Forterra Systems

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

~ the obituary ~

Forterra Systems is the company that was left over after There.com. It was founded in 1998 in San Mateo as There, Inc., built a consumer virtual world where you drove buggies around in branded clothing, and then discovered what everybody in that category discovered: a well-made 3D world full of strangers is very expensive to run and very hard to charge for. There.com was separated out and sent off on its own. What stayed behind was the engine, the team, and a new name.

The engine was rebuilt as OLIVE, which stood for On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment, and the pitch changed completely. Instead of teenagers, the customers were institutions that needed a private secure environment where people in different cities could rehearse something together. The US Army ran training scenarios in it. Medical programs used it to practice mass-casualty triage without a room full of actors.

That is a real business and Forterra found real customers in it, but it is a business with a small number of very large buyers, and one of them eventually decides it would rather own the software than license it. On 1 February 2010, SAIC announced it had purchased the simulation and collaboration product line outright, trademarks and licenses included. Roughly twelve Forterra engineers went across with the deal, continuing on OLIVE from San Mateo and Orlando.

The company did not go bankrupt and there was no closure announcement, because there was nothing left to close. Everything of value had been sold and everyone who mattered had a new employer. forterrainc.com still resolves, and it lands you on SAIC's corporate homepage.

~ the case file ~

~ the pivot ~

The move from There.com to OLIVE is one of the cleanest examples of a consumer product finding out its only paying market is defense. The technology barely changed. Avatars, shared spaces, voice, persistent objects: the Army wanted the same features that the teenagers wanted, except the Army had a budget line for it and would sign a multi-year contract.

Every serious virtual world company of that decade ended up reaching for some version of the same lifeline, with Second Life chasing enterprise deployments while Metaplace tried to turn itself into a platform. Forterra went furthest by dropping consumers altogether. It bought them a decade. It did not buy them independence.

~ what it became ~

OLIVE outlived Forterra by years inside SAIC, sold on to government buyers long after the company that wrote it had stopped existing. The brand went away and the codebase got a new owner and a new contract number.

There.com, the piece that was spun away, had its own long and complicated afterlife with closures and revivals of its own. The two halves of the 1998 company ended up in opposite worlds: one selling rehearsal environments to the Pentagon, the other trying to keep a social hangout alive on subscriptions. Neither half is what the founders set out to build.

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