Dynamix

» see dynamix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Dynamix was a game studio in Eugene, Oregon, founded in 1984 by Jeff Tunnell and Damon Slye. Slye's Stellar 7, a wireframe tank game for the Apple II, was finished before the company existed and was later remade under its name. The early years were contract work for bigger publishers. Arcticfox went to Electronic Arts as one of the first games on the Amiga, and a run of action titles for Activision followed. From 1988 the studio was known for digitized graphics and sound, first in Pete Rose Pennant Fever and then in movie tie-ins like Die Hard.

Sierra On-Line bought Dynamix in 1990, in the middle of the development of Red Baron. That World War I flight simulator opened the "Great Warplanes" series, and by 1994 Slye was agreeing with a Computer Gaming World line that "Now when someone hears 'Dynamix' they immediately think 'flight simulator'". He left the same year, for what he called a sabbatical to study math and physics. The studio's other line was giant robots. Metaltech: Earthsiege came out in 1994 and led to Starsiege, and a side project of Starsiege became a team shooter with jetpacks called Tribes, published in December 1998.

Tribes 2 shipped on 29 March 2001. On 10 August a Slashdot thread was already asking whether Dynamix had been closed, and on Tuesday 14 August 2001 Sierra confirmed it. The studio was shut as part of a restructuring under Vivendi Universal Interactive Publishing, and 97 people were laid off. Sierra's stated reason was to consolidate product development and marketing. Management of the Tribes games moved to its offices in Bellevue, Washington.

~ the case file ~

~ warplanes and rube goldberg ~

The Sierra years produced a catalog with very little in common with itself. A World War I flight simulator shared the building with Betrayal at Krondor, a role-playing game set in the world of Raymond Feist's novels. Front Page Sports, designed by Pat Cook and Allen McPheeters, started with football and grew into a series.

Then there was The Incredible Machine, a puzzle game about building absurd contraptions to do simple jobs, which got a cartoon spinoff in Sid & Al's Incredible Toons. Versions of Red Baron and Front Page Sports Football also ran on the ImagiNation Network, Sierra's online service, years before Tribes made the studio's name in multiplayer.

~ a paper from gdc 2000 ~

Dynamix was founded in 1984, the year I was born, and it closed when I was seventeen, so its catalog belongs to people a few years older than me who bought boxed Sierra games in America. The piece of it a computer engineer is most likely to run into today is a conference paper. "The TRIBES Engine Networking Model", by Mark Frohnmayer and Tim Gift, explains how Tribes kept up to 128 players in one game over the internet of 1998. The model, it says, "supports low end modem connections", and it was designed around high latency and lost packets. Curated reading lists for game network programming still include it.

~ the engine walked out first ~

In 2000, a year before the closure, Tunnell started GarageGames in Eugene with three Dynamix colleagues, among them the two authors of that paper. Wikipedia has the four of them working in a garage on severance checks. They negotiated with Sierra for the source code of the Tribes 2 engine and reworked it. The first release was called V12, until they learned that another engine already had the name. It became the Torque Game Engine, licensed to nearly anyone for fees starting at 100 dollars, and it was later released as open source under the MIT License.

In 2007 Barry Diller's InterActive Corporation bought a majority of GarageGames for an estimated 80 to 100 million dollars. The same year Damon Slye came back to games and founded Mad Otter Games. The address dynamix.com does not answer today.

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