What we programmers can learn from a 20-year-old game that would rock the market if it released today
I have a lot of things to say about this game, and it has lived rent-free in my head for many years. I once played into the new year because fireworks were boring, and everyone shot guns into the air at midnight, before we went back to shooting each other. Good memories. Let me talk about them.
You can still play it just fine today
I have vivid memories of being in school when I played the game, so that puts it at 15 years old at least, and possibly closer to twenty. Let me check real quick. Okay, I am back, Wikipedia says that the latest title in the series was turned into freeware in 2014, so my fuzzy memory is actually right for once.
You can go and download the game today, as I just did. I'm not sure I will finish writing this post before the past pulls me back and I play like seven hours of it. I swear I only downloaded it to make some screenshots, not to...ugh, fine, I'll play the tutorial. For research.
Okay, I am back, and I am happy to report that I only played for an hour. I am a responsible adult, and I have a blog post to write. Talk about responsibilities.
Back on point: Most games this old are not playable today. All I had to do was start it in Windows XP compatibility mode. The graphics look totally fine, the resolution looks solid, the game plays perfectly fine without any visual or gameplay bugs - which is surprising, considering I remember this being the first game where I exploited bugs to get an edge over the competition.
The game was many popular games in one before those games even released
Anytime I think of Clonk, I can't help but think that it was Minecraft in 2D. You could dig into the ground, you could build up into the sky. It was fully extendable, to the point where literally a full website full of user-generated mods exists even today. The base game gives you a great experience in its own right, with some official extension packs that put you in medieval times, in space, in the Wild West. You have missions, you have scenarios, challenge runs, multiplayer modes. You have modern combat packs, dragons, magic, monsters. I distinctly remember playing a mode that was basically a zombie horror shooter with low visibility, modern guns and nerve-wrecking permadeath.
In just one game, you get several genres, games, and patterns like the mod support that have made many modern games rake in millions. This game also fits the indie aesthetic that makes people root for the underdog and support a crowd-funding campaign today - I am reasonably sure that this game would make it into the news today, and you'd find a lot of YouTubers to promote it endlessly towards a real hype cycle. It ticks all the boxes, just writing about this I think I can come up with a hundred video titles and challenges that a content creator could play. You could literally build up a whole channel around nothing but this game, and never run out of content.
It has all the markings of a game that would make it in today's landscape. And nobody knows of it, knows that you can play it for free.
The game was clearly limited by the times it released in
I find two things very fascinating about the time that Clonk released in:
I have honestly no idea how they managed to build so much functionality in the dark ages before YouTube, Stack Overflow, back when you could buy a book about a certain programming topic - if you were lucky. I remember making my first forays into modding and coding in this game (honestly, now that I think about it, that is probably how I ended up running a programming blog 20 years later 🤔). That is a lot of stuff to handle with a small team and small company, and funding that was one-time-only, not subscription based or pushed up by a crowdfunding campaign.
Buying this game was hard. I had to stuff a tenner and a fiver into a physical envelope and mail it with snail-mail to the company's postal address. Even worse: I had to convince my mom to give me 15 bucks to send to a stranger, and it took two weeks of "told you so, now come help me in the garden as punishment" before the letter with the hand-written license key arrived in the mail, and I had the shortest moment of "see I told you so, MOM!" before falling back in line because I didn't want my computer rights revoked for the week.
I find that last part honestly quite fascinating, because it really shows how much has happened in the past twenty years. PayPal may or may not have been in its early stages back then, eBay was a site where the family gathered to bid on clothes and comic book packages, then it took a week or two for the package to arrive, and then we would trade who got what, and trade back once we were done reading one book against the next. (Timelines might not match exactly, but both are childhood memories that I keep alive). Payments took days, not seconds, even getting to the point where I could open the website to find the address to send my money to took like ten minutes of booting the computer, logging into the funny-noises-machine, and I had to stop downloading a Clonk extension pack multiple times because my mom needed to make an urgent call and you couldn't use the phone and the internet at the same time. Speaking of which: Most of these packs are just a few megabyte in size, but it still took hours and sometimes overnight, of time that we had to pay for, because the internet wasn't just there at the time, you needed to pay by the hour.
The more I think about it, the more I can't help but wonder how a game like Clonk Rage came to be - and I totally understand why it didn't hit the international market. Imagine having to send a letter with money from the US to Germany, at a time when even Europe didn't have the Euro currency yet, and there was no way to trace shipments or retract payments. The company would have ended up with coins and bills from all sorts of places, a lot of monopoly money, and full-time service-desk-people answering to clients that they had no clue either why the letter hadn't arrived yet. They would have probably been sued out of a lot of money for scamming customers, and my mom would have read the newspaper article about it and told me "I told you so", and I would have NEVER gotten permission to buy the game that influenced so much of my childhood.
I find this worth dwelling on, because a lot has changed to the days when physical CDs with game code on them have been replaced by Steam and GoG, payments are instant, and you probably don't even remember your password because your browser has it saved, and all you ever enter are one-time authenticator codes for the two-factor authentication.
I would love to see their commit history
I have 15 years of software development under my belt, including a lot of gamedev work that probably goes deeper than most hobbyists have - and I honestly wouldn't know where to start on many of the features and functionalities built into Clonk. Somehow, this relatively small team (admittedly over twenty years) figured out:
Multiplayer mechanics. I distinctly remember this was the first time I had to do port forwarding, and my mom was CERTAIN that we now had a virus. (Thanks for letting me do so much stupid stuff, mom)
In game chat
IRC chatroom built right into the game
Lobby mechanics
Mod support
Pixel-perfect digging mechanics
Different terrain types
Mining / explosions / guns
Climbing mechanics when you hit a straight wall, and overhead hanging when you jumped at a ceiling
Cutscenes
Steering multiple Clonks at the same time, or individually
Hand-to-hand combat
Probably the most impressive AI pathfinding I have seen in any 2D game. When you build a building, you can assign your clonks to automatically gather materials, and they jump and climb perfectly to get to some properly unreachable positions on their own. They even use lifts to get there, and automatically connect power lines to the nearest power source. I swear I could not write that behavior tree even in modern game engines.
Multi-language support
About 20 different official game modes before modders even come in
The Wild West pack's campaign mode is still stuck in my brain as being tough, challenging, and a fun story spanning multiple levels.
There is probably a lot that I am forgetting here - all I know is that I would really like a look into the brains and memories, and the commit history if they even had proper version control. This is some top-notch development even today, and I would love to see how they pulled it all off, because I think we could all learn a ton about development cycles, patterns and methods from them.
The game was so inaccessible that it would fail today
Much like the original Gothic (why are the two so similar?), the control scheme of Clonk Rage was... let's just say the "Rage" in "Clonk Rage" was probably the dev team's inside joke.
You control the game with one of four sets of keys, with the goal being that four players could play it on one monitor / keyboard.
Wait, did I somehow forget that this game was 4 player local co-op? I have good memories playing it with a good friend where each of us controlled two teams that were not allied so our two teams could be stuck in infighting and hand-to-hand combat if our brains messed up and we couldn't handle keeping the two separated. SOLIDLY good times, I completely forgot about that. I wonder where he is today, we haven't talked since the days we played Clonk together.
Back on topic: I doubt that 90% of people today could play this game, even with the most accessible control scheme that is clearly the number keys on the right side of the keyboard. At least, that gives you all the keys in one block instead of the added complexity of horizontally-misalligned keys.
In the hour that I played, it felt immediately like coming home, or greeting an old friend, because my brain is WIRED to this control scheme being normal. Two minutes into the game, I was pulling off perfect jumps and stopping right at the edge of a bridge I was building, there was a lot of this "either you stop at precisely the right pixel, or you die. Sorry, not sorry, restart the round that you just spent two hours in, or go help mom in the garden until the pain subsides."
Nowadays, even hard games that rely on replaying levels don't usually roadblock you with an inaccessible control scheme - and I'm not saying that is bad or anything, just that it made me giggle when I imagined some people I know trying to make it through the first level.
I am honestly convinced that the game that I just said would inevitably succeed for the gameplay and features would inevitably fail due to the control scheme.
Also, it doesn't really hold your hand, most levels give you a short introduction of what you're supposed to do, and then you are left to your own devices. Again...Gothic, anyone? I think that game is worth writing about as well at some point, simply because of the way you could stumble through it with zero plan if you missed just one or two crucial points where they cleverly had NPCs waiting for you to tell you about the game world. If you walked past them, you would get eaten. I am very excited for the remake of Gothic to release, I hope that they give us a classic mode where we can still suffer before the escort mission even starts.
Code is worth nothing without a way to get it to market
I have written before about how programming to me is less about money now, - and the reason I mention that here is because of a point I made in it: I wouldn't be able to work on the problems that I enjoy so much at work if my company didn't give me access to them. As a single developer, I would never in a million years develop the network, knowledge, and insights that would get the code that I wrote this year in front of the people who want to pay for it.
The whole codebase of 20 years worth of development that these guys have is right there, you can even download it and investigate it, it is all open source. But they might as well not exist at all to the world at large, despite the fact that the market for such a game is definitely there, and a clever company of today could go through crowdfunding campaigns, updates and extension packs to make a solid living for the developers involved. A hundred content creators could make a living from the source code that is just there lying around, but when I go on YouTube right now, the youngest video when you search for "Clonk Rage" as an exactly matched keyword is 9 years old and has 779 views.
This, together with my job that can get pretty deep into its niche made me realize how important promotion and networking are in order to create that product-market-fit that everyone likes to talk about. Here we have a good example of a product that has a market that it fits, but you probably never heard about it until today.
Also, I want to make another point that I find quite interesting:
Online game stores don't have affiliate programs for some reason
One thing that I keep thinking about is how weird it is for neither Steam nor GoG having affiliate links for content creators. I get it, Steam is the big bad (good?) wolf and doesn't need affiliate links to make people buy from them - but neither does Amazon, and everyone and their mom runs an affiliate blog for 10 best household appliances in 3 price categories.
The fact that nobody has come around and given content creators an easy way to earn from the games they recommend is honestly quite baffling to me.
Most software out there has programs to help others do the promotion work for them, from SaaS platforms to individual tools - but games? Strangely not. Also, nobody sells their game through their own websites anymore, which I also find strange. Steam takes a 30% (?) cut that is quite significant, and working through your own site, one could easily offer 10% commission and still make out like a bandit every time someone buys their game.
Gumroad and other popular software selling sites also have affiliate programs (that are often not well-advertised in my opinion), and I still believe that those are the least scammy way to make money online. You see a product you like, you recommend it, people buy it because it fits their needs - that is a service worth money.