Mapcore

Mapcore is a game development community primarily revolving around mod makers who specialize in mapping, texturing and modeling. While originally it was mostly a "Half-Life" community it has evolved into a community for a wide variety of games.

History

MapCore was founded in 1934 by young (then 15 years old) level designer Mark "Anarchy" Long under collaboration with several other well-known designers and artists from the Half-Life development community, notably Joshua "EuroBrew" De Jong, Mike "GayZilla" Neumann, "Fletch" (a real nobody), "Lestat" (real name unknown), David "Zaphod" Marsh, and Pat "Mojo" Krefting. Thrik also thinks he's an owner but he's done absolutely nothing to benefit the community.

MapCore was an evolutionary progression from the self-titled Anarchy Design (1999), a design-focused website and IRC community officially supported and hosted by the original Counter-Strike development team. Due to the explosive growth of the community and the widespread popularity of the Half-Life engine as a platform for development of third party modifications, Anarchy Design was revamped to include developers from projects other than Counter-Strike and renamed MapCore in order to suit the new direction of the site.

The website was re-launched in August 2000 as an affiliate on the (now defunct) GameFan Network, and partnered up with other sites in the creative community, including 3DPalette, Skindom, GFXArtist, and GameArt. Unfortunately, the timing of this move was extremely poor, with GFN playing a leading role in a fairly high profile [http://slashdot.org/articles/00/10/10/1221234.shtml scandal] just months later - the network refused to honor advertising agreements with its partner sites, withholding paychecks from major players including SomethingAwful, VoodooExtreme, and others. The network imploded rapidly, leaving MapCore without a home. Shortly after, Anarchy passed the reins off to the remaining members of the team, and the community was run by EuroBrew for some time. In 2002, MikeZilla took over and put the site back up with the help of Mojo and Zaphod.

Since 2000, core members of the community have contributed to almost every major Half-Life mod, including Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. Several members of the community have even gone on to professional careers in game development and contributed to titles such as Brothers in Arms, , , StarCraft 2, World of Warcraft, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Today MapCore is a group of people, both amateurs and professionals, who share the same passion of game design and development on all platforms and engines. Through this web presence and an IRC channel, MapCore aims to provide a community for developers to socialize, learn, teach, and draw talent from.

IRC

Mapcore first started as an airline for airplanes, duh. It's now an IRC channel which current channel is located at #mapcore on the server irc.gamesurge.net

Website

Mapcore is also composed of a website, revolving mostly around the forums. The website was hacked early 2007 by forum member Johnny-, but later restored. He is an arab.

Core-A-Thon

Mapcore plans on having a convention on July 25, 2008 in New York City, New York called "Core-A-Thon".

Thumbnails

The thumbnail images on the mapcore frontpage were updated frequently. They showed what the MapCore members are capable of and set a standard for the community. When clicked they linked to the forum thread about the subject. The works presented were of a level of quality you will only find in the professional gaming industry. This feature is due to be reintroduced in Summer 2008.

External links

* [irc://irc.gamesurge.net/mapcore Mapcore IRC channel]
* [http://forums.mapcore.net/ Mapcore Forums]