To tell the true tale of Rubicon, one must first learn about a scenario by the name of Marathon Chimera.

"Marathon Chimera was started back in the summer of 1997..."
Marathon Chimera was started back in the summer of 1997 by Nick Nethery and his buddies from grade school, whose names I've long since forgotten. Way back then, Nick posted a message on the AOL Bungie Forums requesting artistic assistance for his scenario, and I volunteered to provide help to the fledgling scenario by creating terminal graphics and chapter screens for it, as well as some textures and other assorted artwork. I became good friends with the other contributing artist, Justin Flood, and soon we were off to a good start. Over the course of about a month and a half, Justin drew up about twenty textures, and I crafted a large map and some terminal/interface graphics. To compliment the map and artwork, Nick wrote a complete storyline that was centered around the war between the humans & Pfhor, but beyond that had little grounding in the Marathon universe.

After a long summer of hard work for Justin and me, I began to see Justin online less frequently. Following Justin's unexplained disappearance, Nick notified us that he and his team had lost interest in Chimera. I asked him for permission to continue work on my own, and to build my own team. He agreed willingly, and wished me the best of luck in finishing Chimera.

"...fifty qualified people out of the hundreds evaluated..."
With the maps, art, and story produced over the summer in my hand, I immediately scoured the net and my trilogy map collection CD for every artist and mapmaker on the planet who had created anything of high quality for Marathon. In the end, I found only about fifty qualified individuals out of the hundreds and hundreds I evaluated. Each of those fifty people were emailed with a personal request for a contribution to the scenario I was developing.

One of the people who was offered a position on the development team was a man named Christopher Lund. Chris's talents as a mapmaker were miles above any of the other team members, and he took the scenario as seriously as I did. Unfortunately, Chris was initially unable to devote his full attention to Chimera's development due to his involvement in another scenario being developed by Dan Rudolph. Dan's scenario team was inactive except for Chris, however, and it soon became clear that the many maps Chris had created for it would not see the light of day. I proposed to acquire Dan's materials as a subset of Chimera, and he agreed.

This acquisition was the last straw in pushing me to give Chimera's story a complete rewrite. After brainstorming with a buddy from my old Myth order, Max Lieberman, I wrote up a general outline for Chimera's new plotline.

"...and poof, suddenly Chimera was non-linear."
From then on in, it's all a blur. More maps were made by Chris and others. I scrapped whole texture sets and painstakingly remade them, scrapped them again, switched them from collection to collection, and remade them again. Weapons and team members came and went. The plotline shifted to accommodate still more content, and poof, suddenly Chimera was nonlinear.

Everything related to Chimera was developing at a tremendous clip when tragedy struck - my hard drive got wiped clean by the Sevendust virus. The damage was enormous... not only did I lose a great deal of the work I had completed but not yet uploaded for Chimera, I also lost all of my professional work. The next six months were spent playing a chaotic game of catch-up in my professional life and absentee landlord management of Chimera.

Once things were finally in order again, Chimera was struck with another, thankfully less damaging crisis; the release of a Bungie-sponsored scenario for Myth 2 named - you guessed it - "Chimera". We had no choice but to change our name, and after a brief period of being called "Deus Ex Machina", we settled on the name "Rubicon".

"...compromise required us to com-pletely remake whole sections of the game."
In all of the fury of developing Chimera, one thing remained constant- the polar opposite visions of how Chimera should look and feel that Chris and I possessed. Our heated debates have followed us all the way through the scenario's development, and delayed its final release by at least a year I'm certain. We'd frequently find ourselves at a point of absolute deadlock about any aspect of the scenario, with the only possible way out being a compromise that required both of us to completely remake whole sections of the game.

Chris has proven himself as the best partner I could hope for, as well as one of the best mapmakers I've ever seen, and he deserves credit without a doubt for half Rubicon's development. We worked opposite one another, fighting every step of the way, and in the end it gave Rubicon the perfection we both wanted.

Now, with three years of sleepless development nights under our belt, Chris and I finally have Rubicon in the beta testers hands. While I can't say the ride has been a smooth one, every step was worth it.


-D. Scott Brown
-scott@fuel5.com

Other History Texts:

Active Team Members: Original Chimera & Salinger Concept:
Christopher Lund Nick Nethery
Sean Wallitsch Dan Rudolph
Scott Brown


What's New :: About Rubicon :: History :: Screenshots :: Downloads :: Credits :: Email Us