Press Info

A more detailed history (with an incorrect date of 2002 for the release of the Allegiance code) can be found on WikiPedia.  More info on the specifics of the game can be found at www.freeallegiance.org and the Allegiance community maintained Wiki, especially the Wiki history section.

Allegiance was developed by Microsoft Research and released in March of 2000.  In 2002, MS closed the official servers.  Such was the dedication of the community that Microsoft granted access to the server and client binaries.  This allowed the player-run community to continue playing the game under a player-run administration.  The name Free Allegiance was adopted shortly thereafter.

ASGS was developed by “Pook” (a now-retired, but still hallowed Free Allegiance administrator) that prevented cheating (successfully still in use with only minor revisions eight years later) and allowed the community administrators to ban troublesome players.

In 2004, Solap (one of the Microsoft Research developers that worked on Allegiance) was able to secure the legal release of the Allegiance source code under a “shared-source” license for the community.  In very short order, the development team formed and Free Allegiance began to move forward.

The community developers have certainly changed through the years, but these changes have been handled in an organized manner and the community as a whole is very tightly nit.  The current release is R5 (Release 5).  R6 is currently under development.

For more information, please email marketing@freeallegiance.org