After the successful release of
Abuse in February 1996,
Crack dot Com began instantly with a new project, called
Golgotha. The game was originally meant to be a
real-time strategy game, with elements from
first-person shooter games. This FPS/RTS hybrid should draw inspiration specifically from
Doom and
Command & Conquer.
Demo The last released
demo, version number 5c, was playable in Windows. It supported both
software rendering and
3dfx Glide-based 3D cards. The demo included two levels, one based on
Switzerland and one based on
Cairo. The Switzerland demo level was the more complete one. In addition to this, the demo also had a non-interactive demo level that showed the terrain rendering capabilities of the
graphics engine. In the demo, the gameplay worked in the following fashion. The player controlled a super-
tank, which can be driven in first-person mode. In third-person mode, the player is presented with a bird's-eye view of the battlefield, and can command squads of individual units. The object of the level is to secure the enemy base and move any unit capable of taking over enemy bases to the "takeover pad" in the base.
Re-design In September 1998, around the time the company folded, the gameplay had several issues: Basically, there was no way to control squads any more; grand-scale strategy was limited to choosing path for the produced units to follow. This didn't allow for much variation in gameplay. Also, many
AI issues had been left unattended. Though originally inspired by
Command & Conquer, the team decided to abandon the traditional RTS format because both the team and budget proved to be ill-suited to solving the problems inherent in an RTS. As they would learn later, pathsolving and routing are famous for bringing RTS teams to their knees and theirs was no exception. Rather than suffer, they decide to pull the kill chain on it and adopt a simpler gameplay mechanic. The removal of squad control in
Golgotha was intentional. Crack Dot Com tossed
C&C as the inspiration and embraced
Rescue Raiders, changing it from a 1.5D RTS/action hybrid to a 2.5D RTS/action hybrid. In the new version of
Golgotha, players controlled a supertank in a very twitchy action game. So squad control was reduced to picking a path, then queuing a rock-paper-scissors-ish sequence of baddies so that players could quickly return to control of their supertank. This change dramatically improved gameplay. Artificial intelligence for the opposing supertank was still wobbly and posed another notoriously challenging problem, but it was a far more tractable problem than the pathsolving/routing problem and a much better fit for the team. However, about the time the team had finally settled on this, they had burned through the cash generated from sales of
Abuse, in addition to a little money from
AMD for
3DNow! optimizations and a gracious gift from
Richard Garriott.
Release into public domain The unfinished game's assets were released to
public domain on October 22, 2000. This included
source code, game data, textures and music, some of which have been recycled into other games. After the release, some volunteers started working on the game code. The development effort was rekindled as
Golgotha Forever, headed by Mark O'Hara. However, the interest later died down. == References ==