NovaLogic

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

~ the goodbye ~

In 1992 every other studio drawing 3D landscapes was drawing polygons, and there were not many of them, and they looked like folded paper. NovaLogic shipped Comanche: Maximum Overkill with terrain made of voxels instead, a heightmap rendered column by column, and it looked like actual ground. Canyons had erosion in them. The engine came from Kyle Freeman, an electrical engineer whose previous work had been in medical imaging, and Computer Gaming World ran a feature on him the following year with the headline "The Wizard of Voxels".

The company behind it was small and had started in a much less glamorous place. John A. Garcia founded NovaLogic in Calabasas on 7 August 1985 after working at Datasoft, and its earliest catalog was PC conversions of Taito arcade games like Bubble Bobble and Arkanoid. It also spent 1992 and 1993 building a CD-i sequel to Super Mario World that Philips canceled when the platform failed.

What the voxel engine bought them was scale. Polygon hardware in the mid 1990s could not give you a large outdoor space, and NovaLogic's could, so the games became military simulations set in open terrain, from the Comanche helicopter series to the Armored Fist tank games. In 1998 they pointed the same engine at a first-person shooter and got Delta Force, where the interesting part was not the shooting but the distance you could see.

Counter-Strike is what ran on every machine in the Turkish internet cafes I used between 2002 and 2005, and Delta Force belonged to a different arrangement entirely. It was built for playing against strangers over a modem rather than against the person two seats away, on a free service, at a scale that made no sense on the connections of the time. That was a US and UK habit before it was ours.

~ the chronicle ~

~ novaworld ~

NovaLogic launched NovaWorld in 1997 as a free online matchmaking service with stat tracking, which in 1997 was not the normal shape of the business. Subscriptions were the assumption, and both TEN and Mplayer were charging for the same thing. Delta Force in 1998 shipped with NovaWorld support and put unusually large numbers of players into a single server.

The company got carried away with this. When Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising arrived in 2004 it claimed a world record for the largest first-person shooter, and Sony Online Entertainment pointed out within weeks that PlanetSide had been routinely hosting hundreds of players per server. NovaLogic revised the claim down to the largest modern combat shooter without a subscription, which was still true and much less impressive to say out loud.

~ the long flat part ~

The UK charts tell the good half of the story. Delta Force peaked at number three in February 1999 and the sequel at number two a year later, and Land Warrior went to number one in March 2001, which is a franchise climbing rather than fading. The bad half is what came after. Black Hawk Down in 2003 was the last one with a new idea in it, and then Xtreme in 2005 was the 1998 game rebuilt and Xtreme 2 in 2009 was Xtreme again. Angel Falls was announced and never finished.

There was also a $153,500 fine from the Business Software Alliance in 2003 after an audit found unlicensed Adobe and Autodesk software on the company's own machines, which is an unusually literal way for a software publisher to end up in the news.

~ the day it died ~

In 2012 NovaLogic sued Activision over the use of "Delta Force" as a squad name in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, arguing consumer confusion. The judge ruled for Activision on 27 June 2013. Three years later, on 31 October 2016, THQ Nordic announced it had bought all of NovaLogic's franchises and bought out Electronic Arts' minority stake at the same time.

The label has not been used since. THQ Nordic revived Comanche as a new game in early access in 2020, and in August 2023 Tencent announced a Delta Force revival that has nothing to do with anyone who worked on the original. The voxel engine that made the whole company possible had been obsolete since about 1999, killed by the 3D accelerator cards that made polygons cheap. Everything after that was the studio living off a name.

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