Lets start at the beginning, Starseige: Tribes was released in 1998 and was possibly the first team based multiplayer FPS available at the time, it was released when most people were on the internet via dialup before the broadband era. I have fond memories of playing Tribes on a local LAN event that my father ran every other month before finally hitting the online servers. Being on dialup the game consisted of a lot of prediction due to lag which is something you got to grips with after playing for a long time, to this day I still miss a lot of the prediction that was involved and the satisfaction it gave when you hit a perfect shot on someone when compensating for lag.

Tribes was one of the first games that gave us different armour classes (light, medium and heavy) and load out options which gave you the ability to choose different weapons which we had seen scarcely before then, yet the idea seems to have seen a resurgence with a lot of games in the past few years. The landscapes for the maps where huge and to get around you used jet packs which added mid air combat to the game and the ability to slingshot yourself out of canyons to get from one side of the map to the other in the fastest time possible, very useful during flag runs! The game also included flying vehicles for transferring your heavily armoured units from one side of the map to the other. The medium armour class had the ability to drop turrets and repair turrents/electronics in your base and all classes had mines to help defend your base/flag area, all of this contributed to making the game a very tactical affair. Within the game there were also a lot of different game types available, from the classic Capture the Flag which I played a lot of and Defend and Destroy which was a lot like the Domination/Territory based game types you see in recent games like Halo and Call of Duty. In fact, early videos of Halo appeared heavily influenced by Tribes before Microsoft acquired the franchise for the Xbox.

Throughout playing Tribes I learned a lot about team play and the finer points of offence and defence in Capture the Flag games which I still play in QuakeLive and other games to this day. My time with Tribes was extensive, after playing for our QuakeWorld clan's Tribes team I got deeply into the community and played for several first division sides in various leagues before getting the opportunity to play for the England team in the Tribes Nations cup (circa 2000). Other memories include getting the opportunity to compete in various LAN matches around the UK, which to this day I still have very fond memories of.

I'm exited about the possible resurgence of Tribes. When Tribes 2 was released it received mixed reviews from the Tribes scene which continued throughout the life of Tribes 2 due to a lot of the community including myself feeling like the ball had been dropped on that release. I later moved on to Quake 3 where I spent the next instalment of my gaming career, but that's a story for another day. I just hope it can live up to the memories I have, and have a strong community to go with it. Tribes will always be remembered by me as one of my greatest ever gaming achievements and experiences.

If you want to check Tribes out, it was released as a free download to promote the release of Tribes: Vengeance which inevitably killed the franchise due to the lack of support from the already dying community. You can find it over atFilePlanetand judge for yourself.