Back in late November (or was it early December?) 1996, I bought a Performa 6400/200 with 80 MB of RAM. Some fellow maccies told me I'd be better off buying a 604e machine with ca 150 MHz, but I was awed at the prospect of having a 200 MHz tower under my desk, despite it only having a 603e processor. 200 MHz was pretty impressive back then. When I put in the order for this machine, I also ordered two games; DOOM II and Marathon Infinity. DOOM II because I'd played the shareware version of DOOM and thought it was really great, and Infinity because the M1 and M2 demos looked kinda neat and I was sure Infinity would be nice to have when I got tired of playing DOOM II. As things turned out, they didn't have DOOM II in stock right then, so I had to make do with Marathon Infinity.

For some reason the full version of Infinity grabbed me in a way the M1 and M2 demos never did. Halfways through "Cede Ne Malis" I was hooked. When I finally recieved the fabled DOOM II a week later I found it to be dull and boring by comparison. But it was nice to play for a few minutes when taking a break from Infinity. ;)

When I was nearing the end of Infinity, I started playing with Forge. Bungie's mapmaking contest was something I thought I had a chance at winning. The first map I made was atrocious; I had no sense of dimensions, and my corridors were either so tight you couldn't fit a pfhorstaff in them or huge the entire screen went white in visual mode (followed by the much-hated "view too long" error). I also made some custom graphics to go with that map, and they matched it's ugliness. A few days later I took a long hard look at my monstrosity and trashed it.

That's when I started working on Endymio. I still wanted in on that contest. The map was made and shipped off both to Bungie and whatever archives were around at the time (Hyperarchives West?). I was immensly proud of Endymio and sure it was going to win the contest. And then JHT went and made Meggido. Halfways through the first level of the thing I knew Endymio didn't have a chance.

But enspired by Meggido I started working on my own scenario; new story, new graphics, new monsters, etc. And everything still sucked, for the most part. That's when Dan put out a general call for mapmakers on alt.games.marathon. I bit and was signed up for "The Salinger Incident". I made six levels for "Salinger": Blasted Vent Cores, The Gators of New York, The Exit Leads In, A Long Walk off a Short Pier, Take One Horse, and Hell Pfhor You. Salinger progressed nicely for a while but then started to slow down. Later that year Scott contacted me and said he was very impressed by Endymio and wanted me to make a map for a brief scenario named "Chimera". Chimera was intended to be a short scenario with maybe 10 maps of high quality and new textures and sounds and stuff. I took some time off from Salinger and made "Molten Dihydrogen Oxide". Salinger kept loosing steam and after a while it seemed I was the only one still working on it. And since Chimera had new textures and was full of life, I volunteered to make more maps for it.
Once I got started doing maps, it didn't take long before I started making textures. Then monsters, and when the sounds guy left (Mike something), I took over the sound dept as well. In the end I ended up doing half the work (it feels that way anyway).

Eventually it became quite clear that Salinger was going nowhere. That's when I suggested merging with Chimera. Dan was initially negative but changed his mind when he too saw that it was either merge or die. And that was when Chimera became nonlinear. Soon after Salinger joined Chimera, Ferd, one of the other mapmakers of Chimera decided that his little private scenario, "The BioTech" would also be better off if it merged with Chimera. The levels "iwannavacuum", "Prize Payment Schedule", "Just a Little Further", and "People Under The Stairs" came from that scenario. Other levels were dropped because they didn't fit in.

Two other scenarios were evaluated for merger; Quartz's "Hoth" and Forrest Camarasi's "Eternal" aka "Forever More", but they were both rejected because the Chimera story would need some serious rewriting to be able to accommodate them - and rewriting was something we were all thoroughly sick of at the time.

Chimera now truely fit it's name; it was a creation of imagination, it had several heads (non-linear), and it was an amalgam of several other beasts (scenarios). So we weren't very happy when Bungie announced a Myth II addition called "Chimera". At the time it looked as if we might be finished before Bungie's Chimera so we just decided to stick with the name and if we beat Bungie to it then that wouldn't be our problem. After all, "our" Chimera was three years older than theirs. ;)

But Bungie did beat us, and pretty soon it because obvious that if we stuck to the name "Chimera" people would think the game we were touting either was that old Myth II addon that they had either played already or had no intention of playing ever. And so "Chimera" was renamed "Deus Ex Machina". I didn't really like that name though. It seemed very ad hoc and just didn't have the right ring to it. So we changed the name again to "Rubicon". That turned out to be a good move, since "Deus Ex" appeared shortly after.

Late fall 99 disaster struck; Scott's hard drives were wiped by the Sevendust virus, and he lost a huge amount of original work. Not just Chimera-related work (this was before the first time we changed the title), but also his professional work. That plus the increased demands of his Real Life more or less took him off Chimera for nearly six months. That left me as the sole active contributor for some time. During this period, I polished all the solo maps and textures, and made a bunch of network maps as well as updated those made by other contributors that had left us. Scott wasn't entirly inactive though; he wrote most of the terminal texts and made the interface during this period. When Scott's Real Life finally let up on him, I informed him that the first internal beta was a week away. That turned out to be a bit optimistic. For one thing, we had very little in the way of chapter screens and chapter sounds, and it turned out we had wildly diverging ideas for the final endscreen texts. That was not much of a surprize though, concidering that we had disagreed on virtually every little detail since we started.

This project is ending the only way it could; Scott and I still can't agree on the color of snow and are bickering every inch of the way. We can't even agree on how to promote the thing. I think Rubicon has benefited immensly from our chronic disagreements, but I'm also glad the Atlantic Ocean is between us. Otherwise, somebody might have become seriously injured. ;)

---

Christopher Lund
clund@notam.uio.no