memes

ARC?

edit: Right, didn't see your edit. Yes ARC was Attack. Retrieve. Capture. It was created by two guys, Brian and John, who were at WON when I was. They created the game in college (Duke University I think) before dropping out to come work at WON. They had formed a company called Hoopy Entertainment so we called them the hoopies. At one point somebody found out they had been coming in on weekends, working 7 days a week for months, so they were basically ordered to take some time off. Bona fide nerd life - the hoopies were the real deal.

Those guys were a lot of fun - one time they ran another guy's speaker wires under the partition to their cubicle and through one of their computers, so they could mix sounds into his audio. Occasionally they would fade it up for a while but usually they kept it very faint. He was going crazy, thinking his hardware was picking up a radio station or people's phone calls, he couldn't tell. After he figured it out he retaliated by attaching a spare wall section across the opening between the hoopy guys' joint cube after they left, so they had to climb over it to get back in. The hoopies actually left it that way for a while because it was kind of like a fort.

I remember Brian writing a really nice connection simulator that artificially added network latency for testing. They also created a game based on cops and robbers driving around a city, but the prototype turned out not to be fun enough so they scrapped it. Eventually I think Hoopy became PopCap. I'm sure those guys both got rich.

Good memories.