The Terabyte Tenderloin

Raiders of the Lost ARC

Because ARC has been so thoroughly balanced and refined by community experimentation alone, it has a distinctive play history with its own legends and innovators. The dominant player in the game, Mage, has been at the top of the heap without any significant challenge for years. "You have a lot of players who will get good and go on a streak for a short period of time and then fall off," Kozma says. "Mage is kind of like Michael Jordan in that sense. The difference is there were guys who could play with Michael Jordan; no one can play with Mage." The ARC superstar has taken his past two clans to a combined total of four consecutive titles.

Astrok is ARC's other key figure. One of the game's earliest participants (and preceding Mage by a few years), Astrok was, according to Durham, one of the major innovators in developing some of the strategies seen in the game today. "Astrok wasn't considered the best because he out-skilled everyone (although he was a talented player in those regards)," Durham says. "His notoriety came from his dominance as a strategic mind and excellent teammate. Nobody made a bigger impact on important games than Astrok. To top it all off, he was a very humble, smart and funny guy which added to his legend."

In 2007 the inevitable finally occurred when Sierra shut down its ARC servers, leaving the nomadic community to once again move on to new pastures. This time, they did so without the ARC name. Due to complications with Sierra, and despite offers by the community to purchase the rights to the game, they were ultimately forced to recode it from scratch and call it SPARK under the CodeMallet brand. The community, once numbering in the thousands, has diminished to a few hundred - an old guard interested only in the advancement of their own skills.

The tragedy that ARC illustrates is that games, with few exceptions, are mired in the present. As consumable pieces of entertainment, they function fine in that regard. But as games grow in complexity and communities spring up around specific titles, they develop their own cultures that can end abruptly the moment the server is shut down. ARC, as neither the catalyst for a genre nor a touchstone in gaming history, is doomed to this fate. Gamers can only watch with fascination and, one hopes, a twinge of regret, as the ARC community soldiers on toward the final server shutdown.

Tom Endo doesn't play ARC but, on the advice of Jamie Kozma, he has discovered the pleasures of spectating matches while eating greasy Chinese food.