Before game developer DICE created the seminal multiplayer hit Battlefield 1942, they created Codename: Eagle. Now, by most means of measure Codename: Eagle was not a very good game. The single-player game was fairly weak. The graphics didn't look like much for their time. And multiplayer was barely playable over the 'net, and only one map would work consistently without crashing. But here at GameSpy, we saw the diamond in the rough. If you played on a LAN, with that one particular map ... It was one of the greatest multiplayer games ever created. We'd play for hours, hopping onto that server every night to play capture-the-flag.
Why was it so special? Codename: Eagle had tanks and planes and turrets and motorcycles and trucks and jeeps and infantry and even blimps and helicopters all in the same game. This was over a year BEFORE Battlefield: 1942, but all the ingredients were there. And even better, they just mixed together into the ultimate game experience. It's clear that DICE knew they were on to something: Battlefield 1942 dropped the single-player pretty much entirely just to focus on the awesome multiplayer they'd struck on with Codename: Eagle.
Codename: Eagle doesn't look like much, but the mutliplayer defied description.
Sluggo: To this day, I'm still not sure how we started playing Codename: Eagle, but once we did, we played every night for a loooong while. We had years of different multiplayer games and mods behind us, but we'd never seen anything with vehicles on this scale: Jeeps, tanks, choppers, motorcycles with sidecars, artillery guns -- it sounded like a plan out of Bottle Rocket. And it didn't even work correctly -- the multiplayer code was a mess and games would crash regularly. And yet, we played the No Man's Land map every night, with tanks barreling across the landscape, jeeps ferrying players across enemy lines, and choppers making insane pickups at the enemy flag. Here was a game where one of the key strategies was "park a truck on top of the flag, and we'll bomb anyone who comes near it." Thank god someone at DICE and EA realized there was an entire game to be made there, which turned into Battlefield 1942.
Kindrak: I've played far more than my share of vehicle-based, multiplayer, team-based warfare games, so I naively thought I had figured out all the play mechanics of what constituted "good" from this type of game. What I hadn't counted on was a game that threw many of the rules (including those of conventional physics and conventional wisdom) out the window and replaced them with FUN. Granted, much of the amazing moments we experienced during our weeks and weeks of, um, careful, methodical "evaluation," were as much a result of the quirky game engine as from intentional game design, but none of that seemed to matter as we hollered smack-talk and shouts of victory over the cube walls. Perhaps more than any other game, this prompted whiny shouts of "we're working up here!" to filter downstairs from the working-late business types. They just didn't understand! How can you not howl with delight after jumping from your plane, opening, closing, and then reopening your parachute so that you can get optimal descent speed, land on top of a giant, two-balloon blimp, jump inside and then walk casually up to the pilot and knife him in the back? EPIC, I tell you!
Fargo: Sluggo doesn't remember where it came from, but I do: Our tech team was testing it because we were going to support it in GameSpy Arcade, and they couldn't tear themselves away. I remember our engineers busting over and demanding that we give it "Game of the Year" for that year.
Let me go on record: Codename: Eagle multiplayer was so good it makes me, to this day, want to cry. It's so good I get choked up. It didn't matter that hardly any maps worked: We played this thing 'til our faces bled.
For years afterwards I've been discussing what the 'special magic' of this game was. Here's part of it: you died (and you died a lot when you played), but it never seemed to matter. Because nearly every time you died it was either: 1. Funny 2. Cool or 3. Successful. Ram your plane into an enemy turret? That was funny and successful. Collide with an enemy plane in mid air so you both explode? That was funny and cool. Jump out of a burning helicopter and get chopped up by the blades moments before it hits the truck and exposes the enemy flag in a giant fiery explosion? Funny, successful, AND cool. You never lose.
There was one particular flag run you could make, where you would fly a plane toward the enemy base, swing down low, then jump out of your moving plane onto the ground into a full run while your plane crashed into an enemy turret. Then, on foot, you'd grab the flag and carry it to the nearby motorcycle and zoom out the back door of the base. It would happen in a matter of seconds. If you were successful, you had a dramatic two-minute-long motorcycle chase to look forward to, dodging tanks and trucks and helicopters. If you failed, it was usually spectacular anyways. It was like a Star Wars trench run or something. Every minute you played on a full server was like an Indiana Jones movie.
I would go home at night and my stomach would hurt, I had been laughing so hard. We would scream at each other on speakerphones for hours.
Codename: Eagle achieved a bit of a cult status in Europe, but pretty much tanked here in the U.S. Still, a tiny group of true believers saw this game for what it was. As I type this, there's even a couple of people in the GameSpy lobby trying to set up a game.
A year or two later, the crew at DICE was publishing Battlefield: 1942 through Electronic Arts. EA didn't know what it had. At E3, EA wasn't even showing the game on the main show floor. But WE knew it was coming -- we tracked it down and talked it up on the site. We couldn't wait. I'm glad that Battlefield was such a smash hit for those guys at DICE, because they deserved to get noticed.
