The history of Tribes, the fastest shooter in the west

Scott Youngblood was working in his office at Dynamix when he was interrupted by software engineer David Moore. The year was 1997. The place was Eugene, Oregon.
Moore was refining the player physics for Dynamix' new first-person shooter project, which had been known as the "Doom Killer" up until Quake released. "He walked into my office and said 'Hey, I was working on the physics stuff and I found a bug. But I'm not sure what to do with it, so I want to show it to you,'" says Youngblood.

Intrigued, Youngblood followed Moore to his office, sitting down in Moore's chair while the programmer showed him how to replicate the glitch. In the game, a sci-fi shooter which featured jetpacks, Moore directed Youngblood to fly over the summit of the hill, and as he hit the downslope, repeatedly tap the spacebar.

"I jetted all the way up, and I started tapping the spacebar, and my player slid down on the side of the slope, and was able to build momentum using that mechanic faster than I could have normally done," says Youngblood.

At the time, Youngblood was an avid skier—even persuading Dynamix to let him make a skiing game that eventually became Front Page Sports: Ski Racing. When he saw his character sliding down that slope, he knew it changed everything. "By the time I got to the next hill, I'd seen enough. I was like 'No, don't fix this. This is going to change how I design maps from this point forward.'"

This "happy accident" is the moment when Tribes, the fastest multiplayer shooter ever devised, was truly born. But the first game in the series, Starsiege: Tribes, was far more than just fast. Launched in the USA in December of 1998, Dynamix's shooter was worlds ahead of its multiplayer competition.

Not only was Starsiege: Tribes a team-based, multiplayer-exclusive shooter that released a full year before both Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, its inclusion of jetpacks and that skiing-like movement also meant it played like nothing else on the market. Players could use these tools to build up huge momentum across its vast maps, fighting at such speeds that hitting your opponent often meant thinking several increments into the future.

For those who gel with it, no other multiplayer shooter compares. Yet despite its originality and innovation, Tribes has never reached the heights of other multiplayer shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament, to say nothing of Counter-Strike. On the face of it, Tribes ought to be a permanent fixture in the multiplayer FPS scene, yet it has come and gone numerous times, hopping between developers and publishers, often with gaps as long as a decade between games.

There are myriad reasons for this, from misguided design decisions to a community as tribal as the teams represented in the game. But at the heart of it all lies one fundamental question: Why is Tribes' standout feature such a challenge to develop around?
 

The Fear team

Like many shooters made in the nineties, Tribes was developed in a frenzy to keep up with a rapidly changing landscape, when every new shooter seemed to represent another giant leap forward for technology and game design. After finishing his skiing game, which used the same engine as Starsiege: Tribes but was otherwise completely disconnected, Youngblood was asked by Dynamix president Jeffrey Tunnell to be lead designer on the project.

"It was called the Fear team," Youngblood recalls. "I hadn't really been involved with the project up to that point."

Nonetheless, Youngblood was thrilled to join the Fear team. In fact, he was thrilled by game development in general. He'd joined Dynamix several years earlier, after receiving a call from the company while working on a Computer Science degree at the University of Oregon, agreeing to an interview despite not knowing what Dynamix did.

"When I first started, there were 25 people in the company," Youngblood says. "My first company meeting, they wheeled in this dolly car [filled] with nothing but beer. Everybody went two-fisted for it. It was like 'This is the ultimate company.'"

When Youngblood joined the Fear team, he says the game was "mostly tech." It was also envisioned as a much more straightforward shooter, featuring both a singleplayer campaign and multiplayer, set in the Starsiege universe, which Dynamix had originally conceived for 1994's Metaltech: Earthsiege.

Then came a curious twist of fate. Youngblood, along with Tribes programmer Mark Frohnmayer, traveled to Atlanta to compete in the 1997 Red Annihilation Quake tournament, in which Dennis "Thresh" Fong won John Carmack's Ferrari.

"Watching him use the rocket jumping in a way that was different from all the other players was like 'Holy crap!'" Youngblood says. "That's a degree of freedom I hadn't really been considering. What would our version of that be? And it became the jetpacks."

Once the jetpacks were in, everything followed from there. When the skiing bug was discovered, it was decided the maps should be terrain based, to make the most of the player's movement. "That helped us really stand out from all these other games of that time," Youngblood says. "The other shooters that had been made up to that point were all interior based."

The Spinfuser, Tribes' iconic disc-firing weapon, was a spin on the traditional rocket launcher. "We wanted a hard-hitting, but relatively slower traveling projectile, something that you could see coming and maybe dodge," Youngblood adds.

While Youngblood loved working on Tribes, getting it done was a hard task. "My wife called herself a Tribes widow," Youngblood says. "I'd go to the office and work until 10 or 11 PM. At night I would put the latest build on my Jaz drive, which at the time was an affordable gigabyte drive, and bring it home and continue to work until I went to sleep."
Some reprieve was provided when Dynamix' marketing department suggested they cut the singleplayer campaign, an idea Youngblood agreed with. "It didn't look very good. The engine that we built didn't support the singleplayer levels everybody had been used to. We were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole."

Nonetheless, Youngblood was convinced they were making a great game. "We had to tell people [at the company] to stop playing it," he says. "Do not play Tribes during work hours."

At the game's E3 debut, Tribes was part of the Sierra booth, and its kiosk was placed beside a game being developed by a new company called Valve. "All these people were coming over to check out Half-Life, and then they would hear and see the commotion that was happening at the Tribes kiosk and move over and start playing. It was awesome," Youngblood recalls.

By the time it launched in December of 1998, Starsiege: Tribes had gained a substantial following. But its commercial performance didn't reflect that. The reason for this is simple: Starsiege: Tribes was one of the most pirated games of its era.

"We didn't put any copy protection on it, and we did that on purpose," Youngblood says, surprisingly unbothered by the game's commercial underperformance. "We knew we were gonna probably work on a second one anyways, because we had enough buzz."

Evolving Tribes

Starsiege: Tribes was indeed followed by a sequel three years later—one that would be commercially successful, selling over 200,000 copies. But it was also a very different game in its feel than its predecessor, reflective of a company that Youngblood says had also changed.

"The attitude to working on it was different. We never asked anybody to crunch on Tribes 1. But Tribes 2 was mandatory crunch," he says. "It burned a lot of people up." Ten months into Tribes 2's development, Youngblood left Dynamix.

That difference in feel also resulted in a fracturing of the audience, as the player base polarized into Starsiege: Tribes fans and Tribes 2 fans. "I was dissatisfied with how Tribes 2 felt. I was one of those people," says Michael Johnston, Senior Game Designer on the fourth Tribes game, Tribes: Vengeance. "Tribes 2 felt slow and muddy to me. It's a combination of physics and graphics."

Johnston's relationship with Tribes stretches back to the original game, which he played "as professional as you could get" at the turn of the millennium, competing as part of a team called Imperial Elite. "There was a big tournament in the year 2000 called Tribes Gala, where they said they would fly the winning teams to San Jose to compete on stage for a $10,000 purse," he says. "We ended up winning that tournament."

Johnston's playing career eventually shifted into modding, and ultimately he was invited by Sierra to create a mod for Tribes 2 that "did a lot of work" to try to fix the feel of the game. "It was not just tweaking physics parameters. It was changing artwork to change your perception of scale and speed, because it's a very complex problem to solve."
This mod so impressed Sierra that they put Johnston in touch with Irrational Games, which had just signed to develop the next PC game in the series, Tribes: Vengeance. To work on the game Johnston had to move from his native Canada to Australia, as Vengeance's production was being led by Irrational Canberra, which had just wrapped production on the superhero RPG Freedom Force.

"We were looking for a new project to put the team on," recalls Irrational cofounder Jon Chey. "[Sierra] had some very passionate fans of the Tribes franchise who were looking for an experienced FPS team to take it over." Yet while Irrational was known for System Shock 2, and its Boston arm was then working on SWAT 4, Chey admits the Canberra team "hadn't done a lot of FPS development at that stage."

One of the publisher's mandates for Vengeance was that it should include a singleplayer campaign. "The remit from Sierra was like 'Hey, we want to bring in new players, so we want to have this really strong singleplayer game,'' says Ed Orman, lead designer on Tribes: Vengeance. "But at the same time, we also weren't allowed to change too much of the game. And there was already, between Tribes 1 and Tribes 2, furious groups of people defending the one true Tribes."

As Dynamix had learned, making a single player campaign for Tribes was a huge challenge, because conventional FPS level design simply doesn't work for a game that moves like Tribes. To solve this problem, Irrational Canberra decided that each level should essentially be an open world game in miniature.

"We had to strip away a lot of what we knew about level design—to have locations we ask the player to get to, and they're going to be allowed to approach them from any direction, which means we have to have enemies and defenses that can cope with that," Orman says. "And the player's idea is that they've got to penetrate those defenses, then they've got to go inside a base."

These base interiors provided one of the biggest challenges from a design perspective. "We had to develop architecture for the interior of the bases where there were slopes that let you maintain some momentum with the skiing system," says Andrew James, Lead Artist on Vengeance. "When you did ping off walls, you could do this skateboard-bowl type movement that lets you go back up again."

This meant each level was in actuality two levels at once, featuring an exterior and interior map. "We did not budget for that. I remember that was a big problem, like 'Crap, we're doing twice as much work as we thought,'" Orman adds.

The story for the singleplayer involved a time-hopping adventure that let players play several characters over decades of history within Tribes' extensive lore. "The cool thing about it was the recontextualising of [events]," Orman says. "You get to learn why this person just seems to assassinate your mother out of nowhere—but that's because he was horribly betrayed in the past."

This format was heavily inspired by the Neal Stephenson book Cryptonomicon, which Orman says heavily inspired both him and the story's writer, Ken Levine.

Vengeance's singleplayer campaign was praised for its storytelling ambitions. But according to Johnston, the very existence of the singleplayer caused problems for the project as a whole.

"Most of the budget for the game, which was already quite small, ended up going to singleplayer," he says. "Even at the time, I remember feeling like 'Jeez, why am I the only one on the whole team who's only working on multiplayer?'"

This meant Vengeance's capacity to innovate on Tribes' multiplayer was limited. Johnston had an idea for what he calls a "Unified Game Mode" that allowed players to combine game mode rules, in an attempt to break players away from Capture the Flag (CTF).

"The fact that CTF is the blessed game mode for Tribes is something that holds it back," Johnston says. "It's less cooperative, more sprawling, harder to understand…so I was interested in trying to push the boundaries on that." Sadly, he says that "none of that really worked in the end". Vengeance ended up shipping with strict game modes, with an emphasis on "Let's make CTF as good as we can in the time that we have."

Tribes: Vengeance launched in October 2004. It was generally well-received by critics, but struggled commercially, and not long after launch, Vivendi stopped supporting it. "Unfortunately, Tribes: Vengeance didn't really perform up to expectations in the market," Chey concludes. "I wish we'd been given the chance to do either a pure singleplayer game or a pure multiplayer shooter. I think there's a much better realization now that games should focus on one or the other."
 

Hi-Rez and Tribes

Following the disappointing sales of Tribes: Vengeance, the series stayed dormant for eight more years. Then, around 2010, the Alpharetta based developer Hi-Rez Studios purchased the Tribes license.

As a studio, Hi-Rez was focussed on making multiplayer games in a process they call Rapid Application Development, or RAD. "We were always experimenting in the studio," says Mick Larkins, former Vice President of Gameplay at Hi-Rez studios. "Our DNA is to put things out early and experiment."

With Tribes: Ascend, Hi-Rez specifically wanted to experiment with a free-to-play model, figuring a Tribes game that players could access freely might help introduce it to a broader audience.

The fundamentals of the game, such as movement, were heavily influenced by the work Irrational had done with Tribes: Vengeance, with the overarching design framed around four key pillars: Getting from point A to point B should be a fun experience, encouraging skillshots with projectile weapons, fascinating landscapes, and multiplayer exclusivity.

Hi-Rez also wanted Ascend to be the blockbuster success everyone who loves Tribes believes it can be, and part of that meant navigating that tricky tightrope of making the game accessible, without forsaking the existing community.

For this, Hi-Rez made two changes from previous Tribes games. First, they designed the maps to be primarily outdoors, removing most of the knotty interiors present in previous Tribes games. Second, they added more hitscan weapons to provide a more immediate option in combat.

"If you make the time-to-kill long—with these wonderful ballet dances of jetpacking and skiing in combat—when it works, it's really great. But for a lot of players it's way too challenging," Larkins explains.

When Tribes: Ascend released in February 2012, it was initially a hit. "I think it's still probably the highest-rated game that we've made," Larkins says. However, the very thing that helped give it an audience—the free-to-play model—also proved to be the game's downfall.

"In hindsight, it was not the best decision for this kind of game," Larkins says. "We thought people would have meaningful gameplay by unlocking more guns, and having more ways to play with a large variety of guns." But Hi-Rez couldn't imbue sufficient differentiation in the arsenal to make that weapon progression satisfying. "Once you have a Spinfuser, a Chain Gun, and certain other guns, variations upon those won't make a radical difference in your play experience," Larkins points out.

The player base tailed off steadily, and by July 2013, it no longer made financial sense for Hi-Rez to continue development on Tribes: Ascend. An attempt was made to revive the game in 2015, but that revival proved short-lived, with the game receiving its final update in September 2016.
 

Tribes 3: Rivals

As it transpired, though, Hi-Rez wasn't done with Tribes—at least, in a sense. In 2019, Hi-Rez spun up a sister studio, Prophecy Games, intended to return to the RAD roots Hi-Rez itself had originally been founded upon. For its debut title, it would return to Tribes with a direct sequel to Tribes 2, the recently released Tribes 3: Rivals.

With Rivals, Prophecy attempted a "more focused" version of the Tribes formula, designed to include the classic movement and gunplay, but with smaller teams, stricter weapon rosters, and tighter maps. "We decided not to have 128 person battles, because we see that people stick with these smaller crews where you can make a difference on the map." Nonetheless, Larkins is keen to stress that while less sprawling, the maps are still "not small".

As with Ascend, Rivals has been developed rapidly, going through "aggressive alpha and beta testing." Unlike Ascend, Rivals has been released as an Early Access game, with a mind to involving the community as Prophecy Games tries to work out what players actually want from Tribes.

"For instance, one of the things that we've been testing a lot is 'How many game modes should this game feature?'" says Larkins. "Through our patching process, we've brought in new game modes, experimented with them, deprecated them and brought them back." In addition, Prophecy wants to "expose as much as we can in the custom games, so that the people who want to tweak certain things can do that."

Rivals' Early Access roadmap includes all the typical updates you'd expect, like new maps and weapons (though Larkins stresses players won't see the hundreds of slight variations that made their way into Ascend).

But alongside this, Prophecy has been "looking at the evolution of what a Tribes game can be.'' In one week of testing, for example, Prophecy made it much easier for players to pull off a "Blue Plate Special," killing a player with a direct, midair hit from a Spinfuser. "It was fun for the first five minutes, but then it lost its [luster]."

Tribes 3's experimental Early Access highlights how, 26 years after the launch of Starsiege: Tribes, the series is still wracked by the same fundamental questions. Why isn't it a shooter that everybody plays? And how does it become one without losing its identity?

For Youngblood, the issue is pretty straightforward. "It's not an easy game to get into and master," he says. "The skill level, the ceiling is pretty high."

It's an assertion with which Jon Chey agrees. "While games like Counter-Strike are obviously also very high skill, I think the gap between a beginner and an expert is more surmountable," says Chey. "I can imagine as a newbie getting a lucky shot on an expert player in Counter-Strike and maybe taking them out—but not in Tribes."

For Johnston, the issue is more complicated. One of the issues in Tribes' combat, he feels, is that because the maps are so sprawling, everyone is always so far away from you that the game feels like "fighting ants."

"I'd be curious to try something that was more on the scale of ravines and gullies," says Johnston. "There's still a lot of perception of speed—but when you stop and think about where you're fighting, it's actually a much smaller part of a world. So there's a lot more detail close up, but when you're fighting someone, they're moving fast, but they're closer to you."

Larkins clearly has multiple ideas, some of which Prophecy Games is experimenting with at present. But he wonders whether the solution is not to try to mitigate Tribes' challenge, but to make a point of it. After all, it wouldn't be the first game to become hugely popular off the back of having a reputation for difficulty.

"You want your players to say 'One more time,'” says Larkins. "If you go back to the '80s and play Super Mario Brothers, that's what players were doing when they died. 'One more time.' When it's Dark Souls, 'One more time.'  And if you're playing a multiplayer shooter, whether you win or lose, there's that 'One more time.'"

“That's the phrase that we want as game developers."

Tribes 3: Rivals is available in Early Access on the Epic Games Store.