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"It was a big pay cut," Wedgwood explained. "But by then I knew I had to be in the games industry." After a month of the familiar routine of commissioning servers and dealing with the technical issues of internet gaming, Wedgwood found himself commentating on Quake matches that were to be televised on Now TV, a cable channel that was selling content into the Asian market. All the action took place during unsociable hours, weekends, evenings and so on. "So during the week I got more and more involved in mod work. Team Fortress had been the main thing for us, but we were all looking forward to Quake III. I joined up with a mod team called Quake 3 Fortess [Q3F] , based on Fortress, and I soon became project leader for this Quake 3 mod." Wedgwood began to do huge amounts of promotion and marketing for the mod, emailing news sites and promoting their work to the gaming teams across Europe. Once the mod had been released and was running, he persuaded community administrators to run tournaments for the game, and had a small army of disciples working for him in the form of teams who had signed up to test Q3F in its earliest beta stages. Even at this early time, Wedgwood had become quite serious about Q3F as a project, and began to try and structure the amateur team like a professional development house. "I read everything I could find on Gamasutra, especially the postmortems. The difference between us and a commercial company was that we were distributed across the planet and that no one got paid. Everything about the way the mod was made, from having a PR plan, through have flow charts to show how the mod would come together, to having focused art and design plans, having leads and lead responsibilities; it was all exactly like a games company." "What we would do when we were trying to get a release finished was that we had a 'devathon.' People would all fly in to my house and we would sit and eat pizza and try and get as much into the release as possible. It was a like a weekend long or week long LAN party, but we would work on the mod." The group was keen to keep its fans interested and involved too, leaving a webcam hooked up during the devathons so that interested gamers could log in and see what had been ticked off on the team's 'to do' whiteboard. "Because we were fans we knew the things that Id did that we were excited about. If Carmack updated his dot-plan everyone read it, whether they understood it or not." Soon the boundless enthusiasm of the team (then dubbed 'Mallard Software') began to be noted by Id Software. "In early 2000 I began to talk Robert Duffy at Id, I got in touch and asked if we could test the dev kit before release. We got hold of it and started using it. That gave us a head start over the other mod developers." The team had produced the mod at a furious pace. Id provided the project with some technical help and then in late 2000 the Mallard team was invited to Quakecon by Id Software. They were to show off Q3F to the international gathering of Quake fans. "We manned a table and networked like crazy. We talked to every mod developer, members of Id, every hardware vendor, and just did has much as we could to promote the mod,"said Wedgewood. It was the turning point for the team: the small team (then just five people) realised that they wanted to be full time developers, not just volunteering fans. During one of the Quakecon dinners they pitched an idea to Id's Graeme Devine (7th Guest), who told them to get back to basics and stop aiming at the sky. "He thought I was insane," said Wedgwood. "Although we had a mod, it was a straight port. We knew that we had to demonstrate a better grasp of art and technology." The team set about replacing all content derived from Quake 3 in their latest iteration of the Q3F mod. The new project would have a new UI, new maps, new logos, a new soundtrack, new audio and a complete overhaul of all incidental art materials. |
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