EDIT: I have the translated text here, though without the pic's and links (and spoilertags?). Thanks to [wcip]Angel who translated this into english:
The humble beginning
Once upon a time, there was a group of hardcore gamers whose experience with WW2-shooters spurred their interest in created a game of true realism. They got together and brainstormed some ideas before looking for a game they could use as a starting point. Games such as Soldier of Fortune 2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Medal of
Honor (all using the Quake 3 engine) were considered. However, when Unreal Tournament 2003 was released, they discovered a modding tool unlike anything else they’d seen. It’s worth mentioning that none of developers had met each other prior to the founding of Tripwire Interactive.
Red Orchestra aimed at being a game of true realism while still being a playable WW2-modification. The most important difference between RO and other war games is that in this game, the perspective lies with the eastern forces, and thus, there is no “Go USA!”-message subliminally hidden in the game. In fact, there’s not a single American soldier in the mod at all, which some american gamers reacted to. More information on the Red Orchestra modification and the war can be found here (this page was updated after the release of version 3.1)
The first version of Red Orchestra was released 08.10.03. Already on 10.24.03 came the first update, and soon thereafter came the 1.1.1 patch which significantly improved the game. Around this time, Project Twilight – one of the first RO clans – was founded, and you can read more about them in this interview and on their web pages.
Make Something Unreal Contest
MSUC was a collaboration between developer Epic Games and nVidia. The aggregate value of their awards from all the phases amounted to $1.000.000. This includes (among other things) the value of the Unreal Engine 2.5 and 3 licenses. There were a total of five phases, each one lasting between two and five months. (Towards the end, the phases became shorter.)
Red Orchestra did not participate in the first phase of Make Something Unreal Contest (MSUC). The developers of RO didn’t feil ready to partake in such a contest when modification was in the state that it was. Nevertheless, they were surprised to see how far they’d come compared wo the developers who were in the first phase of the contest, and this encouraged them to join in for the second phase.
Red Orchestra won the awards for ”Best FPS modification” and ”Best Modification” every year they were in contention. Red Orchestra won “small” sums of prize money totalling $100.000. They also won the coveted UE2.5 and UE3 licenses (worth about $300.000). Professional game developers had in fact participated in the competition in a futile attempt to win the licenses to these graphics engines.
[spoiler title=Excerpt from the interview.]
Excerpt from the interview between GameInformer and John Gibson
Gibson: There were like five phases and 20 prizes awarded per phase. Each prize was going from $500 to $10,000 or $50,000 for the final phase. You have to realize that 19 other teams won prize money in every phase. For the final phase, we won the $50,000 and we also won $50,000 throughout the other phases. Grand total, we actually won $100,000. So over the entire contest, it all equaled one million dollars and that included the Unreal license which is worth about $300,000 or $400,000.
Read the rest of the intervju in
GameInformer[/spoiler]
Details regarding the various phases can be found in the timeline further on in the article.
RO:Ladder
The exact time of the founding of the RO:Ladder is uncertain, but the first bulletin on the RO:Ladder was posted 08.08.04. Prior to this date, the fledgling website had only been used as a testing ground. Regardless, it wasn’t until 09.19.04 that the first match of RO:Ladder was played. The match was between Project Twilight and SUOMI, two clans which would subsequently become the best clans of RO:Ladder. The results of the match can be seen here. In addition to the Ladder-clanwars, the people behind RO:Ladder have arranged cups and theme parties, notably “Bolt Action Night” and “Nations Cup”.
RO:Ladder quickly became the only active place for Red Orchestra-clans, and as a result have contibuted both directly and indirectly to the development of the game. Some hardcore players have designed maps of great historical accuracy while still being well suited for clanwars.Truth be told, the Red Orchestra community has in many ways greatly contributed to the development of the game. There is even a “map-maker” web page, where designers get together. If you’re interested, swing on by Map Orchestra. The RO:Ladder also offer a section for RO:Videos, for those interested in viewing in-game recordings from ‘the good old days.’
Battlefield.no was represented with their own clan in the ladder for some time. The clan was composed of a group of relatively unstructured people who wanted to try out something new… You can read more about the BF.no RO-clan further down.
From infantry to Combined Arms
When Unreal Tournament 2004 was released, Red Orchestra was converted and further improved before its re-release as version 2.0. Some people argued that it had become a whole new game, and in many respects, that was true. Finally, Red Orchestra had their own, well-crafted menus, better character models, more maps and weapons and last but not least: “Free aim”*. Of the new weapons, the MG-34 deserves particular attention, not only because it’s one of the most powerful weapons in the game, but also because it introduced a whole new way of handling and shooting the weapon.
[spoiler title=Excerpt from 2.0 changelog]New features in 2.0
- Machine Gun system has been implemented
- The MG barrel steam has been hooked in. Barrels will steam when they are over 100 deg C. Failure will occur at 200 deg C
- Added MG-34 barrel changing functionality (The default key for barrel changing is 'b'). DP-28 cannot change barrels
- Added tracer system for MG's. Tracers spawn every 5th shot
- New MG tracer effect uses dynamic light.[/spoiler]
Spoiler: “Iron Sights” and “Free aim.” (not translated)
Despite massive change and improvement from RO 1.2 (UT03) to RO 2.0 (UT04), the most dramatic changes were not implemented until version 3.0. For a long time, rumours had spread claiming the introduction of vehicles on the battlefield. The engine supported the use of vehicles, and after all, there was actually a great number of vehicles on the eastern front. As a result, the game introduced panzered vehicles, artillery, binoculars, panzerfaust and a whole lot of other ****. The last version of RO which competed in the MSUC was 3.2 introduced the MG-42. Extract from the 3.2 announcement:
Firstly, the oft-demanded German MG-42, bringing new ways to fight the Soviet onslaught. This time we bring you the first ever complete implementation of its awesome 1,200 rounds-per-minute of firepower in any game!
On 01.03.2005, just before the MSUC finales, Tripwire Interactive – previously known only as the Red Orchestra Team – was founded! Despite their victory in the contest and the opportunity to pave the way with new ideas with the UE 2.5/3-licenses, Tripwire Interactive chose to release one final patch for the modification Red Orchestra. As a final boost, Tripwire arranged a map-making competition for RO. The result was “Summer Offensive Map Pack”.
Battlefield.no and RO
A great applause for Skvate, who can take the credit for making sure Battlefield.no got engaged with Red Orchestra early on by lobbying vehemently and passionately for the modification. After a while, other people became interested, and a UT2004-server was set aside as a RO public server.
As an experiment, a Battlefield.no community-clan was put together. The clan – although it participated on RO-Ladder.net – was never very structured (and the results suffered accordingly), but those of us who played can honestly say that the mod is superbly suited for teamplay and clanwars. The community-clan will not be put out to pasture, but some of the members will soon launch a new clan designed to play Ostfront. We hope – and believe – that Ostfront will be even better suited for gameplay and clanwars than RO.
In his days, Skvate compiled some in-game clips. Whether it’s to show off his skills or Red Orchestra is still somewhat uncertain, but the clips can be found on Battlefield.no’s FTP server along with the teaser for Red Orchestra: Combined Arms (version 3.1) and Red Orchestra: Ostfront (the game), if this could be of any interest.
Timeline
- The work on Red Orchestra began 2000/2001
- Before the developers of RO decided to use the UT2003 engine, they had considered using Soldier of Fortune, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Medal of Honor (all of which ran on the Quake 3 engine)
- Unreal Tournament 2003 was released in 2002
- The first playable version of Red Orchestra version 1.0, was released 08.10.03 for
- Unreal Tournament 2003. On 10.24.03 was version 1.1 released.
- Jeremy is one of the developers who quit whilst the game was in development. He’s now project leader of “Insurgency”, a Half Life 2 modification.
- Phase 1 av MSUC
The winners were announced 12.19.2003
This phase was arranged for UT2003. RO did not participate in this phase. (Read more on the reasons for this in the interview with John Gibson aka Ramm-Jaeger) Deathball v1.9 won the award for “Best Mod”.
[spoiler title=Excerpt from the Gibson interview]There are a lot of rumors about Red Orchestra, and one of them is that we were a bunch of evil money grubbers that got together for the sole purpose of winning the MSU contest and that was all we cared about. Couldn’t be farther from the truth. We had probably eight or nine months of development on the game before the contest was even announced. When it was announced we all had a meeting and said, “Should we enter this thing?” And everybody’s like, “Yeah, let’s just do it.” It wasn’t one of those things where we looked at each other and said, “Yeah, we’re going to win this thing. Let’s do it.” Our thought was that there was probably going to be lots of other really good mods, but we’re going to do this thing just for fun.
There were five phases of the contest and during the first phase we didn’t feel we were ready so we sat out. And we watched the other mods come out and it was one of those epiphany moments when we realized that we were six months to a year ahead of every other mod in the contest – just in terms of development and polish. They were fun. But almost every other mod was UT 2004 with jungle models or terrorist models. They really hadn’t changed the core gameplay. They just put a little bit of different artwork in. And we realized, “Man, we could win this!”[/spoiler]
- The last version of UT03 was 1.2 which was released January 2004.
- Unreal Tournament 2004 was released in March 2004.
- It was quickly decided that Red Orchestra would be converted and version 2.0 became available May 2004 for Unreal Tournament 04.
- Fase 2 av MSUC
The winners were announced 05.10.2004
Red Orchestra won the awards for “Best FPS mod” (worth $7.500) and “Best Voice Pack or Audio Modification” (worth $1.000).
- MG-34 was introduced in the mod with its own firing system.
- After this, RO was patched twice (2.1 and 2.1.1 respectively), but the most dramatic changes did not occur until the game reached version 3.0.
- Phase 3 of MSUC
The winners were announced 08.05.2004.
Red Orchestra won the awards for “Best FPS mod” (worth $10.000) and placed second in the category “Best Voice Pack or Audio Modification” (worth $750).
- On 09.19.2004, the first clanwar on RO:Ladder was played, and a home turf for the “hardcore” players was born.
- Version 3.0 – titled Combined Arms – included tanks, artillery and a wide range of changes and improvements.
- Phase 4 of MSUC
The winners were announced 12.02.2004
Red Orchestra won the award for “Best FPS mod” (worth $10.000)
Throughout all of version 3.x, the focus has been on developing the vehicles while still maintaining the joy of playing the infantry.
- The MG-42 was introduced in version 3.2. RO was the first game with realistic firing rate: 1200 rounds pr minute on an MG-42.
- On 01.03.2005 Tripwire Interactive, formerly known as the Red Orchestra Team, was founded.
- The Grande Finale of the MSUC
The winners were announced 01.24.2005
Red Orchestra won the award for ”Best Mod” (worth $50.000)
- The final version of the Red Orchestra modification was 3.3 which was released subsequent to their victory in the MSUC, after which the developers started focussing on Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. More pictures from “Old school” Red Orchestra can be found here.
References
Red Orchestra (home page)
Red Orchestra: Ostfront (home page)
UnrealTournament.com
RO:Ladder.net
Wikipedia
Skvate, who’s been a tremendous help aiding me in the research for this article.
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