Absolute Games history
The article, which can be called “Dark History AG.ru”, is a description of the details of the origin and development of the Absolute Games project, which the creators of Zombiek and your submissive (Sly) could jointly recall. The article was written at the request of dear habrovchan interested in the project.
Adding from Zombik : well, there is little of me in the text - sing the main praises of Slaw. I just supplemented the article with technical details for which I had an unusually good memory.
I apologize for the chaotic presentation - nostalgic tears periodically choked the author, the stock of napkins was diminishing at an alarming rate. Also forgive me for incomprehensible words - Fido, BBS, resident program, MS-DOS, etc. Unfortunately, if you decipher them all, the article will turn into a novel. It’s still too early for me to write an autobiography.
So, the beginning of the 90s. How could this time be imagined now? Especially the current students and students. Internet - no! Absolutely not. Forgot to pay, not the provider is buggy, but simply - no. Computer - 286, 16 MHz, 2 Mb of memory. Floppy 5 ". But there is a modem for 2400! This is an amazing thing that can connect you to remote computers by phone. Miracle of technology.
')
There is a FIDO, a text network of the same people turned on computers, with whom you can communicate on various topics (but mostly - on computers). She was called the “network of friends,” and this was without exaggeration true. Comparing FIDO and the Internet is the same as comparing a party with distant relatives and a crowd at a train station. The Internet is a huge number of strangers, and FIDO is not a very large group, united by common interests and understanding each other at once.
There is a BBC through which the main exchange of files, information, documentation and games takes place. There is Vyacheslav nicknamed Sly - a student of MIPT and a computer fan (the words “geek” are also not yet), who at night (so as not to occupy the phone during the day) roam BBS in search of new games. Got his nickname from a character in one of my favorite games, Death Track. Also interested in programming, masters Turbo Pascal.
And so, on one of the BBS, he accidentally comes across a file with a list of games of the same collector who signed as CraZy AnDreW! (Andrei, yes) and indicated his home phone. Phoned, persuasion, meeting, acquaintance. Game exchanges. What is the difference that one lives in Dolgoprudny, and the second - in Moscow on m. Akademicheskaya? Youth, energy, mobility, enthusiasm! A common passion turned into a friendship, and against its background was born the idea to create something of its own based on the collection of games - namely, the encyclopedia. At about the same time, the nickname Zombie'K was born - just like that, with an apostrophe.
Zombik had a familiar programmer, his school friend who worked with C ++ and ASM, a man who was well-versed in programming, Alexander Albertian . It was decided that we would completely cope with the project in three.
Zombik acted as the ideological mastermind, the master of photoshop, the designer and editor of the base. Sly - likes to write texts, can describe games and can write auxiliary programs for sorting and parsing information. Alexander - makes the main engine of the project.
In general, this trio began her startup, although there was no such word either.
Having made a demo version of the product, I think for a dozen games, Zombik and Sly began to knock down the thresholds of Russian publishing houses that existed at that time. They were lucky on the threshold of the company “Akella”, by the way, existing to this day. Advertised the project, discussed the conditions - and away we go. $ 7,500 for three poor students in 1996 - the money was enchanting. Special tags for memory shake: Dolgoprudny, DMZ, airships, cloth, kayaks.
It is difficult to describe in words the titanic work that we have done on this project. 14 hours a day for several months. But only this is how good projects are born.
Sly had to watch each of the games in order to write a brief description to her. Not a review of course, so - a small annotation. But each has its own particular (especially hentai adventure and numerous side-scroller arcades were “killed”). It was also necessary to sort the accumulated files for the game - cheat codes, trainers, .CRK-files, editors save'ov, and other auxiliary for passing. I note that there were no programs for removing security and information on hacking licensed programs.
Zombik dealt with the contents of the database and screenshots. I must say that in the era of the widespread use of DirectX and OpenGL it is very difficult to imagine how difficult this process was for games written under DOS. After all, there were no common graphic libraries, each wrote something different, and situations arose similar to the problems of pirated translation of games, about which they had already written on Habré. In some rare games there was a built-in removal of screenshots, somewhere resident programs like Screen Thief and Game Wizard helped (it is indispensable for games with DOS / 4GW ).
Some games used completely non-standard screen modes, some intercepted interrupts ... In some particularly difficult cases, when the harmful game completely intercepted the keyboard and the resident did not work, the devil-device, welded by Alexander specially for this, came to the rescue. ISA-board, which generated an interrupt by pressing the burgundy button, displayed on the wire from this board. And on this interruption, the resident kept a screenshot, “hanging up” the game and DOS for a few seconds.
As a result, Andrew has achieved such professionalism in this business, that out of all 3000+ games, only one has failed to be screened! And because of her stubbornness, she was denied the right to be in the encyclopedia. Subsequently, in the era of DOSBox, the recalcitrant was tamed and, equipped with screenshots, got into the GEO database on AG.
For the processing of such serious volumes of information, the ingenious FAR program was used, which, among other things, made it possible to record keyboard macros. Andrei did not study programming, but he perfectly mastered the possibilities of recording and reproducing commands. Sometimes it was necessary to put something heavy on a key (the stapler perfectly suited the player) so that the macro would work on several thousand files in a directory in a row. In difficult cases, when the macro did not save, Sly wrote the necessary utility.
There was also no torrents and e-mule then, games were getting through the same enthusiasts, who had some serious channels for those times to the West, to the foreign Internet. I remember a fan under the nickname, it seems, CyberWarrior, to which I simply came straight home and copied the game to hdd, or took the CD with the return.
The project would not have taken place without FIDO and fidoshnikov - it is difficult to overestimate the help that they provided to us free of charge, just like fellow hobbies. There was, for example, such a case - a few weeks before handing over EI2500, Zombik and his family suddenly left for Cyprus. However, he rested there only in between times. Because all the content of the base was on it. A couple of days before leaving for “rest,” the cry was sent to FIDO in the spirit of: “Are there any of our people in Cyprus who can give a laptop for a week so that I can forget the data in the mega database from the mega-notebook?”. And sho vie think? Such a person was found (unfortunately, the name was forgotten for years)! Russian, he has been working in Cyprus for several years now and gratuitously gave out a laptop to a complete stranger with a full-fledged FoxPro. By modern standards, maybe this case does not sound so fantastic, but then ...
Another good Fidoshnik and admin, Sergey M. (I won’t be surname, all of a sudden) had a channel of 128 Kbps in his organization - it was chopped into “Allods” and Fallout, downloaded games from abroad, and promoted the bosses to a thicker channel , “But this one is already slowing down”. We also just came to him from the HDD and rewrote the fresh warez.
Neither the encyclopedia, nor the AH would not have taken place without the ability to store a huge number of games on a carrier with an acceptable price - “gold” discs were expensive, not to mention the CD-R drives themselves. Fortunately, in the mid-90s, several enthusiasts under the sign of software XI came up with, developed and launched a terrific device - Arvid . The name was decoded as Archiver on VIDEO. It was an ISA board that connected to any VCR through “tulips” and allowed us to record data on ordinary video tapes by digitizing the signal.
The board worked with any video recorders that were controlled by a wired IR transmitter.
It was a terrific device - in the era of 5 ”floppy disks and 210 Mb of hard disk space it allowed you to store 2 Gb of information on a standard 3-hour tape!
You insert a blank tape, give a command to record - the software automatically turns on the REC on the tape recorder and writes data. It was possible to add data to the end of the recording, and the search for the end of the recording was automated.
Copying the data back from the tape was just as easy. The hard files contained index files containing lists of files recorded on the tape, and Arvid could find the end of the record and read the index from there.
In general, it was a device that had the capabilities of a streamer, only the price was dramatically less - and the device itself, and consumables.
It was possible to write with compression on the fly, but the compression was weak, so it was easier to record zip or rar archives.
Fault tolerance was at a level, especially when using good video cassettes. BASF cassettes, which I bought for the sake of this on Gorbushka by boxes, and 10 years after the first record were read without problems (the Sony DX Zombikovs couldn’t endure this period, or the video player couldn’t read them due to technical problems; Fly). As a nice addition, it was possible to simply copy the tape between two VCRs, and the copy was also read!
Recording was carried out at a speed of 200 kb / s. Naturally, the three-hour cassette was recorded in three hours. There was a possibility of “accelerated recording” of 350 kb / s, with an increase in volume, and of course it was possible to buy 4-hour cassettes (with a thinner film), but for reliability I used standard cassettes.
Initially, the work was carried out with the DOS-version of the software, and for long periods of recording the only thing you could do on a computer was play the resident version of Tetris.
Then came the Windows version of the software. By the time Arvid had outlived his life, the collection occupied about 80 gigabytes and 3000+ games.
The transfer rate of information on arvid cassettes turned out to be decent — about a gigabyte per hour — two hours were required in order to get from Dolgoprudny to Akademicheskaya and back with a two-gigabyte cassette.
The encyclopedia turned out for 2500 games - before it there were only encyclopedias of no more than 1700 games, so immediately after the release the product became a hit among gamers. Of course, we really liked that our product is in demand. People liked the abundance of information, screenshots for each game, hit hits from games, a built-in quiz and even hidden possibilities used as a soundtrack, as now they would say - easter eggs. In the first version it was a small letter 'pi' in the lower right corner of the screen - who knows, he will understand. Subsequently, the same 'pi' was used on the AG itself in one of the Days of the Fool.
After that, a version for 3000 games was made, and then for 3500 (torrent) . In one of the versions, a time-bomb was even built in, in case the publisher decided to “throw” (it is not clear why we were suddenly scared then) - after a while (like a couple of weeks), the mined Encyclopedia would stop working. On the last day before sending the disc to print and after receiving the fee, the mined EXE was replaced with a normal one - so there is no time bomb in vivo.
By the way, even in the first version of EI, innovative technologies not used at that time were used - resources were packed and encrypted by Blowfish in one giant file with their file system; screenshots were compressed in the latest PNG format; the music was rammed into stereo-ADPCM, because playing MP3 on computers of that time was a lot of resources. UniVBE under DOS allowed using 16-bit mode and displaying EI in 65,000 colors - then there were few such games.
Under the sign of love for the games, Sly and Zombik participated in the launch of such a project as the magazine “Navigator of the Game World” - as authors / editors during the first few issues (Zombik was the first to guess some hellish crossword game and got into the editorial office, receiving a prize ). Sly was not the best author, but he had a huge knowledge base - there was something to compare with. At a rented apartment somewhere in the area of the railway station Testovskaya (by the way, what is the computer name), the preparation and imposition of the magazine took place.
Once in the spring of '98, in an electric train on the way to Slaya home in Dolgoprudny, Zombik opened his plan for a new project - an Internet site about games. Naturally, it was decided to do such a project, since then it was already obvious that the Internet was the future. At this point, friends walked around Bill Gates in his prediction of the Internet future ... The first name of the project was Ascendancy Entertainment (under this brand EI2500), but then the brilliant (and something silly) appeared - Absolute Games.
Sly already had his own page where he wrote game news, Zombik decided to learn the design tricks and layout for the web (yes, if anyone asks, Sly taught Zombik how to create websites!). Together, they made the first version of the site. News, reviews, preview, screenshots. Sly purchased the cherished llama's book and since then the fate of the AH has been inextricably linked with perl.
What was the internet in '98? There was no Google (well, rather, it was, but the little one)! There were no mobile devices, there were no iPhones, iPads and iPods, but in general, mobile phones were rare and demanded permission to carry a personal radio communication device - such a green paper. There was no facebook, youtube, almost nothing at all. The main search engine was AltaVista, and on the Russian Internet - Rambler. The main rating of sites was Rambler's Top 100.
At first there were several free hosting sites, from friends from FIDO, on the home.ml.org project, and so on. Then the site moved to Demos, I don’t remember with what fate. And when the site reached a more or less serious level, we began to look for hosting for the “server” - in general, it was a regular desktop with FreeBSD installed on it.
Sly learned how to set up an Apache, to work in a unix shell.
A hosting was found, which we could pay by displaying hoster banners - in fact, hosting for an advertising platform. It is an existing and to this day provider Zenon. Here, the well-known now on Habré Pyotr Didenko, who worked in Zeno and also was a fidoshnik, helped us. The desktop was solemnly installed in the server room, and connected. At about the same time, the site received a domain name ag.ru
One of the first website designs, preserved on webarchive :
Despite the small number of sites, there were already a sufficient number of serious projects with which we had to compete and which were our goal. The most popular site about the games was ZAVHOZ site, subsequently Daily Telefrag (now it would be called a blog, or, in the old school version - .plan; then we even parsed it into the mini-site of the State Farm, which withstood several “issues”) and games.ru. Game publishers, both legal and not entirely, also had well-promoted sites of similar subjects - Fargus, 7 Wolf, Akella.
One of the interesting subprojects was the Games CD database. The program was invented by analogy with the CDDB. The latter was a database of music discs and a utility for it, which, when it detected a music CD in the cd-drive, searched for the album names and tracks in the database, and showed them. The numeric unique identifier of the disc was considered from the lengths of the tracks in seconds, information was taken from the public access database, where everyone could add new CD data. (now the project has turned from free to commercial, and freedb has appeared to replace it).
We wanted to make a utility that would detect a CD with a game and immediately give out all the information for it - ratings, reviews, auxiliary materials, etc. An alpha version of the program and several auxiliary utilities were written in Delphi. Unfortunately, the project was not implemented by our forces - everything remained at the level of the alpha version ( you can download it ). However, as far as I know, such a project has not yet happened. True, the purchase of electronic versions of games is becoming more and more common, and cd and dvd are gradually dying off.
A few words about people. I don’t believe in blind luck, so it’s quite difficult to explain how it turned out that a great team of people gathered around AG. Responsible, pleasant in communication, burning with enthusiasm, sincere - in general, the dream team turned out. Perhaps the founders of the project attracted and infected them with their enthusiasm.
Cases of the appearance of people who worked for some time, after which they had to be kicked out, when a person turned out to be unreliable, failed, deceived and behaved unworthily - such cases can be counted on one hand.
The team not only worked together with pleasure, but also rested together, gathering, if I may say so, at “corporate events” called “events”. The first, for example, was held in a festive atmosphere on a bench in the square near McDonald's on Pushkinskaya, food, of course, was also from “Mac”. Since then, the team has been meeting periodically, although, having already matured and matured, it prefers to use normal restaurants of varying degrees of high prices for this.
In those days, the sites were seriously smaller than they are now, so simply by giving out interesting content, you could raise the site in the rankings - slowly but surely.
In search of news, we combed Western sites, we wrote reviews of games and preview ourselves. Once they even did something stupid - they promoted gameland.ru forums with their ads. Eh, young green!
Enthusiastic authors began to catch up on the project. For example, the now famous author Nomad got into the team after several weeks of finding the leaders of the I-GAME-Q quiz game. And Mikhail 'Redguard' Kalinchenkov came to us from GAME.EXE - first by the author, and then mutated into the editor-in-chief.
I remember how one of the episodes of spasmodic increase in popularity happened when the demo version of Half Life: Day One was released. It seems that she was a bonus disk to the video card. The bottom line is that it was not sold, and did not spread freely.
We risked putting it on download from the site. After a few days attendance has increased dramatically, all swung demo. And then, probably, the first contact with Western game developers happened for us - we received a polite letter asking us to remove the demo.
We have removed it, but attendance has not gone away.
Monetization (and no one said such a word at the time) was simple, the sale of advertising space for banners (there was no contextual advertising either). But over time, it became harder to generate income - the volume of work grew, and sales of banners - not very. Sly rented an apartment in Moscow ($ 150 / month, five minutes walk from Mendeleevskaya metro station!). Money barely enough to live.
And just at that very moment when the site was under threat of closure due to financial problems - we received a LETTER.
A certain foreign bank expressed a desire to negotiate with us on behalf of a certain company that was interested in purchasing our project. And here we understood - flooded.
That same year has come, the combination of this year with the abbreviation NASDAQ should tell you everything that is necessary. Everyone thought that the dot-coms were very cool, and it was necessary to quickly buy projects for them, because they should go up in price. Why - no one could explain.
What is interesting, almost at the same time with this proposal fell others. Either industrial espionage worked, or it was just worn in the air. We wanted to buy Rambler, some now forgotten company Cluve Corp., 'company' “7 Wolf”, some other incomprehensible people at all ... But nobody overtook Golden Telecom either by the seriousness of the intentions or by the agreed amount.
After lengthy negotiations, we came to an agreement.And having received a very decent remuneration, the size of which I will not disclose, we officially transferred our project to Golden Telecom. But they did not simply transfer it, but began to continue to support it, but already with normal financing and on the technical basis of this provider.
With the support of GT (we take off our hat personally to Andrei Kolesnikov, who always supported us) we were able to go to the world's largest gaming exhibitions like ECTS in London (and ride the newly opened London's Eye), and to the holy of holies - E3 in LA (and, of course, visit the amusement park Universal Studios).
After a while, Sly lost interest in AG and games, and left for his own projects. Zombik continues to steer the development of the resource to this day. By this time, Golden Telecom managed to acquire the Corbina Telecom company, and then both of them took over VimpelCom. The company office moved several times. Now the project still occupies a leading place among gaming journalism sites, it is developing, growing and steadily approaching world domination.
The impression of working on the project will remain with me for the rest of my life, and these impressions are bright. Despite the heaviness and in some places monotony, we worked on what we really liked and very fascinated. We thought about money only as a tool for achieving development goals. The driving force was the desire to improve and promote our project. I think that anyone who has had such a positive experience of creative work in his life can consider that at least a part of his life was not in vain.
Adding from Zombik : well, there is little of me in the text - sing the main praises of Slaw. I just supplemented the article with technical details for which I had an unusually good memory.
I apologize for the chaotic presentation - nostalgic tears periodically choked the author, the stock of napkins was diminishing at an alarming rate. Also forgive me for incomprehensible words - Fido, BBS, resident program, MS-DOS, etc. Unfortunately, if you decipher them all, the article will turn into a novel. It’s still too early for me to write an autobiography.
Dashing 90s, the beginning of the game
So, the beginning of the 90s. How could this time be imagined now? Especially the current students and students. Internet - no! Absolutely not. Forgot to pay, not the provider is buggy, but simply - no. Computer - 286, 16 MHz, 2 Mb of memory. Floppy 5 ". But there is a modem for 2400! This is an amazing thing that can connect you to remote computers by phone. Miracle of technology.
')
There is a FIDO, a text network of the same people turned on computers, with whom you can communicate on various topics (but mostly - on computers). She was called the “network of friends,” and this was without exaggeration true. Comparing FIDO and the Internet is the same as comparing a party with distant relatives and a crowd at a train station. The Internet is a huge number of strangers, and FIDO is not a very large group, united by common interests and understanding each other at once.
There is a BBC through which the main exchange of files, information, documentation and games takes place. There is Vyacheslav nicknamed Sly - a student of MIPT and a computer fan (the words “geek” are also not yet), who at night (so as not to occupy the phone during the day) roam BBS in search of new games. Got his nickname from a character in one of my favorite games, Death Track. Also interested in programming, masters Turbo Pascal.
And so, on one of the BBS, he accidentally comes across a file with a list of games of the same collector who signed as CraZy AnDreW! (Andrei, yes) and indicated his home phone. Phoned, persuasion, meeting, acquaintance. Game exchanges. What is the difference that one lives in Dolgoprudny, and the second - in Moscow on m. Akademicheskaya? Youth, energy, mobility, enthusiasm! A common passion turned into a friendship, and against its background was born the idea to create something of its own based on the collection of games - namely, the encyclopedia. At about the same time, the nickname Zombie'K was born - just like that, with an apostrophe.
Encyclopedia of the Games 2500, Akella
Zombik had a familiar programmer, his school friend who worked with C ++ and ASM, a man who was well-versed in programming, Alexander Albertian . It was decided that we would completely cope with the project in three.
Zombik acted as the ideological mastermind, the master of photoshop, the designer and editor of the base. Sly - likes to write texts, can describe games and can write auxiliary programs for sorting and parsing information. Alexander - makes the main engine of the project.
In general, this trio began her startup, although there was no such word either.
Having made a demo version of the product, I think for a dozen games, Zombik and Sly began to knock down the thresholds of Russian publishing houses that existed at that time. They were lucky on the threshold of the company “Akella”, by the way, existing to this day. Advertised the project, discussed the conditions - and away we go. $ 7,500 for three poor students in 1996 - the money was enchanting. Special tags for memory shake: Dolgoprudny, DMZ, airships, cloth, kayaks.
It is difficult to describe in words the titanic work that we have done on this project. 14 hours a day for several months. But only this is how good projects are born.
Sly had to watch each of the games in order to write a brief description to her. Not a review of course, so - a small annotation. But each has its own particular (especially hentai adventure and numerous side-scroller arcades were “killed”). It was also necessary to sort the accumulated files for the game - cheat codes, trainers, .CRK-files, editors save'ov, and other auxiliary for passing. I note that there were no programs for removing security and information on hacking licensed programs.
Zombik dealt with the contents of the database and screenshots. I must say that in the era of the widespread use of DirectX and OpenGL it is very difficult to imagine how difficult this process was for games written under DOS. After all, there were no common graphic libraries, each wrote something different, and situations arose similar to the problems of pirated translation of games, about which they had already written on Habré. In some rare games there was a built-in removal of screenshots, somewhere resident programs like Screen Thief and Game Wizard helped (it is indispensable for games with DOS / 4GW ).
Some games used completely non-standard screen modes, some intercepted interrupts ... In some particularly difficult cases, when the harmful game completely intercepted the keyboard and the resident did not work, the devil-device, welded by Alexander specially for this, came to the rescue. ISA-board, which generated an interrupt by pressing the burgundy button, displayed on the wire from this board. And on this interruption, the resident kept a screenshot, “hanging up” the game and DOS for a few seconds.
As a result, Andrew has achieved such professionalism in this business, that out of all 3000+ games, only one has failed to be screened! And because of her stubbornness, she was denied the right to be in the encyclopedia. Subsequently, in the era of DOSBox, the recalcitrant was tamed and, equipped with screenshots, got into the GEO database on AG.
For the processing of such serious volumes of information, the ingenious FAR program was used, which, among other things, made it possible to record keyboard macros. Andrei did not study programming, but he perfectly mastered the possibilities of recording and reproducing commands. Sometimes it was necessary to put something heavy on a key (the stapler perfectly suited the player) so that the macro would work on several thousand files in a directory in a row. In difficult cases, when the macro did not save, Sly wrote the necessary utility.
There was also no torrents and e-mule then, games were getting through the same enthusiasts, who had some serious channels for those times to the West, to the foreign Internet. I remember a fan under the nickname, it seems, CyberWarrior, to which I simply came straight home and copied the game to hdd, or took the CD with the return.
The project would not have taken place without FIDO and fidoshnikov - it is difficult to overestimate the help that they provided to us free of charge, just like fellow hobbies. There was, for example, such a case - a few weeks before handing over EI2500, Zombik and his family suddenly left for Cyprus. However, he rested there only in between times. Because all the content of the base was on it. A couple of days before leaving for “rest,” the cry was sent to FIDO in the spirit of: “Are there any of our people in Cyprus who can give a laptop for a week so that I can forget the data in the mega database from the mega-notebook?”. And sho vie think? Such a person was found (unfortunately, the name was forgotten for years)! Russian, he has been working in Cyprus for several years now and gratuitously gave out a laptop to a complete stranger with a full-fledged FoxPro. By modern standards, maybe this case does not sound so fantastic, but then ...
Another good Fidoshnik and admin, Sergey M. (I won’t be surname, all of a sudden) had a channel of 128 Kbps in his organization - it was chopped into “Allods” and Fallout, downloaded games from abroad, and promoted the bosses to a thicker channel , “But this one is already slowing down”. We also just came to him from the HDD and rewrote the fresh warez.
Arvid
Neither the encyclopedia, nor the AH would not have taken place without the ability to store a huge number of games on a carrier with an acceptable price - “gold” discs were expensive, not to mention the CD-R drives themselves. Fortunately, in the mid-90s, several enthusiasts under the sign of software XI came up with, developed and launched a terrific device - Arvid . The name was decoded as Archiver on VIDEO. It was an ISA board that connected to any VCR through “tulips” and allowed us to record data on ordinary video tapes by digitizing the signal.
The board worked with any video recorders that were controlled by a wired IR transmitter.
It was a terrific device - in the era of 5 ”floppy disks and 210 Mb of hard disk space it allowed you to store 2 Gb of information on a standard 3-hour tape!
You insert a blank tape, give a command to record - the software automatically turns on the REC on the tape recorder and writes data. It was possible to add data to the end of the recording, and the search for the end of the recording was automated.
Copying the data back from the tape was just as easy. The hard files contained index files containing lists of files recorded on the tape, and Arvid could find the end of the record and read the index from there.
In general, it was a device that had the capabilities of a streamer, only the price was dramatically less - and the device itself, and consumables.
It was possible to write with compression on the fly, but the compression was weak, so it was easier to record zip or rar archives.
Fault tolerance was at a level, especially when using good video cassettes. BASF cassettes, which I bought for the sake of this on Gorbushka by boxes, and 10 years after the first record were read without problems (the Sony DX Zombikovs couldn’t endure this period, or the video player couldn’t read them due to technical problems; Fly). As a nice addition, it was possible to simply copy the tape between two VCRs, and the copy was also read!
Recording was carried out at a speed of 200 kb / s. Naturally, the three-hour cassette was recorded in three hours. There was a possibility of “accelerated recording” of 350 kb / s, with an increase in volume, and of course it was possible to buy 4-hour cassettes (with a thinner film), but for reliability I used standard cassettes.
Initially, the work was carried out with the DOS-version of the software, and for long periods of recording the only thing you could do on a computer was play the resident version of Tetris.
Then came the Windows version of the software. By the time Arvid had outlived his life, the collection occupied about 80 gigabytes and 3000+ games.
The transfer rate of information on arvid cassettes turned out to be decent — about a gigabyte per hour — two hours were required in order to get from Dolgoprudny to Akademicheskaya and back with a two-gigabyte cassette.
And again the Encyclopedia ...
The encyclopedia turned out for 2500 games - before it there were only encyclopedias of no more than 1700 games, so immediately after the release the product became a hit among gamers. Of course, we really liked that our product is in demand. People liked the abundance of information, screenshots for each game, hit hits from games, a built-in quiz and even hidden possibilities used as a soundtrack, as now they would say - easter eggs. In the first version it was a small letter 'pi' in the lower right corner of the screen - who knows, he will understand. Subsequently, the same 'pi' was used on the AG itself in one of the Days of the Fool.
After that, a version for 3000 games was made, and then for 3500 (torrent) . In one of the versions, a time-bomb was even built in, in case the publisher decided to “throw” (it is not clear why we were suddenly scared then) - after a while (like a couple of weeks), the mined Encyclopedia would stop working. On the last day before sending the disc to print and after receiving the fee, the mined EXE was replaced with a normal one - so there is no time bomb in vivo.
By the way, even in the first version of EI, innovative technologies not used at that time were used - resources were packed and encrypted by Blowfish in one giant file with their file system; screenshots were compressed in the latest PNG format; the music was rammed into stereo-ADPCM, because playing MP3 on computers of that time was a lot of resources. UniVBE under DOS allowed using 16-bit mode and displaying EI in 65,000 colors - then there were few such games.
Under the sign of love for the games, Sly and Zombik participated in the launch of such a project as the magazine “Navigator of the Game World” - as authors / editors during the first few issues (Zombik was the first to guess some hellish crossword game and got into the editorial office, receiving a prize ). Sly was not the best author, but he had a huge knowledge base - there was something to compare with. At a rented apartment somewhere in the area of the railway station Testovskaya (by the way, what is the computer name), the preparation and imposition of the magazine took place.
The birth of the site
Once in the spring of '98, in an electric train on the way to Slaya home in Dolgoprudny, Zombik opened his plan for a new project - an Internet site about games. Naturally, it was decided to do such a project, since then it was already obvious that the Internet was the future. At this point, friends walked around Bill Gates in his prediction of the Internet future ... The first name of the project was Ascendancy Entertainment (under this brand EI2500), but then the brilliant (and something silly) appeared - Absolute Games.
Sly already had his own page where he wrote game news, Zombik decided to learn the design tricks and layout for the web (yes, if anyone asks, Sly taught Zombik how to create websites!). Together, they made the first version of the site. News, reviews, preview, screenshots. Sly purchased the cherished llama's book and since then the fate of the AH has been inextricably linked with perl.
What was the internet in '98? There was no Google (well, rather, it was, but the little one)! There were no mobile devices, there were no iPhones, iPads and iPods, but in general, mobile phones were rare and demanded permission to carry a personal radio communication device - such a green paper. There was no facebook, youtube, almost nothing at all. The main search engine was AltaVista, and on the Russian Internet - Rambler. The main rating of sites was Rambler's Top 100.
At first there were several free hosting sites, from friends from FIDO, on the home.ml.org project, and so on. Then the site moved to Demos, I don’t remember with what fate. And when the site reached a more or less serious level, we began to look for hosting for the “server” - in general, it was a regular desktop with FreeBSD installed on it.
Sly learned how to set up an Apache, to work in a unix shell.
A hosting was found, which we could pay by displaying hoster banners - in fact, hosting for an advertising platform. It is an existing and to this day provider Zenon. Here, the well-known now on Habré Pyotr Didenko, who worked in Zeno and also was a fidoshnik, helped us. The desktop was solemnly installed in the server room, and connected. At about the same time, the site received a domain name ag.ru
One of the first website designs, preserved on webarchive :
Despite the small number of sites, there were already a sufficient number of serious projects with which we had to compete and which were our goal. The most popular site about the games was ZAVHOZ site, subsequently Daily Telefrag (now it would be called a blog, or, in the old school version - .plan; then we even parsed it into the mini-site of the State Farm, which withstood several “issues”) and games.ru. Game publishers, both legal and not entirely, also had well-promoted sites of similar subjects - Fargus, 7 Wolf, Akella.
GCDDB
One of the interesting subprojects was the Games CD database. The program was invented by analogy with the CDDB. The latter was a database of music discs and a utility for it, which, when it detected a music CD in the cd-drive, searched for the album names and tracks in the database, and showed them. The numeric unique identifier of the disc was considered from the lengths of the tracks in seconds, information was taken from the public access database, where everyone could add new CD data. (now the project has turned from free to commercial, and freedb has appeared to replace it).
We wanted to make a utility that would detect a CD with a game and immediately give out all the information for it - ratings, reviews, auxiliary materials, etc. An alpha version of the program and several auxiliary utilities were written in Delphi. Unfortunately, the project was not implemented by our forces - everything remained at the level of the alpha version ( you can download it ). However, as far as I know, such a project has not yet happened. True, the purchase of electronic versions of games is becoming more and more common, and cd and dvd are gradually dying off.
Dream Team
A few words about people. I don’t believe in blind luck, so it’s quite difficult to explain how it turned out that a great team of people gathered around AG. Responsible, pleasant in communication, burning with enthusiasm, sincere - in general, the dream team turned out. Perhaps the founders of the project attracted and infected them with their enthusiasm.
Cases of the appearance of people who worked for some time, after which they had to be kicked out, when a person turned out to be unreliable, failed, deceived and behaved unworthily - such cases can be counted on one hand.
The team not only worked together with pleasure, but also rested together, gathering, if I may say so, at “corporate events” called “events”. The first, for example, was held in a festive atmosphere on a bench in the square near McDonald's on Pushkinskaya, food, of course, was also from “Mac”. Since then, the team has been meeting periodically, although, having already matured and matured, it prefers to use normal restaurants of varying degrees of high prices for this.
In those days, the sites were seriously smaller than they are now, so simply by giving out interesting content, you could raise the site in the rankings - slowly but surely.
In search of news, we combed Western sites, we wrote reviews of games and preview ourselves. Once they even did something stupid - they promoted gameland.ru forums with their ads. Eh, young green!
Enthusiastic authors began to catch up on the project. For example, the now famous author Nomad got into the team after several weeks of finding the leaders of the I-GAME-Q quiz game. And Mikhail 'Redguard' Kalinchenkov came to us from GAME.EXE - first by the author, and then mutated into the editor-in-chief.
I remember how one of the episodes of spasmodic increase in popularity happened when the demo version of Half Life: Day One was released. It seems that she was a bonus disk to the video card. The bottom line is that it was not sold, and did not spread freely.
We risked putting it on download from the site. After a few days attendance has increased dramatically, all swung demo. And then, probably, the first contact with Western game developers happened for us - we received a polite letter asking us to remove the demo.
We have removed it, but attendance has not gone away.
Monetization (and no one said such a word at the time) was simple, the sale of advertising space for banners (there was no contextual advertising either). But over time, it became harder to generate income - the volume of work grew, and sales of banners - not very. Sly rented an apartment in Moscow ($ 150 / month, five minutes walk from Mendeleevskaya metro station!). Money barely enough to live.
And just at that very moment when the site was under threat of closure due to financial problems - we received a LETTER.
Profit!
A certain foreign bank expressed a desire to negotiate with us on behalf of a certain company that was interested in purchasing our project. And here we understood - flooded.
That same year has come, the combination of this year with the abbreviation NASDAQ should tell you everything that is necessary. Everyone thought that the dot-coms were very cool, and it was necessary to quickly buy projects for them, because they should go up in price. Why - no one could explain.
What is interesting, almost at the same time with this proposal fell others. Either industrial espionage worked, or it was just worn in the air. We wanted to buy Rambler, some now forgotten company Cluve Corp., 'company' “7 Wolf”, some other incomprehensible people at all ... But nobody overtook Golden Telecom either by the seriousness of the intentions or by the agreed amount.
After lengthy negotiations, we came to an agreement.And having received a very decent remuneration, the size of which I will not disclose, we officially transferred our project to Golden Telecom. But they did not simply transfer it, but began to continue to support it, but already with normal financing and on the technical basis of this provider.
With the support of GT (we take off our hat personally to Andrei Kolesnikov, who always supported us) we were able to go to the world's largest gaming exhibitions like ECTS in London (and ride the newly opened London's Eye), and to the holy of holies - E3 in LA (and, of course, visit the amusement park Universal Studios).
After a while, Sly lost interest in AG and games, and left for his own projects. Zombik continues to steer the development of the resource to this day. By this time, Golden Telecom managed to acquire the Corbina Telecom company, and then both of them took over VimpelCom. The company office moved several times. Now the project still occupies a leading place among gaming journalism sites, it is developing, growing and steadily approaching world domination.
Morality
The impression of working on the project will remain with me for the rest of my life, and these impressions are bright. Despite the heaviness and in some places monotony, we worked on what we really liked and very fascinated. We thought about money only as a tool for achieving development goals. The driving force was the desire to improve and promote our project. I think that anyone who has had such a positive experience of creative work in his life can consider that at least a part of his life was not in vain.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/120594/
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