Best Game No One Played
That’s the ignominious award given by Gamespot in 2000 to Allegiance, a game they described as an “…online-only game [that] integrates real-time strategy elements into a solid space combat 3D engine to create the most realistic strategic space combat simulation to date.”*
I joined the Allegiance art team In May 1997 as a texture artist, leaving behind a position as the senior Art Director at Fantagraphics, a Seattle based comic book publisher, which while having a ton of street cred, did not pay particularly well (there’s not a lot of money in the comic book industry, as I spent many years proving to myself).
Since that time in 1997 and barring two six month breaks I took to try my hand at oil painting professionally (the second break also included running a small gallery), I have worked in one way or another at or for Microsoft, nearly half my life.
Allegiance was originally developed by Microsoft Research (the project started before Microsoft Games Studios was a thing) in part as a collection of many new technologies in development, such as Microsoft’s acquisition of 3D modelling and animation tool Softimage, support for these new tools using Windows (prior to this, 3D production tended to rely on proprietary systems like Silicon Graphics International), 3D graphics engines, and co-operative online play, all of which were in it’s infancy.
I worked on vehicles and space stations, and planets. It took three years after I worked on it for it to be released, and looking at screenshots I see elements I recognize, but also much that looks very different. In the screenshot above, the two warships with blue canopies look like something I worked on, but I suspect there was quite a bit of rework done after I dropped my virtual brush.
