Between 1994 and 1996 RedWolf Design, with the German lead developer Matthes Bender, created four
Clonk games for the
MS-DOS/
PC platform. In 1999 RedWolf released their first
Windows Clonk game,
Clonk 4 (in retail release under the name
Clonk World).
Revival of the series In 2003, RedWolf Design revived the series' 2D branch by collaborating with the GWE team and
derived the next official
Clonk title called
Clonk Endeavour from the previous GWE 4.
Clonk Endeavour received positive attention when it was presented on the
Games Convention in
Leipzig, and won a newcomer contest held by
GIGA TV. The development continued, and several extensions such as a new network architecture for faster internet games and a fullscreen menu system were being developed. The development led to a new sequel,
Clonk Rage, which became the officially current version on May 5, 2008. Its predecessor,
Clonk Endeavour, was released as freeware a couple of days later. The other 3D development branch,
Clonk Extreme, progressed slowly, and in 2008 only early
alpha versions, some screenshots and one preview video of the game were available.
Clonk Extreme was announced with a release date in 2050, but this was later found to be an
April Fools' Day joke. However, in 2009 RedWolf Design's leader Matthes Bender announced he would be working on other projects, and the
Clonk Extreme development was frozen without probable continuing development. Development of
Clonk Rage continued until May 2014. In 2014 the forums of
Clonk were closed, and on
end-of-support of all available
Clonk versions, their engine source and game content have been released under
open-source licenses to the community. Specifically,
Clonk 1 to
3 Borland Turbo C++ code,
Clonk Planet v4.65 and
Clonk Endeavour v4.95.5 (engines only) VC6 code and
Clonk Rages current development prototype were released under the Clonk Source Code License (
ISC License). The content of all the games in the series was released under the
CC BY-NC Creative Commons license, making them freely shareable and downloadable freeware.
OpenClonk Community continuation OpenClonk is an
open source continuation based on
Clonk Rage by a community of
Clonk enthusiasts and former
Clonk developers. It is not officially developed by RedWolf Design.
OpenClonk is licensed under the
ISC license with the content under
CC BY-SA (or more
permissive). Development happens on a
git repository. == Reception ==