Art Min Talks Up TeamTalk

Programmer Art Min got his start in the computer gaming biz at Looking Glass Technologies. He started there as a summer intern while an MIT student and went on to work on that company's System Shock as well as Terra Nova.

But it's at Multitude where Min might just make his biggest mark.

Min started Multitude in April of 1996 with Ned Lerner, who he had met at Looking Glass. Their goal: Taking multiplayer online games to the next level. Their attempt to do just that: FireTeam, currently in beta test, but set for general release in December.

"We looked around at the Internet games out there at the time," Min says, "most of which were LAN games that had been 'net-enabled, or what Mpath was doing. We thought there were so many cool things you could do with community and team play that weren't being tapped into."

Communicating by voice was one of the keys to their idea.

"Our voice technology (which Multitude has labeled TeamTalk) enables us to do team play as well as we can," Min says. "There are things people miss in emotional situations ... when you hear people laugh or shout out at you - that's what voice brings to the game ... Of course, once you have voice technology, you have to give people a reason to talk."

"We had to come up with TeamTalk (which lets up to four players (the maximum number for a FireTeam squad) conference with each other over the 'net) before we came up with the game because everyone said what we wanted to do couldn't be done. We got it to work in 1-1/2 months - we got voice to work over a 28.8 modem. It doesn't add lag because we break the voice up into packets ... By the end of 1996, we had a demo of TeamTalk ready, and that's when we began our first round of venture capital fund-raising."

After TeamTalk came FireTeam, a game Min likens to X-Com (because of its squad-level tactical combat), Crusader (because of its fast-paced real-time element) and sports games (because of its team play element).

From the beginning, Min and Lerner knew that their's was going to be a team-oriented game.

"Every design decision (made by Multitude's 20-plus person staff) has been made to enforce team play," Min says.

"One of those decisions was our line-of-sight feature. You can only see what's in front of your character. That means that you have to depend on your teammates to watch your flank."

Another feature of the game that Min contends fosters team play is that, the longer one character holds his or her cursor over his or her target, the higher that character's accuracy. "That feature makes the game more strategic," Min says, "because instead of your success rate being based on how many clicks you can make on a certain pixel the focus is more on picking your shots - and having your teammates protect you while you pick your shots.

"In Quake, one really good player can kill any six average players. But in FireTeam, one really good player CANNOT win the game - you have to play as a team to win.

"This is a game that's pretty easy to master," Min says. "The basic commands are pretty simple - arrow keys move a character, and you click to shoot. (Of course, by talking over the Internet, you're saved the problem of typing in taunts or commands; you've just got to say them.) "The subtle skills you can learn, though, are basically unlimited."

One aspect of FireTeam is definitely limited - the game sports a time limit. Each match is but 10-minutes long.

"I don't expect people to have a two-hour span of time that they can devote to playing a session of an online game on a regular basis," Min says. "But a 10-minute game is something you CAN play over your lunch break. We also think that that adds a sense of finality and intensity to the game." There's not much set up to FireTeam; you're dropped into a scenario and then you're offrunning and gunning.

"That doesn't mean that we won't create linked scenarios that can be played one after the other, and where your success in earlier scenarios helps determine your position in later scenarios," Min says.

FireTeam scenarios include Capture the Flag (where teams try to take possession of as many flagged areas in the arena as they can during the game's 10-minute span), Team Deathmatch, Gun Ball (which Mins describes as "combat football") and Base Tag (where each team has a base to defend at the same time they're trying to capture their enemy's base). (Future scenarios might be based on real-world events ("hostage rescue, things like that," Min says) but those scenarios are in the future. Right now, Multitude's focus is finishing FireTeam.)

It's not just team play that Min and Multitude are interested in fostering, it's community as well. As in the oft-touted term "Internet community." The main way Multitude is going about this is through its Community Web pages, which the company rolled out on Nov. 4.

Those pages track user statistics, so that FireTeam players can always see where they (and current and prospective team members) rank.

"The most important thing about our community effort is our notion of companies, which are like Quake clans. Companies will be able to have their own Web pages, and their company logo will appear next to their characters in our lobby areas. We'll have a sort of classified ad area where people looking to join companies or companies looking to recruit players can post notices. Companies will be able to look at the statistics of players who want to join their group and decide whether or not to accept them. We try to take all the work out of running a company." Multitude's system is set up to take many of the administrative and tracking duties of a clan (or in this case company) organizers off those organizers' hands.

"Games like Quake Team Fortress and cooperative Capture the Flag have validated us - our idea of team play IS something that players want," Min says. "Ours is not a 3D shooter like Quake though, it's a real-time strategy game. There are a lot of people who don't understand what FireTeam is. So our job is to build awareness."

Part of the raison d'etre behind the FireTeam beta test is to help build that awareness. Gamers who sign up for the beta test (it's scheduled to come to an end soon) are charged $19.95, for which they receive a Multitude-branded Andrea Electronics NC-65 GameWare headset and a beta copy of the game. When the final version of the game launches, testers can upgrade to the full version for an additional $19.95 - less all told than the $59.95 Multitude plans to charge for the full version they'll be selling direct to consumers. The company has not yet signed a deal for retail distribution of the game.

Multitude offers free unlimited play through the beta test period (Min says that the company currently has about 3000 beta testers), and plans to continue that policy with the December launch of the game's full version.