Gaming goes global

Paul Nelson '06 has been doing a great deal of file-sharing recently — and the administration doesn't mind. That's because Nelson is giving away something that is rightfully his: a first-person shooter computer game called Ultrono Arena, which he made himself.

The multiplayer version of his game, officially released the night of Sept. 26, has since been downloaded over 7,000 times.

"I expected 100 people to try it out and tell me what they thought," Nelson said. "[I just] wanted to have fun with it."

Ultrono Arena players dart around a virtual environment at breakneck pace, shooting opponents who are depicted as large spheres.

The geometrical element stems from the game's origins. Just over a year ago, the program was a rigid body simulation for Nelson's spring 2004 computer science course. It almost stayed that way. But the day before it was due, Nelson turned it into a game to make it more interesting to the other students in COS 426: Computer Graphics.

"It was going to be boring if I just showed blocks and spheres," he said.

The first version had a few fans, who convinced Nelson this summer to make the game playable over the Internet. After several weeks of programming, he released the multiplayer version and awoke the next morning to find that 1,500 people had downloaded it overnight.

By lunchtime, he said, his computer was "thrashing nonstop" from the sheer number of players.

"There are countries I've never heard of that have like 20 people playing," Nelson said, citing download requests originating in Mauritius, Kazakhstan, Slovenia, Tonga and Tuvalu.

Nelson's Ultrono Arena game is popular, he said, because of its easy-to-master controls, simple rules, fun gameplay and decent graphics. The game's popularity is also helped by Nelson's status as one of the world's best players of Quake, a 3-D computer game.

"Since Paul is among the elite of the gaming community, he knows what would make a good modification," Matt Mehlhope of Lexington, Ky., an avid Ultrono Arena player, said in an email. "In this case, a fast, furious frenzy allows for the white-knuckle speed and skill-intensive gameplay that the Quake community craves."

Ben Siebert of the Netherlands is another fan. "It's all about fast action combined with fast thinking," he said in an email. "Another fun thing about the game is anyone can play it. You just install it and play it."

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But, Siebert added, "The game is in a quite early stage, which means no big features and no big customizations."

Still, comments about the game on online discussion boards are overwhelmingly positive — not bad for what Nelson called an "on-the-side thing."

The game's success has gotten Nelson thinking about profits, but he said it's not ready for sale. "Nobody would be in a store and see a game called Ultrono Arena and buy it," he added.

Profit isn't out of the question, though. Nelson cited the Half-Life game modification, whose creator, a college student, ended up selling his program. Nelson said he might be able to do the same — or at least charge for downloading special versions of the game — if he had a team of programmers to help him improve it.

But working for a computer game company, he said, would rob him of his "complete creative control," he said. Nelson instead plans to attend graduate school to study math.

Yet, wherever he ends up going, Ultrono Arena probably will have gotten there first.