FTL Games

~ the last words ~

The Atari ST never had a market in Turkey worth the word. It was a machine for countries with a computer press and a specialist dealer network behind it, mostly Germany and Britain, and by the time anybody around me owned a home computer it was a PC clone with a Turkish keyboard. So the game FTL is remembered for is one I met backwards, through the decades of games that copied it, before I ever saw the original screenshot.

FTL Games started in 1982 in San Diego as the game division of Software Heaven Inc, a company Wayne Holder had built on spell-checking software. The initials stood for Faster Than Light. Holder brought in Bruce Webster, a high school classmate, to run the game side; Webster left in 1984 and Doug Bell took over as technical director and stayed until the company stopped existing.

The first hit was SunDog: Frozen Legacy, a space trading game that shipped on the Apple II in March 1984 and got ported to the Atari ST in late 1985, where it became the best-selling game on the machine in its first year. That was a useful result for a young platform with a thin catalog. It was also a rehearsal.

Dungeon Master shipped on 15 December 1987. It sold forty thousand copies in its first year on a single platform, went on to be the best-selling product the Atari ST ever had, and won Computer Gaming World's first Special Award for Artistic Achievement. Doug Bell later estimated that more than half of all ST owners bought it, which for any platform is an absurd attach rate.

~ the record ~

~ what dungeon master did ~

The dungeon crawl before it was turn-based and abstract. You typed a command and then read what the numbers had done about it. Dungeon Master put the party in a first-person view that updated in real time, let you pick up an object with the mouse and put it somewhere, and made your character better at swinging a sword by having you swing the sword rather than by awarding points from a table. Monsters did not wait for you to finish thinking.

Every one of those decisions is now invisible because all of them won. Ultima VI took the interface ideas and Ultima Underworld took the real-time first person into a genuinely three-dimensional space in 1992. Legend of Grimrock rebuilt the FTL grid on purpose in 2012 as a period piece, twenty-five years after the thing it was quoting. Doug Bell wrote the original with Dennis Walker. Mike Newton was the third programmer and Andrew Jaros drew it, and the four of them shipped it ten days before Christmas 1987.

~ the eight year sequel ~

Chaos Strikes Back came in 1989 and was less a sequel than an expansion aimed at the people who had already finished the first one. Then FTL spent the first half of the nineties not shipping. Dungeon Master: Theron's Quest appeared on the PC Engine in 1992 as a reworking of the original. Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep reached Japan in December 1993 and the rest of the world in 1995, six years after the expansion and eight after the game it followed.

~ the inheritance ~

It landed on a market that had been given Doom in December 1993 and was busy deciding what three-dimensional meant. Reviews were tepid, sales were worse, and the studio began coming apart in 1995 around a product that had consumed most of a decade. FTL closed in 1996. A last Saturn version, Dungeon Master Nexus, came out in Japan in 1998 under other hands, two years after the company that owned the name had stopped operating.

Holder went back to software that was not games. Bell kept working in the industry. The engine ideas went everywhere and the company went nowhere, and there is no version of this story where a studio with one enormous hit and a fourteen-year run ends up owning any part of what it started.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »