Troika Games

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

~ the goodbye ~

in 2001 my gaming was counter-strike in an internet cafe on a shared connection, not a steampunk role-playing game installed on a home machine over a weekend. troika's whole catalog belongs to a kind of pc gaming that needed a computer you owned and a lot of hours nobody was going to interrupt. i have read about these games far more than i have played them.

the company was formed on 1 april 1998 by tim cain and leonard boyarsky, together with jason anderson. between them they had led the original fallout at interplay. they had finished the initial design for the sequel and could not agree with management about how the team should be organized afterward, so they left. troika is the russian word for a set of three, which is about as subtle as the naming got.

the first game took three years. arcanum: of steamworks and magick obscura shipped on 21 august 2001 through sierra, a role-playing game where an industrial revolution had happened inside a fantasy world and the wizards were losing to the engineers. it sold two hundred and thirty-four thousand copies and reviewed at eighty-one percent, with almost every reviewer saying the same two things: that the setting was unlike anything else on the shelf and that the combat was rough.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the funny part ~

after arcanum the studio split into two teams. one made the temple of elemental evil for atari, out on 26 september 2003, which got more praise for its handling of the dungeons and dragons 3.5 rules than for anything else about it, and shipped with a plot most people found thin. it is the lowest-rated thing troika made and it is still the one d&d rules enthusiasts point at.

the other team was doing something considerably more dangerous. vampire: the masquerade bloodlines was built on an early version of valve's source engine under contract to activision, which meant troika was finishing a game on an engine that was itself unfinished, at a company that had already run out of margin. development wrapped in october 2004 and the game went on sale on 16 november, the same day valve released half-life 2. halo 2 and metal gear solid 3 were also out that month, and bloodlines sold seventy-two thousand copies in its launch window. there is no scheduling decision available that would have been worse.

~ the inheritance ~

through 2004 troika was pitching an unnamed post-apocalyptic role-playing game and could not find a publisher. screenshots leaked to fallout fan sites and a tech demo went out only weeks before the end. tim cain confirmed years later what everyone had guessed: it was their pitch for fallout 3, and bethesda outbid them for the license. staff were laid off in two rounds through late 2004, and by january 2005 there were rumors the company had already folded. the founders confirmed the closure on 24 february 2005.

bloodlines is the reason any of this is still discussed. it shipped broken enough that players wrote their own unofficial patch for it, and those patches are still being updated more than twenty years after the studio that made the game ceased to exist. the founders went on to other studios and eventually ended up working together again. troikagames.com now redirects to a browser games portal with no connection to any of it.

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