The Foreplay

The history of AO is also the recent history of Funcom. I need to tell you some things about Funcom, here at the very beginning. If you do not understand this, the making of AO could seem absurd. Funcom (and yes, this is the right way of spelling it) was founded in the spring of 1993 in Oslo. This was back in the "Klondyke" years of game development, or most likely in their ebb. Anyway, we quickly grew from 5 to 100 in one and a half to two years .

Developing original console games and doing "conversions" was our trade. (To "convert" a game meant basically taking a very complex game, on, for instance, an arcade platform, and reverse-engineering it ”trying to make it run on a home game console [back then, one such system was the SNES] with one-tenth the processing power and memory.) I daresay it was not a very creative process on a gameplay level. It was more a matter of engineering craft ”and there is a lot of creativity there ”at which we were pretty good. (Have a look at the published games on our home page, www.funcom.com).

We had a young crew. The mean age was 24 or so. We quickly learned that being a developer in the game industry was like being a bitch in the food chain. I don't easily use that term . I have thought many hours about this. Of a game sold on the shelves for $50, we would normally get $1 “$3. This was, of course, after a history in which we took more than half the risk ourselves , funding the development to a large extent.

Anyway, Funcom for 4 “5 years was a very interesting witch's cauldron of successes and disasters. We made some decent games ( Casper for Interplay and Pocahontas for Disney), we made some terrible games ( Dragonheart ), and we learned.

But look at what we did. We were faithfully trying to squeeze a good game out of half-digested ideas, based on creative material from totally other areas ”that is, movies. The combination of the lack of any real prospect of success due to the business model, combined with the lack of creative freedom, left everyone with a hunger for something else.

Funcom was ripe for making something on its own. The whole company wanted badly to give birth to something where we took an even bigger chance, took even bigger risks, but had greater chances of doing it big!

And we were ripe with misfortune. The publishers we contracted with went bankrupt. Publishers would buy the rights to our games simply to delay them since they had an in-house competitor (which they launched like a bombshell when our game unexpectedly stayed in the polishing phase for half a year more than expected). Unfaithful engineers would steal the most promising piece of technology Funcom had ever made and start their own company ”shortly after selling it for major money to some other greedy publisher who did not, six months earlier, want to buy it from us. That particular incident led to a 1,000,000-kroner out-of- court settlement , which, by the way, may be a Norwegian record for stolen technology. We had people from other game developer companies standing outside our entrance trying to recruit key personnel. It was absurd.

Thus, making The Longest Journey was like kindling a flame of hope in the darkness to us. First off, we became our own publishers. It was also our first major 100% in-house production! It became a great game, albeit within a fading genre . (Please head over to www.thelongestjourney.com and check out Ragnar T rnquist and Didrik Tollefsen's great game.) Being a "normal" PC game, it still had slim chances of making Funcom a successful company. I think I've heard somewhere that only 50% of all PC games started make it to market, and that 2% of the market eats 90% of the revenue. It might be hearsay, but it contains something very true: we needed another platform ”a platform of gold and honey.

The Conception

It is easy to name the father of AO . It was Marius Kjeldahl. He was at that time our vice president of new technology. I say he was a typical father in this sense, with the "mothers" in development doing the job after conception. But the seed, the kindling, cannot be taken away from him.

AO was conceived from 1995 “1997. The very first movements generated by Marius resulted in a game concept in 1995. The concept was never used, but the platform and technology were intriguing. After throwing the idea back and forth for some time, it was the base technology platform that started taking shape within our Research and Development department in winter 1996. The lead man back then was Martin Amor, who followed the game all the way to launch.

The focus the first year and a half was basically server technology. We needed a platform on which to run any and all games. So, AO did not start as an idea or story; all that was added later. The motivation for this was, of course, to have a totally different revenue model. The Internet could give us all that: a place to effectively market our games, a place to sell our games, a place to gain income from our games, and a place where people could gather around our games. It was a bypass of the whole normal revenue model, in which the creative people were standing on the lowest rung, begging for morsels.