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.