http://forums3.armagetronad.net/viewtop ... =25&t=2529
For those of us that were there, it's interesting to note how many of the fundamentals in fortress play were discussed in kamp's very first post in that thread, yet it took something like 6-9 months for them to be adopted by everybody playing.
Anyway, I seem to recall Concord starting a history project about Armagetron awhile back, and probably found this thread while doing some of his research. So I challenged him to find the thread that contained the original proposal that led to fortress being made. Here's that thread:
http://forums3.armagetronad.net/viewtop ... f=4&t=2476
I've always considered it fitting that a significant team effort was put forth to put fortress into the first 0.2.8 release and that there isn't a single person who can take complete credit for it, it was one of those synergistic things that happen around here from time to time.
So I wanted to tell Concord what led to my first post in that thread, but he was too sleepy, and I don't know that I'll be around to talk tomorrow, so here it is:
Y'all remember the Crack Pipe, right? It was the server I created to showcase the new map stuff that was in 0.2.8. It was the very first map rotating server.
(For you racers out there, I also had the first racing server, but it was a race through a maze rather than a race course, and was never very popular. You guys have done wonders with the genre ) So, one night on the Crack Pipe, one of the old school players (Zig) was playing, and he said "So now that we have maps, do we get new game modes, like capture the flag?". I said no, and then went to smoke a cigarette, and while smoking, I had the epiphany that if the 0.2.7 clients supported multiple zones, and all zone game logic was on the server, then we could use the zones to provide some fairly simple new effects that might make some new game modes possible. You'll have to read the thread to see exactly what I was thinking. Anyway, you can see z-man and philippeqc pouncing on it, and ultimately fortress came out of it. Sumo and the others came out as experiments with that same stuff but no code changes (I think, maybe sumo required some tweaking).So, if you really want to assign credit, you'll have to dig pretty deep and go even farther than the Crack Pipe to where maps were originally developed, which will ironically lead you to Luke-Jr and hexatron. But really, there's been so many people involved along the way that I think a list that tries to credit everybody is doomed to be incomplete, and there isn't really a particular point where you can say "this one thing done/said by this one person caused fortress", unless it's zig's comment to me
. One thing that I think is inarguable, the combination of the popularity of fortress, z-man's old test server, and the collective hard work of a *lot* of people have made armagetron into a much stabler and more reliable piece of software than any of us playing with 0.2.6.0 could have imagined. I almost feel silly when I look back at some of the things we had to deal with back then. 
And Concord, thank you for that little walk. I think I've managed to reclaim a part of myself that I'd been missing. (You know, divorce recovery, identity quest and so forth)
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