Lucian and Hong Ooi occasionally post on csipg.rpg. Krud showed up exactly once in the last couple of years, to let us know that KotOR is a good game. Okay, so we already knew that…
Old Salt is still policing war-historical, and eep2 either infests groups I don’t read or he has finally moved out of his parents’ basement.
Last I heard Krud was semi-retired at an early age and was dabbling at being a day trader, so I think that more or less replaced his gaming – playing with real money at day trading has got to make computer games seem a bit tame. That was when the stocks were on the upswing still. Don’t know if he got hurt by the downturn.
Think it was 1996 actually. Definitely again in 1998, but IIRC that’s when it sort of fell by the wayside (with Cleve occasionally surfacing somewhere to claim “it’s close”) until the 2004 re-emergence.
I’m pretty sure there have been more “official” release-dates than versions written in X language. Which seems like a no brainer at first but I swear the entire code base has existed in at least 3, and possibly 4, languages (Pascal, Java, C++, and I swear at one point Python was involved but maybe that rewrite got cancelled).
I ran across this quote from the original website (I found it in a post I made here over a decade ago).
"At the moment, we are planning to release our Alpha 1.16 on April 29th,
1997 at this site for public review and to get some feedback. The game
should be fully functional in all respects. It will feature a small dungeon
and forest area for testers to explore and get some feeling for the
gameplay present in Grimoire.
The public beta should be released in the early part of June, 1997 and the
uncrippled, fully playable shareware version will be available on the 1st of
September in 1997 for anyone to download and play.
How much of the game is finished right now?
The game engines are 95% completed at this time. The artwork is 60%, sound &
music 10%. We are making remarkably rapid progress and expect to achieve all
the deadlines we have set for ourselves. We are not amateurs at the business of software development and would not be wasting your time by putting up this web page if we were less than confident about releasing the game on time. We despise developers who miss deadlines and promote games before they are even certain if they can finish them probably even more than you do."
If you are at RPG Codex for more than a year I recommend reading all 1000+ pages of the thread. I laughed, I cried. Okay, I didn’t cry. But there are laughs to be had. That thread needs to be downloaded in its entirety and made into a book. Cleve would make more money by publishing it than from his game.