After a merger IPO with CD game developer Interactive Magic in 1998, what was left of the Interactive Creation “WarBirds” team (now known as Imagic Online), was finally left with a one week ultimatum to move to the headquarters of Interactive Magic in Raleigh NC, or consider ourselves unemployed. Being that just one year earlier we had been 25% part of a 28 million dollar IPO, and now we were the only financially secure satellite of this collapsing Research Triangle Park “superstar” that is otherwise hemorrhaging money like the gamma rays from a supernova, this was not a high confidence situation. Thankfully, Killer and Maypole came up with another plan.

Stick with me just a little bit longer, we’re almost there!

Killer and Maypole get together and come up with the idea to found a new company, and tell the rest of us that anyone that wants is welcome to come along. It’s been so long ago, that I can’t remember the exact number, only that there were about 15 or so of us left. Mo, Hoof, Corn, Kango, Ramp, Snail, Frying Tiger, Squirm, Caligula, and myself, along with a few others whose call signs elude me at present (sorry guys). Every single one of us turns in our two weeks notices and quickly thereafter was pretty much invited to leave the premises. Damn Joe, where did all the love go?

About a week later, Killer and Maypole set up a meeting. Even though we are about to become our own company and embark on an unknown future, we don’t yet have office space so our very first “company” meeting is held in a gazebo in the NE quadrant of Dove Park in Grapevine, Tx. (Some of you might have seen the images from the live feed last week). At this meeting, we come up with our new name, Playnet (get it Play Net lol!) and since we feel like rats recently escaped from a sinking ship, Cornered Rat Software. Now that we know what to call ourselves and who we are, what the heck are we going to do?!?!? Well, why can’t we do a combined arms sim? I mean, we all love what we’ve done in WarBirds, we love playing Counter Strike, we love playing Panzer Commander, we love playing Silent Service… Why can’t we combine them all? And WWIIOL was born. Right there in that gazebo. First and foremost was figuring out how to get folks to action. No sweat with planes zipping along at 250mph, or trucks and tanks at 30-40 mph, but what about the grunt walking along at a couple of miles an hour? And how do they capture stuff? Once we came up with the concept, the ideas started pouring out. They came out so fast, it was hard to get them all down on paper for later reference… Trucks and tanks can haul troops and tow ATG’s and AAG’s. Make the cities a bunch of CP’s that they can fight over. How about firebases to give the guys a closer point from which to regroup a defense or launch an attack, etc. etc.? Obviously it wasn’t all figured out right then and there, but that’s where it all started. A bunch of talented and wildly optimistic gamers in the middle of a park trying to figure out how to make something work that had never before been attempted on such a grand scale. Yeah, I know that we bit off one heck of a big bite that we have never been completely able to chew, and that from day one WWIIOL has never been that perfect and polished big wallet production. But you know what? Thanks to all of YOU, and all past and present “Rats”, we STILL have something that provides an incredibly immersive combined arms simulation on a size and scale that nobody else has been able to do better for over 15 years!

Pictured below is the new team at the Gazebo where it all started, with PILOTMC sharing some of his perspective.

Now fast forward to this last weekend…

So Imagine yourself in my shoes, leading another NEW group of talented and passionately enthusiastic “Rats” with names you are still working to remember properly, like Xoom, Fohdron, Gadget, Pilotmc, Waver25, Sniper62, Company0, Heavy265, KMS, and one of our QA guys, Tandel, out to that same gazebo. You bring them out after telling them earlier that morning about the first meeting in the gazebo in the paragraph above. Now, I know that Xoom has some reverence for the place (as do I) and that he was going to speak to the new team for a little while we were there. He did, and while not going into details, I felt that he honored all the past “Rats” for their accomplishments from that humble beginning, but also recognized that there have been some monumental mistakes that this new team needs to learn from and make sure to guard against in the future. I felt honored, humbled, and pretty damn emotional being in the place where it all started so many years ago… But this is where it unexpectedly went completely over the top for me… Fohdron whips out a big paper sketch pad, and says we need to solidify some things, and start talking about short term and long term plans for WWIIOL. And it starts happening all over again… I’m talking about a full on, seriously freaky déjà vu like, Twilight Zone type of experience! The juices start flowing and the ideas start flying all over the place. Just like 15 years ago! “A bunch of talented and wildly optimistic gamers in the middle of a park trying to figure out how to make something work that had never before been attempted on such a grand scale.“

I’m sold. Ya just don’t get to experience those types of cosmic reboots that often in life.

Except this time we have YOU with us, and one heck of a head start…