Red Redemption has its 8th birthday!

This is a little late...but I am proud to announce that Red Redemption has had its 8th anniversary of founding and its 6th anniversary of actual operations beginning.

So given that, I thought I'd write a short potted history of our little company in two parts:

Part One: MMO Dreams

2001: Kindred Spirits
Whilst working at Gameplay I realised that I wanted to work for myself, and when Hannah introduced me to Matt Harvey I knew I had found someone I shared my work dreams with. So around the middle of the year the ideas began to coalesce into Steel Law Online.

Steel Law Online was based on the roleplaying game called Steel Law (later Broken Shield), authored by me. Its a gritty science fiction setting that deals with issues like consequence, power and the perception of truth. That sounds grandiose, and it is, but mostly the game is about playing cops in a future London, or Agents in the wider universe.

Anyway, we decided that Steel Law would make a great MMO. I had written a long piece, which if I can find I will repost here, about the failings of MMOs, and we thought that we could address a lot of those failings. Anyway... I digress...

Suffice it to say we wanted to make fun games, for adults.

2002-2003: Awards and Bedroom Coding
Matt and I apply, successfully for a Department of Trade and Industry Smart Innovation Award. The purpose of that award? To develop an Adpative Client and Server using Steel Law Online as a test bed.

Matt and I spent a memorable Christmas period 2001-2002 creating the prototype for the game in good old fashioned bedroom coder style. Over a two week period the first iteration of Steel Law Online was created. It was certainly rough around the edges, but it worked!

We made terrific progress on the game, and the Smart Innovation Award allowed us to devote the time it took to really flesh out the complex technical elements of the game. After all we were making the entire game in Java and there were more than a few technical bumps in the road.

We grew as a team, taking on some fabuous people and things progressed.

Oh and along the way I got married :)

2004: Steel Law Online reached beta.
We were all scared t death the day we finally went beta with Steel Law Online. Within minutes we had many players in the game, and also many bugs that needed fixing, but that was okay, because basically it worked!

Over the next few months, we improved the game, taking it through countless revisions, and the team grew to add to that capacity as all of us were working flat out all the time developing and running the game.

2005: Everything went pear-shaped!
Now with a beta and everything we went out looking for investment, but several horrible things happened all at once that made sure that we were going to have to change plans:

1. My wife, Hannah, became very ill. Very ill. We were a very small team (~4) so this hit us all hard.
   
2. Two of the UKs biggest games developers, Argonaut and Elixir, both closed their doors. Neither of those closed because the games industry was in trouble, rather both closed for internal reasons, but you try explaining that to investors who have never even played a game. Totally understandably, they were spooked, and were I in their shoes, I would have been spooked too :)
   

But that was not the end for Red Redemption, oh no. In fact we were just about to embark on a path of relentless growth and success, and everything was going to change.

You could say that the whole environment was about to change...