The Rise and Fall of Chimera
(or How to Build a Clay Oven)

Chimera started as an idea tossed around by my friends and I when we’d go to Taco Bell after long hours playing Marathon and other early net games. We quickly grew used to the maps, and we all had a few favorites at which we were unbeatable (mine were Wrath No More? and Thick and Chunky; Edward quite liked Fugee Camp). Before long, we started downloading netmaps from what at that time was this incredible and geeky thing called the Internet. I never could make much headway in the horrible scenarios that people uploaded, but I enjoyed the netmaps. The were new and fresh, and a lot of them were surprisingly good. It wasn’t too long before I and my friends were making maps ourselves, the best of which were The Palace and Constant Whirling Sensation, which we uploaded to AOL.

It didn’t take that big a leap of logic--we were fifteen, after all--to decide to make our own scenario. I quickly found that all but two of my friends, Edward Adams and Jonathan Birkholz, were completely useless when I asked for help. I must admit, however, that a few of the maps I got from my posse might possibly have advanced to the quarter- or even semi-finals of the Worst Ever, Ever, Ever Marathon Map Contest. We decided to take on help, as it were. (Those tiny, tiny few of you out there for whom the name “Edward Adams” rings a bell: Edward also goes by the handle “The Cleaner” and was a beta tester for Ambrosia for quite some time, until they went and got big heads over the success of Escape Velocity. He is extremely proud of his work with Ambrosia, but sadly, the girls he tries to pick up by offering that information have never really jumped on the wagon, so to speak.)
I solicited help over the AOL message boards and was soon flooded with responses. I signed everybody on at Deaf Palm Trees Software, so called because Edward thought it sounded cool. I wrote the storyline all by myself. It took a lot of time from my American History class, which is where I wrote it. Really, I didn’t do much all year in that class except write the story and try desperately to get Alison Kelley to notice me. Poor old Mrs. Lawson was not pleased.

Anyway, the story takes place after Marathon Infinity. The humans and S’pht have joined forces to attack the Pfhor homeworld, and an incredible land and space battle has been raging for a few months. The ground forces are trying to take out the shields so that the planet can be bombarded directly from space, and they’re not having much luck. Maybe an eighth of the planet is under Human/S’pht control, and a Maginot Line-type situation exists. The human-crewed battleship Chimera is damaged in battle and manages to crash-land on the planet without too many of the crew being killed. The main character is sent down with a few hundred marines to try to secure the ship, but the Pfhor take it and the surviving crew. UESC intercepts very cryptic messages from the Pfhor about secret rituals and ancient prophecies, and the S’pht, upon seeing these communicades, do the S’pht version of going all pale and clammy.

When pressed, the S’pht reveal that the ancient prophecy was made by none other than the very god-king who first elevated the Pfhor to their galactic status. It is believed that when the Pfhor are at the brink of destruction, he will return to save them once again, and he will descend in a fiery chariot. To return him to his true form, he will have to be tortured to death in a week-long ritual called the B’tur. And this is the prophecy that the Pfhor believe is coming true. They are therefore performing the ritual on all the humans.

During the frantic increase of the scale of battle, the humans recover information about the Pfhor supernova weapon which allows them to recreate it. The Pfhor activate the millenia-old Rampant artificial intelligence Usyrus, their most ruthless last-ditch backup plan. He is understandably a lot like Durandal, who is still my favorite character in any game. When the UESC Grand Admiral’s son dies in the B’tur (he was one of the officers on board the Chimera), the Admiral takes a flying leap into the Insane end of the pool and orders the nova of the Pfhor sun--immediately. The nova destroys Pfhor and thousands of UESC and S’pht ground troops who weren’t evacuated fast enough. Usyrus kidnaps the main character and takes him away on a stolen ship.

That’s the story, and everybody seemed to like it, so we got to work making levels and whatnot. I received a few very excellent levels (Like Brownie in Motion, still the most skillfully-lighted level I’ve ever seen. Even modern games don’t have lighting like that. Just f*cking beautiful. And I can’t even remember who made it.) I also received some kickass artwork, a really neat new startup screen (complete with Rage’s “People of the Sun” instead of the Marathon theme) and twelve of the most horrible MIDI music tracks ever created. There was also an awesome effect when you opened the Chimera folder: in much the same way as Bungie puts big graphics in their CD windows by making lots of folders which have little parts of the picture, someone made a huge “Chimera-ized” version of the Marathon logo. It was pretty neat.

I was the cock of the walk: firing emails back and forth, encouraging developments in one direction and shooting down proposals in another. I felt large and in charge. I quickly found out how bad I was at making levels, and how good Edward was at artwork, especially with Photoshop. We dreamed up new weapons, made sketches, adjusted the storyline and even storyboarded the levels. I wrote out all the terminals, and it is this that I’m most proud of, especially the one that implies that Coleridge was visited by the S’pht while writing Kubla Khan. And though we had volumes of work and information, I began to realize how little we had really done.

We originally shot for twenty or so new levels, if memory serves, but we only had a few levels that were at all decent after almost a year of work. We had also planned to completely retool the status bar at the bottom of the screen, but nobody could agree on just how. Also, there was a dispute over what the new weapons should be--what they should look like, how powerful, etc. Some wanted more intensely puzzling levels, like in the original Marathon, and some wanted flat-out running gunfights, like in Durandal. Not a few of the team thought that the storyline was too definite; they liked the way you never really knew what in God’s name was going on in Marathon Infinity. Sometimes it seemed to me like half of my team was more interested in making the netmaps than working on the actual storyline levels. Little disputes about graphic details and level design grew into feuds, and there were a few of my team who kept insisting that I rewrite the story the way they liked it. These disagreeing designers eventually would come to me and make me be the arbiter.

I was not at all good at saying no.

It was just about then that my adolescent mind lost interest. I was in a band, I was playing tennis, and I had found a new passion: independent film. Indie film was something which I could spend a few days doing and actually have an immediately tangible result that I could show to anyone and say “look what I did.” Gradually the team began to sense that I wasn’t too into it any more, and most drifted off to do their own thing. I eventually notified my team that Chimera was, as far as Deaf Palm Trees was concerned, a dead project.

Later on my friend John and I had some beers and built our own editing bay out of old VCRs and TVs. I got some email from Scott asking if it would be okay if he used the stuff we’d produced and keep on working by himself. I agreed and wished him well. Every once in awhile I’d hear something about it, but I didn’t think much of it. Lots of projects are born and die without anyone ever seeing a damn bit of them. In my opinion, it’s better to not release anything than release an embarrassing product. The bar is pretty high, too. Now that Bungie’s sold their souls to Satan, they’ve been adulterated, but back then anything from Bungie was perfect and pure. To put out a less-than-heavenly scenario would blaspheme Bungie’s sacred name. Too many people had already done it, and done it poorly. After all, I’ve never played a decent add-on for Marathon, and I’ve only found one good Myth scenario.

Speaking of which...

Some years later, when I was a fish in the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M and Edward was at TCU, I was surprised and a little peeved to see that some bastard had gone and released a scenario called Chimera for Myth, another Bungie game. It seemed like quite a mighty big coincidence until I realized that a) I didn’t really care and b) it’s actually a pretty good scenario, especially the netmaps. My roommate and I have had endless hours of fun playing them. Too bad Bungie will soon go the way of Atomic Games. I predict that Halo will be the last game they make that’s available for Macintosh, and maybe their last game, period. Someone should pull a Boondock Saints on Bill Gates.

Anyway, I played Chimera through and it was pretty cool. My roommate, Chris Kubiak, eventually got so angry me beating him all the time that he deleted all his Myth stuff. I think it was because I was so good with the RPGs you get with the WW2 units plug-in.

So I have been without a game to play for awhile. I considered and dismissed buying the new Age of Empires for Mac. It seems pretty fun, but not fifty dollars’ worth of fun. That’s a lot of beer. I downloaded Dope Wars for Mac, but it’s not as cool as on the PC, so I lost interest in that. I briefly but very intensely got into Frozen Heart, a plug-in for Escape Velocity Override, and after I beat it I downloaded the sequel, but it wasn’t nearly as good. So I was kind of drifting. Just waiting for Halo to come out, but kind of dreading it at the same time, because it will probably be the last good Mac game ever made.

Then I got an email from Scott out of the blue, telling me they are almost ready to wrap something called Rubicon. I literally said “What the hell?!” and went to look at the site. It looks badass, and I’m proud that my name will be associated with it, even if only for the original story and concept. Now I have a new hope, and I don’t mean Episode Four. (Rimshot!) I think maybe--when Bungie sees that there are still people who care strongly enough about a game they released ages ago to spend YEARS making an add-on for it--Bungie will screw some damn courage to the sticking place, quit MegaUltraUniversalMindControlCorp, and start fighting the good fight again. Probably this won’t happen. But I have to look on the bright side. The editing bay still works. And my A&M Ranger Challenge team regularly beats the pants off Edward’s TCU jackasses.

Nick Nethery
magicelbow@aol.com