GunZ, GunZ, GunZ - A (Relatively) Quick History (part 1)

A still from one of the clanwars recorded for Terminal Velocity.

I found GunZ on the advice of someone from primary school. It hooked me. The nonlinear gameplay, the SMG spamming... then I found the Forums, and I really got into things.

GunZ has a pretty gay history. Developed for Japanese and Korean gamers at first before an international version was made available. It's main allure lies in the open-ended gameplay: how, armed with nothing but a blade, you can fling people into the air, run and jump off walls Matrix-style (firing your guns all the while), scale the most tall walls in mere seconds; you can virtually fly anywhere that isn't blocked by a wall or the height limit. You can have epic air battles off a wall, over a bottomless pit, on a traditional arena; spinning crazily over heads, reloading without touching the ground, circlestrafing+defending+slashing virtually at the same time if you want.

The real uniqueness comes from the fact that most of this good stuff comes from glitches and exploits in the game engine. Other games have had similar kinds of emergent gameplay: one example off the top of my head is the Rocket/Grenade Jump from Quake, which has found its way into Team Fortress Classic and the acclaimed Team Fortress 2. But unlike TF2's polished and promoted rocket jump, GunZ's impressive line of wall scaling techniques develop among with every other unofficial move and exploit. Many games today evolve off patches. GunZ evolves off the community.

But like any other game aimed at children, the community is bad. Veri bad. When I joined the official forums under "Nosedigger" with a cute lightning avatar, people were already bickering over some move or another they supposedly found, or what "style" of playing is best, and you even have people who maintain that the new "K-Style"(Korean Style, named after the people who discovered the useful glitches) is cheating. It was messy back then, and the lack of consistent moderation didn't help. Eventually some disgruntled amateur hacker took over the admin accounts, prompting a shutdown of the official forums and a move of all GunZ fans who cared to GunZFactor.com.

With a better mod team, GunZ players had a bit more space to make headway with the untapped potential of the game engine's loopholes. No longer was there much discussion on whether K-Style was legit: in 2005 an officially-produced trailer displayed players swarming like flies around the battlefield and turning shotguns into semi-automatic weapons(a discovery that made close range combat a peril for anyone who didn't have dual shotguns). Thus far, most of the new glitches gave sword users more capabilities to fart around with. But in GZF, the neglected possibilities of the dagger were also unlocked; whereas swords offered extreme close-range strength, D-Style relied on its ability to cut corners faster and change directions whenever they wanted.

Young artists also saw a little golden age: Both fan art and fan fiction picked up, with a role-playing thread that continues to this day. In the machinima section pioneers _Zephyre_ and DarkRadiance released acclaimed shorts that took advantage of GunZ's freecam in replay mode. The last few years saw an explosion in frag movies - pressure was put upon giving each frag movie an artistic streak, with moviemakers like MiyaDV, Cysote, and Divine Rose treading the line between narcissism and art. A compilation can be found here.

As the North American version of GunZ attracted more westerners to the malleability of the game, GunZ grew still further. Last year Clan Wars were introduced; tight-knit clans came into prominence and a new list of celebrities came into the GunZ society. We had Cerb3rus, the elite gladiator who found how to juggle and kill someone in the air without letting them touch the ground once, AryaVarwin, an alpha female who became known as one of the top players, we had toktok, we had screwy, GilGilGil, ShadowSkullz. The dagger community in particular, expanded: one of the very first successful dagger-only clans headed by D-Style celebrity Slap made waves in the community when clan Pokable held its own against more prestigious clans. Cysote shot to fame with his Do Dagger movies and attracted attention for his all- styles clan, -Do-. Guides on each play style became more detailed as new moves were added to the list: Extended Lunge shot a dagger user forward at high speed, skyblocking to defend against reverse massives became popular, etc.

And then GunZ began to dwindle.


To be continued.