A Story of Doing the Improbable
Timothy Dexter remains a legendary trader of the 1800s after pulling off a series of highly improbable but highly lucrative trade deals. Selling coal to Newcastle and arriving during a coal strike resulted in selling coal at a premium to a city whose main export was coal. Taking bed warmers to the Caribbean, a notorious warm part of the world and selling them in the molasses trade. Why mention him at the beginning of an article on abandoned computer games? Because he’s a fine example of what someone can do when common sense says not to.
What happens when computer games become abandoned? Hope a group of dreamers like Playnet Software turns up at the right time at the right place, despite all indications that it’s not the right time and it’s not the right place.
An old man of the internet
Playnet Software, better known as Cornered Rat Software (CRS), have one title to its name, an old game called World War II Online released in 2000[1]. The game is based around a realistic World War II simulation with infantry, tanks, Navy, Air Force, all on one map in one theatre of operation, with only one map that runs 24 hours a day. Its scale is 1/2 scale map of Europe itself, running from England over the channel to France, Belgium, and all to the Ruhr valley. Since opening, they have run almost 240 full campaigns, each ‘map’ lasting anywhere from two days to four months. The game itself, being 25 years old, dates from a time when massive multiplayer online games were barely just starting.
World War II Online is ancient by any standard. The game is held together by a core of dedicated players and programmers, with some new players trickling in over time, but it’s running out of puff. I am one of those players, and I hate saying that, but the old game can’t transfer onto a new game engine, and graphics are as good as they’re going to get, but still have that early 2000s to 2010 feel.
Technically, it’s on its second team of programmers after most of the originals left just prior to or during 2020. It easily deserves its own article, and if you, oh gentle reader, like this one, I’ll get to write that story.
All of this helps put in context what Cornered Rat Software is doing now. This old game is going to find new life in an abandoned game, Resistance & Liberation.
Resistance & Liberation
Resistance & Liberation was a small sandbox game started around 2002 as a Garry’s Mod and, up until 2020, progressed to using the Unreal Engine 4. It had a volunteer development team that had come up with the idea of making a realistic World War II sandbox game based on the 101st airborne and their battles from World War II from Normandy through to the end of the war in 1945. Eighteen years is a long time, admittedly, but in the world of computer games it’s not a sprint but a marathon.
It had chugged along for all that time and had developed a player base of around 10,000 players. You don’t have to go far on the Internet to find individual, independently developed games; there are thousands of them, possibly 10s of thousands. R&L’s story wasn’t anything new, and it will be repeated innumerable times. The computer equivalent of those unaccountably well-selling schlock novels with a woman on the front being held by some man with his shirt off, both of which might be thought of as belonging to the top 1% of all good-looking people who aren’t us.
A solid little game with great potential if its volunteers could keep development going.
Being in the right place at the right time…Despite appearances
2020 was a rough year for everyone involved. Everything was kind of fine up until March, at which point the world came to a violent but survivable stop because of COVID. Like being in a car decelerating from 60 to 0 by slamming on the brakes. You can survive it as long as you have your seat belt on, but it leaves you with a hell of a case of whiplash. Otherwise, you’re going through the windshield and eating pavement or possibly a surprised pedestrian out walking their dog, which everyone was doing in 2020, if only to get out.
XOOM[i], the brand you head of Playnet and C.R.S., decided now would be a good time to go looking for new business opportunities to revamp World War II Online. A private man yet dedicated to the ideals CRS worked toward, keeping his anonymity, he did the entire of my interview wearing a cap and dark glasses, I assume so anyway, as all I got to see was his picture. Taking over as Head Rat, he wanted to revitalise the game. We were all stuck at home. What else was he going to do but cruise the internet looking for young, innocent computer games to pick up and proposition?
indiedb.com is a website dedicated to independent computer games, a place where they could post links and stories about the games they were making, where they liked to go to dinner, their hobbies and what their favourite programming language was. Resistance & Liberation, which, as mentioned, was a World War II sandbox game that had been in development in one way or another since 2002, began life as a Garry’s Mod but by 2020 had moved on to Unreal Engine 4 and was well represented on the site.
It seemed to match what we saw CRS was looking for to be developed into the larger game of WWIIOL 2.0. which the older game needed. While R&L was worthy of a release as a standalone game, it might prove a good test bed for elements that could be used in a massive multiplayer game. Imagine a small sandbox game like Counter-Strike transforming into something the size of World of Warcraft. Could it be done? That being the question.
Negotiations and selling kidneys
Resistance & Liberation had its own development team, and they were working on their project when they were discovered by XOOM[2]. He didn’t just burst into the room like a Cool Aid Man and say Hey, I’m taking over. There were talks, negotiations, and a conversation about what R&L could become and how it could work with WWIIOL. It wasn’t set to become a hostile takeover, more a combination of production teams and games to benefit both. If both respected each other’s boundaries but worked with the same sort of game, that being a realistic World War II game on their respective scales, it could help each other out. R&L on a sandbox level, WWIIOL being the massive multiplayer version.
All that was probably the easy part; everyone likes to be part of a vision to be able to see something that they can make which is bigger than themselves, if possible, by getting rich at the same time, of course. But before you become rich, a lot of the time you get to experience poverty.
It was a rough time for investments that were anything other than medical research connected to COVID. The whole world was going through a traumatic experience that still hasn’t quite shaken off, and people were more interested in locating toilet paper than new computer games to invest in. We wanted toilet paper, snack food, streaming TV and oh yeah, a vaccine.
I did enquire how many kidneys XOOM had left, and I did point out that in his heyday, WWIIOL did have a Chinese server behind the great Chinese Firewall. He told me to rest assured that, no, he didn’t have to sell any of his internal organs, but writing this now, I’m probably on Xi Jinping watch list, and he didn’t mention if he’d done anything with anyone else’s kidneys. More than a few meals were missed, and his stomach has shrunk. It was that hard, and to an extent, it remains that hard.
It also bears mentioning that Playnet and CRS are not just one man. During this whole time, they were effectively two production teams, one for R&L and WWIIOL, effectively volunteering their time while any money they made went into keeping servers running for their respective games. Both teams worked jobs, making these games a passion more than a paying proposition. Both were held afloat by the love of their games and their dedication to a historically accurate World War II simulation. It was these elements that made R&L, a sandbox game, a good match for WWIIOL, a massive multiplayer online game, in the first place.
However bad you might have thought 2020 was, I can’t say these production teams had it worse, but I can say with a certain level of confidence they had it rougher than many others. They did have a shared dream, which can sometimes help in those tough times when the Wi-Fi cuts out.
Negotiations finished, money paid, what’s the next step? Turning a good sandbox game into a great sandbox game and a great sandbox game into a massive multiplayer game.
Where did everybody go?
Resistance & Liberation had been moving along for close to two decades, slow and steady, but this is about abandoned games, so clearly something terrible is about to happen.
Coding can sometimes be a mystery. Why does the code work with the word ‘Chrysanthemum’ uncountably written in a certain place? Why did it crash when they took it out? Some questions will never be known. In R&L’s case, the question was, where did all the original programmers go and why then? It’s hard to say, but they decided to move to the Unreal Engine 5. How hard could that be?
In 2024, the move to the Unreal Engine 5 began. During the move from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, the original team just kind of disappeared, and disappeared hard. No response to emails, they didn’t call any more, that weekend trip they had planned for the place upstate? Not even a cancellation text saying they had to work suddenly. They just left the RATS with an open booking and never turned up at their place when they said they would. CRS would like this part of the article to have a better answer, but like the later seasons of the TV show LOST, some parts just don’t have an answer. If any of you out there in internet land have an answer, put it in the comments. While researching, I did hear it might have had something to do with a plane crash, like LOST did. My ending will be better, though.
XOOM is very clear: when transferring your game, backup your work. Make sure your original build has a copy. At this time, being more advisory than hands-on, this advice would have been good to pass on. The original team had attempted to upgrade from Unreal Engine 4 to 5 with no backups … it did not go well[3].
Everything that could break, did
The game was unplayable on Unreal Engine 5; the transfer led to a game best described as a waste of space on your hard drive. You couldn’t even spawn in. In the words of a community manager, BEEBOPSAXXX, ‘Everything that could break, did’. Most of this part of the story comes from him. He has a beard like his voice sounds. Kind of like a biker version of Santa with less white in it, an imposing Beard of Knowledge.
Ghosted by the original team, the RATS had a game in name only, a certifiable mess. While the original programmers seem to have just disappeared. XOOM was very insistent that no ill will stand between the RATS and the originals, just a great deal of bafflement. What to do now? Get to work.
With the original team now gone, it was decided they needed a name change. While not a fresh start, at least a fresh coat of paint. They rebranded Resistance & Liberation to Chokepoint. The Unreal Engine 5 version the RATS are using for Chokepoint only became fully realised in November 2024 or so. To say what the team did to lift Resistance & Liberation to a working stable alpha of something by April of 2025 is like describing the 12 tasks of Herculeses like a quiet weekend in the garden.
Nothing fancy, German Kar98k’s, US M1 Garands’ and US Colt’s for the officer classes on either side…and everyone who spawned in looked like a 100 foot high version of themselves stalking the map like vengeful gods seeking mortals to crush like ants while using rifles the size of Californian redwoods to blast holes to the centre of the Earth, so, progress?
It gives you an idea of the mess, going from a bricked game to at least spawning in, but that’s only half the mess, the computer and programming side. What do you do when you have 10,000 people wondering where their game went?
Someone’s at the door
The landmine in your morning oatmeal, with taking over an independent game with such a long development cycle, is having a dedicated player base. Due to events to save the game, the changes Resistance & Liberation underwent, changing to Chokepoint, caught the entire player base by surprise. During the development process, simply not knowing who had access after over a decade of game design, the RATS made the unilateral decision to remove everyone’s access; they had to reapply to become alpha testers. Of course, CRS did sweeten the deal a little. In WWIIOL, you pay a certain level of money each month to get a certain level of equipment in the game; although it’s not pay-to-play, they have a free account option. You’ll have to trust me on that, my 25-year veteran, I don’t think my editor will let me use the word count to explain the whole thing here.
What CRS offers is a premium subscription to WWIIOL, which also gives you a Chokepoint access key available through Steam. You can get it right now and be an alpha tester for Chokepoint. Just go to the WWIIOL website and choose your subscription level. It’s all listed there at https://www.wwiionline.com/. It’s not a bad idea, two games for one, and it keeps the coffers of the company a little healthier.
By his own admission, this is where XOOM kind of fell over its own feet. His people skills were a little lacking, and while saving the original game of R&L, the original player bases didn’t quite understand what was going on, and it wasn’t terribly well explained. It did get better, but XOOM had to take a second run at it. I don’t know every detail, but it’s enough to say people were upset. We’ve all seen what happens in comment sections. While they did lose some players from the game, they also retained a great deal.
BEEBOBPAXXX did a lot of personal work here to calm the player base down. If you ever had a chance to ask a veteran of the Korean War from the South side, a joke was often told that the scariest thing they ever saw in Korea was 50,000 screaming Chinese soldiers[4]. BEEPOPSAXXX only had to worry about 10,000, an easy job, right?
Are they happy to see us? Are any of them carrying a lawyer?
As part of my interview process, I got to talk to a player named Armed Grizzly[5]. Weirdly enough, he could be a clone of XOOM in that he wears dark glasses and a cap during the interviews; oddly, they also have the same facial hair. It could be brothers, or it could be that they’re just both American.
As it turned out, while he had been following the entire process, he really hadn’t got the grasp of what was going on until he played in an alpha play test, which was the one that I met him playing.
Grizzly was a dedicated player of Resistance & Liberation and followed the game all the way through to Chokepoint. Initially, as with the greater player base, he didn’t know what was going on. Being an original player, though, didn’t give him more insight into what had happened. He doesn’t quite know what happened any more than the RATS do, but he can describe what it felt like. He said it in one sentence, ‘it’s as if the game fell apart from the inside’.
This might explain why those 10,000 players felt so upset. When you follow an indie game, you see the programmers not only developing the game, but they’re in the game with you. Large game development companies have ghost accounts. They wander in, you don’t know them though; they keep their cover, not to innumerable game testers. With smaller companies and smaller games, it’s the programmers themselves you see in the game. They don’t have the money and resources to hire a small army of community managers and play testers. They don’t bother with disguising themselves. From XOOM’s perspective, at the time, he just saw progress reports; from the players’ perspective, they started to see abandonment followed by violent upheaval. Not unlike a divorce, really. The dating and relationship metaphors really do start to stack up.
I know this from experience and WWIIOL from the early days. I still tell people about the time when I played in a special event and had the head RAT, MOE flying off my wing over Dover. You develop a personal relationship with these people, no matter what level they maintain in the company. You notice when they get the flu from garbled voice comms, you notice when they disappear. You know what car they drive and where their children go to school from the photos you’ve taken…I’ve said too much. I’m right there with Armed Grizzly. Is the point. It means on a certain level, players feel personally betrayed when someone you don’t know comes in out of nowhere, even if it’s to save your game when you didn’t know it was dying.
The good news is that after the playtest, being able to talk directly to BEEBOPSAXXX over voice communication, Armed Grizzly felt revitalised about the entire experience. In an age where most people text, having voice communication with programmers and community managers cannot be underlined heavily enough. It’s very easy to misinterpret a text message; ask any millennial about the light artillery of a full stop.
Being face-to-face or voice-to-ear and getting the tone of what’s being said makes a massive difference. I saw this in action. It’s also handy that what they’ve produced, even at this early level, is ridiculously fun. This play test went a long way to recovering a lot of what R&L had.
Oncoming train or tunnel entrance?
Resistance & Liberation come. Chokepoint does have a happy ending, so far. The light isn’t making odd choo-choo noises, and that is daylight ahead. While it’s had ups and downs, this is a happy story. R&L got lucky; it was found by someone who could not only make it better but could understand it, and I think it’s important to list those elements in that way. You can take an old product and make a new version that can be better, but in doing so, you can lose many of the people who liked the older version. It’s not always about game mechanics, but sometimes the spirit behind the mechanics.
I did learn three important lessons from everyone I interviewed. First, have patience; second, have hope; third, back up your builds before you transfer onto a new game engine. I can let you figure out who said what.
CRS has saved this old game, and like two people meeting each other for the first time and yet seemingly knowing each other for their entire lives, there is an opportunity to make something better than anyone ever expected. Don’t get me wrong, CRS is in this for themselves as much as anything else. They needed a new version of their own old game, and it appeared to have hit the jackpot.
Chokepoint, formally known as Resistance & Liberation, is a game to watch in 2026. With a little luck, you will have a release in the first half of next year on Steam. Give it a couple more years after that, and WWIIOL 2.0 will absolutely blow the doors off every World War II recreation out there using Chokepoint as a base. You’ll be able to play a small sandbox version of the game if you only have 20 minutes, but it will have developed into a massive FPS version of itself if you’re into that kind of thing. By saving an old game and combining it with another old game and understanding its DNA, it’s going to satisfy everyone, I think, which is not something every relationship, I mean game, can say they’ve done. As they say, watch this space.
- Playnet Software or Cornered Rat Software (CRS) was incorporated in 1997/98 based on this one game idea. It’s equivalent to walking into Deadwood in 1877 (Deadwood was established in 1876) with three other guys, determined to set up a pizza joint where none of them really have a firm grasp of how to cook a pizza, have no idea of marketing, but all of them have an overabundance of yeast.
- It should be noted at this point that everyone who works for CRS or plays World War II Online has call signs from the game, and it’s all we ever call each other. I’ve had friends for 25 years that I have met in person; I still don’t know their real names, and they don’t know mine either. Playnet is Playnet, Cornered Rat Software is CRS, and World War II Online is WWIIOL if only to keep the word count down, it’ll make my editor happier, who’s paying me by the word.
- Like trying to juggle three live hand grenades with the pins pulled and trying to put them back in mid-juggle inside what they used to call a phone booth. Some of you will have to look up what those were, and I don’t mean the cool kind with a Time Lord in it. I mean the gungy kind you used to have in the 80’s…yes, I’m old, how else would I know enough to write this stuff?
- During the Korean War, after the initial invasion of South Korea from North Korea, UN forces pushed the North Korean troops back almost all the way to the North Korean/Chinese border. The Chinese worried about a possible invasion, released their own army, and so forced the UN forces back to the 38th parallel. You are reading a story essentially about World War 2, so there is a distinct possibility of picking up some actual knowledge of history as a byproduct.
- I know his name isn’t capitalised in the world of the Internet; capitalisation is a form of hierarchy. I’m Rabitldr, yes, one b. Armed Grizzly is presented the way he is with XOOM, and BEEPOBAXXX are presented that way for Reasons.
