"The only truly secure computer is one buried in concrete, with the power turned off and the network cable cut."

The Genesis of UberGames

It's been well said that great minds think alike. It's also been said that there are some times when the universe chooses to throw totally outrageous co-incidences at us.
This is one of those stories.

The year was 2003 and I was on my way to graduating from my final year of high school and entering university. At that time, the one game which I was completely addicted to was Jedi Knight 2 (STILL one of the best Star Wars games I've ever played!). Around that time, a pretty cool d00d nicknamed Mau'dae created a Visual Basic 6 application called JK2 Kill Tracker that simply put, could interface with the Quake 3 console component of JK2, and monitor the game logs, recording whenever you as the player managed to score a kill. When Mau'dae released the source code to the Kill Tracker, I was pretty hyped since I realised it meant I could make a similar one for my all-time favourite game: Elite Force.

After a few weeks of screwing around in VB, redesigning the UI of the Kill Tracker, checking its integration with the EF engine as well as adding a few EF specific features, I was ready to release! However, 'lo and behold, when I went to EFFiles in anticipation of releasing it, I found out that someone else had beaten me to the punch by about 3 days! Quite amazingly, one certain Dominic 'Phenix' Black had the exact same idea as me at about the same time and we both worked on and released the same tool at the same time! Even now at this point in my life, I still think this is the biggest outrageous co-incidence I've ever experienced.

In any case, it seems me and Dom then went and downloaded each others' kill tracker program and tried it out. One thing that clicked straight away is that although both programs were built on the same original code base, Dom and I had both written our own set of unique features into our own versions, making both of them pretty unique programs, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. One would could only imagine how cool it would be if the two programs were merged into one! At this point in time, it seemed pretty obvious at what we needed to do.

I was on AIM one night and I got a message from Dom. It was brief and to the point. He asked me if I'd like to work with him to merge the two kill tracker programs into one version and release it as an official sequel to our two tracker programs. I was thrilled at the opportunity and said yes straight away! And with that, so began our first collaboration.

Since the original two kill trackers were already fully finished applications, it only took a month or so of development to create the new application. Most of this was just having discussions on what new features to add as well as any optimizations that could be done to the code. Once the application was finished, and properly beta tested, Dom put forward a new conumdrum: what were we going to put as the developer name when we submitted it? "Phenix and TiM" would have been acceptable... but it was a pretty plain title. Then, Dom had a great suggestion, a play on the geeky usage of the German word 'Über', he suggested 'ÜberGames'. Me being the geeky individual I am, thought that sounded pretty darn cool, and so I wholeheartedly backed it.
(Ultimately, due to the character glitching up in certain fonts on web pages and certain graphics, not to mention the extra effort required to type it out, we ended up dropping the umlaut and keeping it as 'UberGames' in the end.)

And so the rest is pretty much history.
EF Kill Tracker 2 was released on the 17th of July, 2003 under the developer title of UberGames to an expectant crowd and we were both very pleased with the subsequent feedback. It was probably a result of that, that Dom and I chose to continue using the title for some of the other pieces of work we created. Towards the end of 2003, I followed with the release of my idTech 3 Engine minimizing program, Q3E Minimizer, and Dom followed shortly with an external access RCON program called Rcon Unlimited.

And now, in 2008, having now released several upgrades to Q3E Minimizer as well as spearheading RPG-X our very first game mod, I'm pretty impressed at how much the name UberGames has lingered onwards. What started off as a freak co-incidence of two guys having the same idea at the same time has brought forth quite an impressive set of collaborations and in my opinion, already an impressive amount of creative content. Through my own endeavours, chatting with people I've met and worked together with through UberGames, not to mention the generous people who have provided feedback on the stuff we've done, I've learnt an absolute tonne about a great number of things, and it's something I'm very grateful for.

Finally, now that we've finally got our act together and deployed a website for UberGames, it's my sincerist wish to continue what we're doing; through our love of video games, we continue to learn new things as we work together and have fun.
And who knows... maybe we'll even make our own full blown game some day. The sky's the limit!

Well, hope to see you in the servers some time! Happy fragging!

-TiM