Innerloop Studios

» see innerloop.no as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Innerloop Studios was founded in May 1996 in central Oslo, at Øvre Slottsgate 27, a few doors from the Norwegian parliament. When a reporter from the magazine Next Generation went to see them in the winter of 1997 he found six people, described in the piece as ex-hackers and demo coders, and a piece of graphics technology nobody else had. Their first game, the flight simulator Joint Strike Fighter, shipped that December and had sold around 700,000 copies by 2000, the largest sales figure any source gives for anything they made.

Eidos took a 40 percent stake in 1997 and paid for JSF's development, about $600,000 at the time. In the autumn of 2000 the Swedish publisher Vision Park bought the studio, and within four months Vision Park's own share price had halved along with every other technology stock on the Stockholm exchange. Codemasters signed the sequel to Project IGI on 1 November 2001, taking worldwide publishing rights everywhere except Scandinavia, for a game scheduled to launch in the second quarter of 2002.

IGI-2 arrived on 21 February 2003, about three quarters late. Henning Rokling, who co-founded the studio and ran it for its entire life, described finishing it to Dagbladet the following year as, in his words, a nightmare, fifteen hours a day and seven days a week. The game sold just under 300,000 copies. It was not enough, and there was no next round of money to be had: "we had to shut down operations after the game was launched," he said, and getting the 50 million kroner a studio of that size then needed was something you could forget about in Norway. Twenty-three years later he put the collapse in one line to the site Gamer.no. In 2003 they were no longer thirty employees. They were one.

~ the case file ~

~ a continent on a floppy ~

The thing worth remembering here is the engine, and it was unlike what everyone else was building. Instead of storing a landscape as a mesh of polygons, Innerloop stored it as parameters and textures inside a mathematical function, using a technique called iterated function systems. The practical effect was terrain that stayed detailed all the way to the horizon with no popping in and no distance fog used to hide the seams, running at 30 frames a second on a Pentium 120. Next Generation's reporter noted that the whole textured world fit onto one floppy disk.

Rokling explained the consequence in a way that still sounds strange. Because every point was computed rather than stored, the engine had random access to the entire map at any zoom level, and you could fly several thousand miles in one direction, turn around, come back, and the place you started from would be exactly as you left it. The demos they showed in 1997 ran a flight sim and a snowboarding game on the same terrain code. Only the flight sim was judged marketable at the time, so the snowboarding one waited three years and became Extreme Sports on the Dreamcast.

~ no save, no multiplayer ~

Project IGI came out on 8 December 2000, published by Eidos, and sold more than 200,000 copies inside a month. It won PC Zone's award for best first-person shooter of that year. It also shipped with two omissions that attached themselves permanently to its name: no multiplayer at all, and no saving in the middle of a mission, so failing a long infiltration thirty minutes in meant starting that mission over from the top. The Norwegian review on Gamer.no called the missing save the worst thing about the entire game.

Rokling conceded the other one himself, a month after launch, to a Norwegian trade site: they had reached all the way up to Half-Life and Quake, he said, if only they had been able to let players fight each other. That absence is also why I never met this game. The PC shooters I actually played between 2002 and 2005 were played in internet cafes in Turkey, which were LAN rooms before they were anything else, and the whole economy of that room was fifteen machines shooting at each other. A single-player infiltration game with no network mode had nowhere to sit in it. IGI-2 added multiplayer and a rationed save system in February 2003, right in the middle of those years, and it still never turned up on any machine I sat at. Counter-Strike already had the building.

~ one man and a viking game ~

The company outlived the studio. In 2004, in the first round of Norwegian state funding ever granted to video games, Innerloop received 1.2 million kroner for a strategy game called Vikingjarl, aimed at teenagers, with a planned 2006 release and an ambition to get it into Norwegian schools as part of history teaching. Rokling worked on it for eight or nine months. It was never finished. Of the seven games funded in that first round, three were ever released.

The franchise did better than the people who made it, although not by much. A third game, I.G.I. Origins, was announced in 2019 and handed to Antimatter Games, whose owner Enad Global 7 shut the studio in May 2023 after deciding further investment was not worth it. The game's director asked to buy the code and the rights and was refused. Its Steam page is still there, release date "To be announced", developer listed as a studio that no longer exists. innerloop.no is a registrar's parking page now, and there is no company by that name in the Norwegian register at all. The one thing still for sale anywhere with Innerloop's name on it is IGI-2, on GOG, currently $2.49.

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