HISTORY OF IBGAMES AND FEDERATION 2
PART FOUR
Aries - GEnie, Delphi and Cris
Another game on GEnie which was a runaway success was Air Warrior, written by a company called Kesmai. Kesmai had their own computers, called Aries, on which they ran games, and they offered to run Fed.
This had two advantages. First, it got us off GEnie's proprietary system with its memory limit. And second, it allowed players from other systems to play Fed because Aries was accessible not only from GEnie but also from Delphi and Cris.
It was porting time again - this time to an early version of Linux, running on a Pentium computer. The changeover happened, and although it wasn't totally transparent to the players any problems were offset by the huge advantages - no more planetary rotation!
Throughout Fed's time on Aries, GEnie continued to be the most important system. We picked up a handful of players from Delphi, and none at all from Cris, although existing players did switch to Cris because in some cases it was cheaper for them.
But sadly, GEnie started to decline. GEIS's unwillingness to invest any money in the system - not even the money it was bringing in - meant that the system was constantly developing problems and the programmers were finding it more and more difficult to keep the thing together. And as the Internet and the world wide web began to take on its own importance, GEnie's lack of Internet access and its clunky interface began to look more and more obsolete.
The rot set in when GEIS got rid of Bill Louden, GEnie's founder, and the visionary who had made the system what it was.
GEnie's games were so successful that together with a couple of message boards (such as the hugely popular Science Fiction area) they kept GEnie alive for several years - a fact that didn't go unnoticed by AOL, who eventually made the GEnie games companies offers they couldn't refuse.
Finally, after years of neglect, GEIS decided to get shot of GEnie and sold it to another company. Who failed to do anything at all to improve things... instead they drove users away by increasing the prices. Fed's future on Genie (the capital E was dropped) looked uncertain.
Towards the end of this period, Alan decided to stop coding Fed himself so he could concentrate on new projects. For the first time, an outside programmer was employed on Fed. Nick Osborn (Cryptosporidium, also the original Pegasus in Fed) took over.
Fed continued to run on the Aries system after we opened up on AOL but because of our limited resources we didn't add any new features, or do anything to manage the game. Finally, Kesmai decided to drop all DOS-based games from Aries and they included Fed in this category, so the game closed.
Genie finally closed at the end of 1999, just in time to avoid having to deal with the millenium bug.
