I remember our engineers busting over and demanding that we give it "Game of the Year" for that year. They just didn't understand! How can you not howl with delight after jumping from your plane, opening, closing, and then reopening your parachute so that you can get optimal descent speed, land on top of a giant, two-balloon blimp, jump inside and then walk casually up to the pilot and knife him in the back? EPIC, I tell you! Fargo: Sluggo doesn't remember where it came from, but I do: Our tech team was testing it because we were going to support it in GameSpy Arcade, and they couldn't tear themselves away. Perhaps more than any other game, this prompted whiny shouts of "we're working up here!" to filter downstairs from the working-late business types. Granted, much of the amazing moments we experienced during our weeks and weeks of, um, careful, methodical "evaluation," were as much a result of the quirky game engine as from intentional game design, but none of that seemed to matter as we hollered smack-talk and shouts of victory over the cube walls. What I hadn't counted on was a game that threw many of the rules (including those of conventional physics and conventional wisdom) out the window and replaced them with FUN. Kindrak: I've played far more than my share of vehicle-based, multiplayer, team-based warfare games, so I naively thought I had figured out all the play mechanics of what constituted "good" from this type of game. Here was a game where one of the key strategies was "park a truck on top of the flag, and we'll bomb anyone who comes near it." Thank god someone at DICE and EA realized there was an entire game to be made there, which turned into Battlefield 1942. And yet, we played the No Man's Land map every night, with tanks barreling across the landscape, jeeps ferrying players across enemy lines, and choppers making insane pickups at the enemy flag.
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And it didn't even work correctly - the multiplayer code was a mess and games would crash regularly.
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We had years of different multiplayer games and mods behind us, but we'd never seen anything with vehicles on this scale: Jeeps, tanks, choppers, motorcycles with sidecars, artillery guns - it sounded like a plan out of Bottle Rocket. Sluggo: To this day, I'm still not sure how we started playing Codename: Eagle, but once we did, we played every night for a loooong while. It's clear that DICE knew they were on to something: Battlefield 1942 dropped the single-player pretty much entirely just to focus on the awesome multiplayer they'd struck on with Codename: Eagle.Ĭodename: Eagle doesn't look like much, but the mutliplayer defied description. And even better, they just mixed together into the ultimate game experience. This was over a year BEFORE Battlefield: 1942, but all the ingredients were there. Why was it so special? Codename: Eagle had tanks and planes and turrets and motorcycles and trucks and jeeps and infantry and even blimps and helicopters all in the same game. We'd play for hours, hopping onto that server every night to play capture-the-flag. It was one of the greatest multiplayer games ever created. If you played on a LAN, with that one particular map. But here at GameSpy, we saw the diamond in the rough. And multiplayer was barely playable over the 'net, and only one map would work consistently without crashing. The graphics didn't look like much for their time. Now, by most means of measure Codename: Eagle was not a very good game. Codename: Eagle (PC) Before game developer DICE created the seminal multiplayer hit Battlefield 1942, they created Codename: Eagle.