Massive Development

» see massive.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Three people started Massive Development in Mannheim in October 1994, first as a GbR and later as a proper GmbH. Two of them were Alexander Jorias and Ingo Frick. The third was Oliver Weirich. Their first paid job was unglamorous and useful: porting Die Siedler, the Amiga strategy game the English-speaking world got as Serf City, to MS-DOS.

In 1996 they shipped their own game. Archimedean Dynasty, known in Germany as Schleichfahrt, was a submarine simulator set in a flooded post-apocalyptic world where humanity lives under the ocean and shoots at itself, published by Blue Byte. It did well enough to build a reputation and stayed strange enough to keep one. Both it and the game that followed have carried a cult following ever since.

JoWooD bought the studio in December 2000, at the exact moment the sequel was about to matter.

~ the dossier ~

~ the krass engine ~

Through the late nineties Massive had been building its own renderer, named the krass engine. AquaNox came out on it in 2001, into a window that stayed open for maybe eighteen months. Consumer graphics cards had just gained hardware transform and lighting, with very little software out there that used it. Here was a game whose underwater lighting looked like a demo for the thing the card manufacturers were trying to sell.

So AquaNox went into the box. New cards shipped with it, so the game landed on far more machines than ever chose it. The engine went on to carry AquaNox 2 and SpellForce, and turned up as middleware in Legend of Kay. For a studio of that size, that is a wide footprint.

~ how everyone got it ~

This was the era when the game you played was frequently the game that came with the hardware. You saved for a card, and the disc taped into its packaging decided your next two weeks. In Turkey that mattered more than it did in Germany, because the boxed PC game at full import price was a luxury item and the bundled disc was already paid for.

The forums were the other piece. On the Turkish hardware boards everyone carried a signature listing their machine, line by line, and arguing about cards was most of the content. A game written specifically to make a new card look worth the money sat at the center of that argument, an unusual job for a submarine shooter, and AquaNox did it well.

~ what jowood kept ~

JoWooD had bought a studio and the engine inside it. On 30 May 2005 it closed the studio. Fifteen people were working there.

The AquaNox name outlived everyone involved in it and came back in 2020 as a new game, made by a different studio under a different publisher, fifteen years after the people who invented the setting had been sent home.

Jorias and Frick went off and built Club Cooee, a 3D chat world with social features, which is roughly the same technical problem as a game engine aimed at a different decade. The engine they wrote in Mannheim had its name attached to one of the few German games of its era that people outside Germany can still name.

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