Terminal Reality

~ the obit ~

Terminal Reality was set up outside Dallas in October 1994 by Mark Randel, who had come from Microsoft, and Brett Combs, who had been general manager at the flight-sim house Mallard Software. It was a studio organized around its own technology from the first day. Randel built engines, the engines got licensed, and the games were partly a demonstration of what the engines could do.

For about ten years this worked on its own terms. Terminal Velocity in 1995 was a fast tunnel-and-canyon flight shooter that went out as Apogee shareware. Monster Truck Madness followed for Microsoft in 1996 and got a sequel in 1998. Nocturne in 1999 was a survival horror game about a nameless government agent called The Stranger, and Randel's claim for it was that it was the first game with volumetric lighting and fogging, which is the kind of claim only a studio that thinks of itself as an engine company makes about a horror game. BloodRayne came out of Nocturne's world in 2002, got a sequel in 2004, and became the studio's only recognizable character.

The second decade was work for other people. Ghostbusters in 2009 and Kinect Star Wars in 2012 were both licensed contracts on somebody else's schedule, and so was the last one, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct in March 2013, which reviewed at around 32 on Metacritic and was the final thing the studio shipped. Nine months later the building outside Dallas was empty and nobody had announced anything.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ terminal velocity ~

The first game is worth its own section because of how it arrived. Terminal Velocity shipped in 1995 through Apogee, which meant the first episode was free and copyable, and a shareware episode in 1995 traveled along routes that retail boxes did not. It got onto cover disks and compilation CDs and anywhere else software moved without a receipt. That is the one Terminal Reality product with a plausible claim to having reached most of the world, and it did it in the studio's first year, before the company had a second game to its name.

Three years later the studio put its name to something stranger. On 13 January 1998 it became one of the five founding development houses of Gathering of Developers, the Dallas publisher owned and run by the studios it published. That arrangement has its own grave and its own ending. What it says about Terminal Reality is that in 1998 the company still thought of itself as a peer of 3D Realms and Epic rather than as a contractor.

~ the infernal engine ~

The Infernal Engine was the asset that outlasted the games. It was cross-platform middleware covering rendering, physics, sound and metrics, sold to other developers as a foundation to build on, and it is the reason a studio of this size could keep taking cross-platform licensed contracts in the first place. Outside developers shipped on it, which meant the engine earned money in years when the games did not. It was still the engine underneath the studio's last three releases when the studio stopped existing.

~ other people's franchises ~

Ghostbusters: The Video Game in June 2009 was the high point, and it was a genuinely careful piece of work. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis wrote the script, the surviving original cast recorded their own parts, and the result played like the third film a lot of people had been waiting twenty years for. Kinect Star Wars followed in 2012 and is now remembered almost entirely for a dance mode. Then came the Walking Dead license, on a schedule tied to the television show rather than to the game, and it arrived broken enough that its Metacritic score is a punchline.

Here is the odd thing about that catalog viewed from Turkey. Every property in it was already here and had been for years. Ghostbusters had run on Turkish television as both the films and the cartoon since the eighties, and The Walking Dead was airing here while the game was being built against its deadline. Star Wars is the third and it is the clearest case, because a generation in Turkey met it on VHS long before any console could render it. The intellectual property arrived through broadcast and tape, cheaply and early. The games were the last and most expensive way to receive something the audience already had.

~ how the news arrived ~

On 11 December 2013 Game Developer ran a report that the studio had shut down. The source was a Facebook post by Jesse Sosa, who had worked there for ten years and wrote that the place seemed to have finally closed. Former colleagues in the comments did not contradict him. The trade press tried to reach the studio's old PR contacts and got nothing, and no executive ever put out a statement, so the filed date is the date somebody noticed. The website had already become a placeholder pointing at a Facebook page last updated in October. BloodRayne came back in 2021 as remasters under Ziggurat Interactive, and Terminal Velocity was reissued in 2023, both of them handled by companies that buy up catalogs from studios that are not around to object.

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