Ten years ago, in March of 2000, Microsoft Research (MSR) released “The Best Game No One Played,” Allegiance.  But, this space flight FPS, come RTS with managed economies was played.  You’re either the commander or a player.  Think StarCraft or HomeWorld where your units don’t HAVE to listen to you, and then imagine being one of those units.  Two years later, when MS decided to pull the plug on the game servers, such was the dedication of the community that Allegiance didn’t die.

Sound familiar?  We’ve seen the same thing from many games.  Tribes, Quake, etc.  You can name plenty of games that have continued for years and years.  So is Allegiance any different?  Is it just another in a string of old games that will eventually die?  No.

In 2004, Joel “Solap” Dehlin (a key developer of Allegiance during his MSR employment) secured the release of the source code for the Allegiance community.  Development began in earnest and today, Free Allegiance is on it’s fifth release of the game engine and the eighth version of the “community core” (think game rules/factions, etc).   There is a roadmap for development and the community as a whole constantly reviews and revises this development.

Again, how is this different?  Haven’t we seen this time and time again?  No, we haven’t.

The difference is community.   This community is organized.  You don’t find 50 different versions of Allegiance.  There is one.  You don’t find 300 mods that break each other.  Every “officially” released mod works with every other mod.  And perhaps that’s the right word, the Allegiance community is official.  The hierarchy within the community is so rock solid that you just can’t believe it.  There have only been two (2!) community heads in ten years (Pook and Tigereye).  There are “schools” (Allegiance Flight School, AFS, and Cadet, CDT and Allegiance Command School, ACS) that run on scheduled intervals to help new players learn the intricacies of the game.  Show me a combined, organized community with a proper business-like attitude (about a game) surrounding all official releases of Quake/Tribes/any non-commercial game and I’ll still one up you with the Allegiance community.  Players who “get it” don’t leave.  They just don’t.  This is why Allegiance is solid.  The core community is loyal, almost to a fault.  Each Sunday afternoon you’ll find massive, highly skilled squadron matches being played.  Many of the players in these squads were playing during the BETA of Allegiance, in 1999 or 2000.  They still live and play competitive matches, under the same names with many of the same players today.  If that’s not enough, every day the Allegiance forums (not to mention the game itself) are alive with the amazing discussions of unbelievable intelligence.  Lawyers, doctors, priests, professors, engineers, artists, this community is filled with intelligentsia.  I would wager that the Allegiance community has a higher IQ than the entering class at MIT this year.

The Allegiance community is one of the most amazing groups of alpha males (and alpha females!) who live, breathe, sleep, eat and play Allegiance.  So do we have anything to celebrate?  Oh yes!   For more information on the ten year month long celebration of Allegiance, check us out on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Also, be sure to visit our Wiki or our forums, the official news.fao website, Allegiance Sports (the podcast dedicated to Allegiance), oh .  . . and don’t forget, join us in game.

Allegiance has had MANY MANY MANY fan pages.

Many of us weren’t around for the AZ (most of us weren’t I’d wager).  Here are a few pages we missed:

http://allegiancehq.gameglow.com/ (and check out the screenshots there, wow!)
http://www.planetmerc.com/allegiance/ (and the forum link works . . kind of . .you can read the subjects)
http://www.planetallegiance.com/ (really?  who knew!?)
http://www.allegiancewars.com/ (the first Allegiance Wars?)

Allegiance, developed by Microsoft Research, was based on Alto Trek, one of the earliest networked computer games, originally developed by Gene Ball and Rick Rashid in the 1970’s.

There are two threads so far, Thread #1 here, Thread #2 here (free forum registration required).

Obviously this is someone “in-the-know,” but who?

Let’s examine his post (I assume it’s a “he”?):

1. He knows of Pook.
2. He understands squads (SRM’s meds, DSM is new and hasn’t won, refers to spidey by a fond nick, “many legged leader”
3. He picked an IB quote (mmmmm)
4. He refers to our marketing efforts (pointing to me)
5. He makes fun of DSM for resigning (rather well done poke too, if you ask me).
6. Has an old man avatar on the forums.

What does all this mean?  Well, he’s not new.  He trolls the forums . ..a lot.  He’s not MW (really, would MW poke fun at himself?).  There has been speculation by badp already that

=

Hmmm.  Does this quick to post speculation mean that badp is attempting to cover up his hidden identity?  Hmmmm.

Let’s dig even deeper.

The image comes from a URL on a uTexas server from a username of bump.  Is this one of our Texas players?  A quick look at a frappr map of Alleg players shows a good concentration of players in the state of Texas, but could this just be a ploy to throw us off the trail?  Let us know if you have any more info.  In the meantime, we will keep digging.

Imagine flying around in a beautiful space shooter with nebulae and 3d sound and beautifully rendered, high-poly ship and station models where all of the enemies (and friendlies) actually have brains and can do unpredictable things. Imagine being in space with 30 or even 100 of these other players and duking it out with tons of variable loadout choices. That’s Allegiance: Beautiful graphics and large-scale multiplayer space action. Simple as that.

Well, except for the squadron part. Allegiance was built for squadrons from the ground up. Pre-recorded quick comms. Strategic commands. Wings. Squadrons. Wingman commands. We did all of that stuff and more to really make it advantageous, nay, necessary to be successful as a team. So that’s Allegiance: Large-scale, beautiful space action game for squadrons. And that’s really it.

Well, except for the strategy part. You may have heard me say it before (and Rob mocks me unmercifully), but I’ll say it again for those who weren’t paying attention. Imagine playing a game of Age of Empires or Starcraft where YOU are one of the units. Ain’t that just a cool concept? So squadrons take on a new twist because you have a group of other warm bodies that you’re working with to accomplish a team objective (Conquest, Prosperity, Artifacts, CTF, Deathmatch). Several on your squadron might form the Alpha wing that harasses the other team’s miners. Others form the Delta wing, which defends your miners and buildings. Still others form the Foxtrot wing which acts as a quick strike force and can mobilize to help one of the other two wings when needed. And one guy becomes commander and spends the whole time managing investments, choosing the technology path for the team (to get you better stuff) and commanding the battles from the 3rd person, RTS view of the game. OK. So that’s Allegiance: “Beautiful, squadron-based, large-scale multiplayer Space Action game, where you’re one of the units in an RTS.” We coined an acronym for the game type and genre: BSBLSMSAGWYOOTUIARTS. We’re hoping it will catch on.

–Joel Dehlin, original Microsoft Game Developer (more historical info on the FAO Wiki) ]]> http://news.freeallegiance.org/welcome-to-allegiance/feed/ 0 http://news.freeallegiance.org/allegiance-trailer-remastered-by-aem/ http://news.freeallegiance.org/allegiance-trailer-remastered-by-aem/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:46:03 +0000 SaiSoma http://news.freeallegiance.org/?p=60 HUGE props go out to AEM for his remastering of the original Allegiance trailer!  We’ve favorited it on our YouTube account (http://www.youtube.com/freeallegiance) and posted it below. To watch it in HD, click the link above (we don’t have the width with our current format to preview in HD, but we’ll fix that soon):