In the Beginning

Chaotic Arts was founded in 1994 by Mathias Ricken, still a high school student in Bremen back then. The only two other members were his classmates and have already left Chaotic Arts again. Some of their first projects were text adventurs, smaller jump-and-run games and role playing games, as well as clones of games like Bomberman and Marble Madness.

When everyone seemed to feverishly play Westwood's Dune II in 1995, Chaotic Arts began to work on the first version of their real-time strategy game Incident, back then still under DOS and at a resolution of only 320x200 with 256 colors. Yet, many of the features of the much later version for Windows could already be found.

While also working on Incident, the team also worked on a second project for a few months, the pre-rendered 3D-Shooter Fury Shock, that looked surprisingly much like Argonaut's Creature Shock. The graphics were quite impressive for back then and the team's entry into 3D rendered art. And even back then they used MOD trackers to create the sound tracks for their games, just like today.

Unfortunately, Chaotic Arts was unable to finish Incident since in the summer of 1996, Mathias went to the United States for a year as a foreign-exchange student. Time did not stop for Chaotic Arts, though, and the members kept extending their horizons, working on 3D engines, learning C++, or improving their rendering skills.

When Chaotic Arts was reunited in the summer of 1997, the team began development of Windows games using DirectX, and worked on several test applications concerning artificial intelligence and networking. One of these internal AI tests was The Living Dungeon, a simulated orc village, and thoughts about this project still haunt the developers' minds.

The Ascension

In May 1998, Mathias went to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) for the first time and returned even more ambitious and bursting with energy. Not much convincing was necessary, though, to get the team to start working on a new version of Incident. The development began, with a basis of old, well-tried ideas, but countless of new features. As time progressed, Jan-Christoph Conrad joined as Lead Artist, Tobias Lensing became the new Lead Programmer, and for a while, the team grew to five members. Among other things, Tobias was responsible for the grandiose GAIA graphics engine that brought a lot of attention to our team. He and Jan-Christoph also created the excellent 90-minute soundtrack for the game, while Mathias was mostly concerned with scripting, network programming, and project management. Thomas Bohlmann, unfortunately not a member of the team anymore, created the 3D art. The results of this kind of team work can be seen in pictures like these:

In December 1999, requests from publishers started to flood in. There was hardly any week without correspondence. In March, armed with a new trailer that highlighted the advantages of the graphics engine (and that can be downloaded here on the Archive page), Tobias and Mathias traveled to the GDC 2001, only to get excellent contacts and continue working on the project with even more determination than before. The negotiations with some of the publishers went into the final phases, and the team was rushed to create the 80-page concept paper within only one and a half weeks and add several hundreds of pages to the design document. Several times a week, members of Chaotic Arts visited the other negotiating parties or hosted guests in their offices in Bremen. By June, Chaotic Arts was forced to decide whether to continue the development of Incident as a professional company or to stay an amateur team. No one was able to foresee this dramatic development, nor screenshots like these that speak for themselves:

A year earlier, Mathias had already decided to study in the United States, and was accepted by Rice University in Houston, Texas. His departure quickly came closer, and the Chaotic Arts team unanimously decided against starting a professional company and signing a publishing deal with one of their partners. In the first few weeks of fall 2000, the members found that Incident was simply too large to be developed as a hobby project and purely over the internet. Grudgingly and with heavy hearts, the team discontinued the development.

The Changes

Recently, Chaotic Arts has greatly extended its area of operation and is now also concerned with web programming and the development of general application software. We admitted Marcus Tillmanns und Jan-Hendrik Wöltjen into our ranks as another programmer, and now understand ourselves as a group of semi-professional developers of multimedia software of all sorts. We are doing contract work as well as working on our own projects, like our most recent game Narrow Gauge, the web software ChaoticDocs, and the scripting language ChaoScript.

We are convinced of our abilities and love our work. If you have any questions about our past, present projects, or maybe about our future, please do not hesitate to write us.

Thank you for your attention.