The Terabyte Tenderloin

Raiders of the Lost ARC

The game that emerged was dominated by a community of savants. "Before name registration was closed, there were a wide variety of skill levels playing the games," Durham says. "When name registration went down, the influx of new players disappeared." Earlier in its history, the game featured public games with maps tailored to all skill levels. Cloistered away from newcomers, however, hardcore ARC players refined their skills to the point where games and maps catering to new players no longer existed. What was left were a half dozen or so proven maps requiring enormous amounts of gameplay knowledge in order to be competitive. An insurmountable skill gap emerged. The community became at once highly advanced and deeply out of touch.

Another effect of the Sierra exile was that ARC saw few updates. To this day, the game's graphics betray its origins as a student project. It's difficult to describe just how abstract the game looks. The player's ship, affectionately called a nipple, is just that - a multicolored saucer that looks oddly like a metal nipple. Levels are made of colorless grey tiles and barriers that resemble a prototype Gauntlet level or a half-completed game of Minesweeper. The overall effect is off-puttingly sterile, and watching someone play is initially confounding as you try to make sense of the subtle differences in barriers. It's not quite the level of visual obfuscation of a game like the ASCII-rendered Dwarf Fortress, but it lacks the color and style of more modern 2-D games.

Not that ARC was ever about the visuals. It's an example of a perfectly balanced game; a game whose fundamentals are so strong that even the cataclysmic change in the game's resolution only served to re-balance the gameplay. As an example of community play - testing, it is unrivaled. ARC's most popular map, Go, has been the only one used by serious players for over eight years. Using a freely available map editor, ARC players have made constant tweaks to the Go map in an effort to address its sole nagging imbalance: that the red base is too easy to defend. A quick glance over the matchmaking lobby shows various iterations of Go in constant play. Beyond the appeal of obsessing over tournament predictions, play tactics and map tweaks lies the simple fact that every match holds the promise of the unexpected - the knowledge that after all these years, tomorrow's game might be the best yet.