“I think every child has the desire to mod things,” Bill tells me. “You’re given a Lego set that’s supposed to build the Eiffel Tower or whatever, and you end up turning it into a set of starfighters attacking a castle.” The game that Bill is most known for, a variant of the original Team Fortress known as CustomTF, is perhaps as ‘pure’ of a mod as can be. Bill thought of a novel twist on a hugely popular multiplayer game, put it together, and people came and played. In fact, an early problem with the mod was more people were wanting to play than server limitations could handle.
Many different mods based on Team Fortress sprung up in the late nineties, and Bill soon found himself in competition with a rival outfit running a game called MegaTF. “The competition between MegaTF and CustomTF mostly had to do with a personality conflict between the developers of Mega and myself,” he says. “Aside from the mutual word-slinging, my main issue with them was that the Team Fortress guys, as part of their license for other people to use their source code, was to limit your mod to just one server.”
Bill’s CustomTF had already amassed some half a million downloads, but he was forced to run it on one constantly-full official server while MegaTF ignored this rule. Bill resolved to find a solution for this problem—but he wanted to do it the right way. “I eventually got permission from Robin Walker to run multiple servers, as I felt it was impossible to ethically behave otherwise. We both owed a great debt to the guys of Team Fortress Software, and I felt that ignoring their very easy source code license was a sign of disrespect.”
CustomTF met its fair share of issues over the course of its development, but it’s clear that Bill’s firm hand and pragmatic outlook were enough to deal with any problems quickly and efficiently. Take, for instance, the suspect contributions of one of the developers working with Bill, known to the community as ‘Cyt0plasm’ and known to Bill as ‘a shady son of a b****’.
“CustomTF was always an open source project, and I took code contributions from anyone on the net, with only a limited review to make sure it wouldn’t throw balance off too much,” Bill tells me. Cyt0plasm gained Bill’s trust over the course of a year while contributing code to the project, submitting bug-fix patches and performing other similar tasks. “He started sneakily introducing bugs that would pass a cursory review, but which would allow him to exploit the game to essentially gain god mode,” Bill says of the devious Cyt0plasm. “He played it smart for a while, but eventually got caught and expelled from the community. That said, it still didn’t really sour me on the experience of working with others.”
Happily, Bill has plenty of stories to tell about better collaborators that Cyt0plasm. For one, there’s Often[CP]—an “awesome guy who lives in Catalonia” who took the reins of the project after Bill moved on to other things. Another was his roommate and nightclub DJ Daedalus[UVM]. “During CustomTF’s peak—1999 or so—we’d go out to a nightclub and sit there like geeks discussing how the mod was going, what roles were missing, and what new items should be added to it,” Bill tells me. The fact that a mod can be refined in a nightclub of all places is part of what makes user-generated content so compelling. This content isn’t being hashed out in a boardroom or in front of a focus group, it’s happening wherever someone has a great idea—and sometimes that’s while you’re out on the lash with a mixed drink in your hand.
CASE STUDY: LEARNING QUAKE
When I ask Bill whether it was Quake that got him into modding, he tells me that it wasn’t the first game that he modded, as he’d worked on a few projects including a Marathon 2 mod that rebalance weapons. Quake was, however, the first game that he was ‘serious’ about. What did he mean by ‘serious’? Well, he was working on it for college credit. “I worked with an absolutely brilliant professor of Electrical Engineering at UC San Diego named Dr. Clark Guest, and wrote a fuzzy logic AI controller as a senior in high school that I ended up selling to a military contractor,” he tells me. “When I saw how easy Quake was to mod, I approached him with the intent of writing bots using fuzzy logic. He created a 199 independent study class for it, and I worked on it as diligently that quarter as any other class I took.”
“The original goal was to pit our bot against other bots in deathmatch, but as the quarter progressed it became obvious how pointless it would be – bots can cheat, and have perfect knowledge of the state of the game. Without limitations, they could simply remotely kill anyone from anywhere in the world, and any limitations put into it would be somewhat artificial.” No bot came from Bill’s work, but he did receive an A for his efforts. He also gained the base knowledge that he would need in order to write CustomTF. “That project taught me the ins and outs of the Quake codebase,” he tells me. “So when I had ideas for various mods later on, it was actually very quick to write them, as I knew every place in the 20,000 lines of code where the changes would need to be made.”
Being so familiar with the codebase that he was to be working with ahead of time allowed Bill to make a great deal of initial progress in a short span of time when he did sit down to start on CustomTF itself. Stories of a mythic 72-hour period where Bill hammered out the first iteration of CustomTF can be found on various Quake modding sites across the internet, so I asked Bill how much truth there was in those stories. “Yes, CustomTF was coded over a weekend,” he replies. “I knew from the start exactly what needed to be changed. It took about eight hours to get a customizable blank slate together, that would play nicely with the rest of the code base, and then another eight hours to hack the Team Fortress menu system so that it would handle the purchases of new components to build your own class. And that was that.”
The next day, Bill took what he had out to a Clan Erinyes LAN party and his work was met with very positive response. “I was—jokingly, maybe—offered money for it by one of the CE guys who was working for Valve. A bit of bug fixing later, and a guy named Atrocity-CE put up the official CustomTF server the next day, and it ran uninterrupted for years after that.”
Whilst Bill’s technical abilities might have been what got him into working with Quake, it’s clear from speaking to him that he has an immense understanding of how to make a competitive game fun to play. The key to CustomTF as a mod is choice; constantly giving the user choices about what they should spend their money on and whether they should sacrifice their position on the leaderboard to sell their position for the chance at a better build. This sort of choice has to be balanced, of course, and listening to Bill talk about balance makes it very clear that he knows his craft. “The core principle of game balance is this: every choice should be tough,” he says. “No purchase should dominate all other options and therefore be an automatic buy, and no purchase should be so terrible you’d only buy it to mess around with it. You want your players to agonize over each and every choice they make.”
From the way he managed to gain college credit from Quake modding to his dealings with the MegaTF crew, you should know that Bill is a problem solver who doesn’t mind ruffling a few feathers to point that problem out. So, when he returned to play a few rounds of CustomTF having left the mod in someone else’s hands for a few years, you won’t be surprised to hear what happened when he found that the balance he had worked so hard to perfect wasn’t quite right. “I noticed some interactions that didn’t work correctly—if you buy new option A and new option B, they don’t play well with each other—as well as an overall change in balance to make defense too powerful,” Bill says about the changes to the mod. “For a capture the flag game, you need to have a reasonable balance between offense and defense, and CuTF games just kept turning into turtleing matches where nothing strategically interesting would ever happen.”
Bill set about contributing to the project once again, rebalancing things but making sure not to remove anything that had been added in his absence. Since 2009, Bill has once again stopped working on the project, which is now in the hands of OneManClan. When I asked him whether seeing his project in someone else’s hands was difficult for him, Bill told me that it didn’t bother him at all, and in fact it was just nice to see that people are still playing a mod that he created sixteen years ago. So, since CustomTF was something that he worked on over such a long span of time, did it manage to retain the same appeal throughout the time that Bill worked on it? “It was always enjoyable,” Bill tells me. “Even when I stopped working on it, it was because something else caught my interest, not because I got tired of CustomTF.”
