HISTORY OF IBGAMES AND FEDERATION 2
PART FIVE
Other Games - Armored Assault and Torpedo
Our relationship with Kesmai did not just involve them running Fed for us. They actually commissioned us to write a new game for them, to add to their own existing games and their new products running on Aries.
We were commissioned to write Armored Assault, a tank combat game. For various reasons, Armored Assault was dropped (although it appeared briefly in beta-test on GEnie with a DOS interface).
We were also commissioned by the ImaginNation Network - INN - to write a submarine arcade game called Torpedo. This project had its problems, not least of which was that INN's system had no capability for downloading software. They intended to mail a disk with the front-end on it to all their subscribers. This meant the program would have had to be finished completely before we could launch it, and fixing bugs or adding new features would have been almost impossible.
The company was involved in a power struggle between those who wanted true multi-player games and those who wanted head-to-head games, and we were caught in the middle; the latter faction were able to prevent us getting the information we needed to interface the game with their network for 6 months.
Torpedo was a DOS-based game. What INN had failed to tell us was that they planned to move their whole system to Windows-based. We had almost finished the project when they cancelled it, on the grounds that we would never be able to convert it to Windows.
A month later, we had a Windows submarine game called Iron Wolves in beta-test, running on the On-line system! We actually sold the whole game to On-line after a while and they ran it themselves for a number of years.
INN was later bought by AOL. Almost as bad a fate as going bust? (Late breaking news - AOL then canned INN's main project, CyberPark, and laid off the developers.)
On-line
Meanwhile...
Clem, Alan's erstwhile partner, owned a UK boxed-game company, and that company decided to get into the online games business. They set up a network called On-line, and Fed went up on the system. Most of the old Compunet players moved onto this version, which ran right up until we moved to on the web, and were finally able to consolidate players from all different versions into one game.
French language
Meanwhile again, On-line did a few deals of its own to put Fed on other European systems. First came an attempt to run a French-language version of Fed, which was just starting to take off when funds ran out. A later attempt to put the game on France's Minitel system struggled along for a while, but there weren't enough funds to market it and there were also cultural problems. Firstly, there was no tradition of text-based adventure games such as those produced by Infocom, so players just didn't know what to do. More importantly, French political culture is such that our licence to run on Minitel specified the game had to be monitored 24 hours a day and any criticism of the French government terminated immediately.
Greece
Fed also went on to a system in Greece, this time running in English. When I first wrote this history in 1999, it was still running - and we had just received the 1995 Royalties from it! But I don't think it's going now (not much in Greece is these days...)
