Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Ted, and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
The late ’90s was a wildly exciting time in the internet’s history, one that witnessed a Cambrian explosion in websites as users crawled out of BBS forums and began forming dedicated webpages of their own. PC gaming coverage was no different. There were entire websites dedicated to covering individual games, not least the Planet network operated by GameSpy. If there was a PC game that you were looking forward to, chances are there was a website somewhere out there waiting to cover it.
Today, most of those websites are long dead, the victims of over-ambition, the brutal realities of the modern internet, or good old fashioned link rot. But holed up on some dusty server in the internet’s Outer Rim, one crazy old hermit clings on to the past.
A New Hope
The Massassi Temple is a community website dedicated to Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, which has been running consistently since it was launched in early 1998. The site was created by Brian E. Lozier, who is also the site’s current owner and administrator.
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Lozier became a fan of PC gaming playing first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. But Lozier’s newfound hobby was quickly interrupted when he joined the United States Air Force, working at what he describes as a “secure facility” as a computer operator.
If this sounds thrillingly clandestine, Lozier stresses it was anything but. “It was really boring,” he points out. “We were just having to wait for stuff to happen and then respond to it. Most of the people who did that job with me watched cable TV for hours.”
It was around this time that Lozier discovered Star Wars: Dark Forces, which, as a huge Star Wars fan, reignited his desire to play PC games. “I had to buy a new computer just to play it,” he says. As it turned out, Dark Forces wasn’t quite the dream game he’d hoped for. But when Dark Forces 2 came out two years later, that was another matter.
“I thought it was the most amazing thing ever, and I started watching or reading other websites,” he says. “There was a site called jediknight.net and they were saying ‘Hey, there’s people working on the level editor so you can make your own maps for this thing.’ I was blown away.”
Lozier began making Jedi Knight maps in his spare time. But he found learning how to use the level editor difficult. “The way the levels are constructed was really different than anything my mind could think of.” Hence, he decided to write some tutorials to lessen the growing pains of other wannabe Jedi Knight modders. Since he needed somewhere to host the tutorials, he decided to build his own website.
This also proved more of a challenge than Lozier anticipated. “I had to learn programming, and I had told myself earlier in my life that I was never going to be a programmer,” he explains. “[But] then it turns out I wanted to make something … so I learned it out of books.”
The secure facility Lozier worked in understandably did not allow people to bring in external computers. So Lozier would write the code for The Massassi Temple on pencil and paper during work downtime, then take it home and test it on his computer. Between designing the site and writing the tutorials he planned to host on the site, the process took a couple of months. “Right now it looks really close to what it did back in 1998.”
The Force Awakens
The Massassi Temple launched in 1998, with Lozier announcing the site on jediknight.net. The news spread across other sites like Blues News, Voodoo Extreme, and Telefragged, which also indirectly hosted the site at one point.
It wasn’t long before people started showing up, keen to benefit from Lozier’s tutorials. “Our most popular section in the early days, especially, was the message boards, where people would go in and ask questions. ‘How do I do this? How do I make this type of feature in my level? How do I use the programming language?'”
Initially, Lozier would respond to every inquiry personally, while also posting the latest Jedi Knight-related news. But the site quickly grew to the point where its community became self-perpetuating. “Within a couple of months, there were more people answering the questions that I had no idea how to answer,” he says. “It felt really good to see people getting use out of it and being inspired.”
But the site’s popularity was only beginning. Over the next couple of years, the number of visitors grew, and grew. “In the late ’90s and early 2000s, the site was getting millions and millions of visitors,” Lozier says. “We were running ads, we were making multiple thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue.”
We were making multiple thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue.
Brian E. Lozier
Much of this cash went on operating costs. The server alone, which had a cutting-edge 300-megahertz processor, cost $1,000 per month to lease. “It sounds ridiculous now, but at the time that was the state of the art, because none of the shared hosting could keep up with us, right? We would just bog down their servers.”
By the time Lozier left The Air Force, The Massassi Temple was bringing in more money than his military salary. Lozier realised a career might be in the making. “I left the Air Force thinking ‘Hey, I can do this.'”
Fallen Order
With The Massassi Temple operating smoothly, Lozier began setting up websites about other games that were tangentially related to Jedi Knight. “The team who made Jedi Knight split apart, and some of them started their own game company called Nihilistic Software. They made a Vampire: The Masquerade game that we were all excited about.”
As such, Lozier set up Planet Vampire in association with GameSpy, alongside several other Planet sites. He also launched websites dedicated to Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, which was built with the same engine as Jedi Knight, and a Serious Sam site for which he created level editor tutorials. “That did really well actually. In Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, I was so surprised—I beat the game, and it was rolling the credits, and my name was on there.”
Best of all, Lozier’s association with GameSpy meant he got to see the games industry in action. “When I was working on Planet Vampire and some other Planet sites, IGN and GameSpy sent a bunch of us to E3 multiple times in a row,” he says. “I got to meet John Romero, I got to meet people working on the later Quake and Doom games … it was just amazing.”
But even as Lozier’s website empire blossomed, the cracks were beginning to show. Several of the games Lozier had established websites for flopped, which meant the websites did too. “Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption, we were so excited about it, but then once the game came out it didn’t get very good reviews and people had a hard time playing it,” he says. The Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine site also struggled. “At the last minute we found out [LucasArts] weren’t going to allow mods.”
Then, in early 2000, the dotcom bubble burst, and the shockwave ripped through Lozier’s collection of websites. “All the money that was flowing around disappeared,” he says. “We saw CPMs drop to tiny pennies, fractions of a cent, where you had to get hundreds of millions of hits to make any decent money.”
One by one, the sites Lozier built began to shut down, and he realised the floor was collapsing beneath him. “I was like ‘OK, I’m not gonna make money with this. I need to feed my family,” he says. Lozier handed control of the site over to someone else, got a job as a software developer, and left The Massassi Temple to its fate. “That was one of the times where I let it go.”
Return of the Jedi
Yet where every other site Lozier created died, The Massassi Temple kept on going. Lozier believes this is down to the dedication of its community. “The site wouldn’t exist without all the people that visit and that are on our Discord and that are sharing and working on stuff.”
And over the years, The Massassi Temple has built up a vast array of additional Jedi Knight adventures. This includes hundreds of mods and more than a thousand multiplayer maps. Some of these are wildly ambitious, including JK Gunrunners, a total conversion mod that transforms Jedi Knight into a modern day roleplaying game, featuring vehicles and racing. “We did level contests over the years where people would submit maps to include in the big multiplayer pack,” Lozier says.
Alongside the maps and mods it hosts, The Massassi Temple is also a key nexus for ongoing Jedi Knight support. Many of the developers involved with OpenJKDF2—an open source reimplementation for Jedi Knight—hang out in The Massassi Temple’s Discord channel. The site’s tendrils have also reached out into broader game development. “We’ve got a couple people who are active AAA game developers in our Discord,” Lozier says, while David Wehle, developer of The First Tree and the upcoming horror game We Harvest Shadows, cut his teeth making mods for Jedi Knight.
Thanks to its community, Jedi Knight is chugging along nicely. Nonetheless, Lozier says the community would be happy to see something bring this aged FPS back into the limelight, such as a Nightdive-style remaster similar to what the studio did with Star Wars: Dark Forces. “I think we would all really appreciate an updated version, especially if it supports all the old mods that still exist,” he says. “I hope they make an easier way to play multiplayer. That would be the absolute best thing to keep the community alive and keep the game alive for longer.”
Survivor
Lozier has stepped away from The Massassi Temple several times over the years. But he has never fully been able to let it go, intervening on several occasions when the site looked likely to shut down. The last time he took the site over was “seven or eight” years ago. “I’m sort of stubborn, and I have a hard time letting go,” he says.
Today, The Massassi Temple is but a small corner of the internet. “Traffic is lower and lower every year now,” Lozier says. As such, he has begun to think about what happens if the site should shut down, and how to preserve both the site and its contents for the future.
The site’s code is already available open source on GitHub, so the next stage is to preserve the community’s creations. “I want to have a permanent archive of all the levels, maps, and mods that people have made over the years that are hosted by us,” he concludes. “It’s no skin off my back, like the community made the site … the main content that everybody cares about was not made by me.”
Lozier has no regrets about how things panned out with his website career. “I taught myself programming as a hobby in this dark room in the Air Force to make this website, and I’ve been a software engineer since then as my full-time job.” That said, he does wonder whether something was lost in the post-dotcom era of the internet, where traffic has been increasingly funnelled toward a small handful of megasites:
Nowadays, the entire internet has transferred to these big corporations.
Brian E. Lozier
“Back then, if you wanted to know about snowboarding, you went to a snowboarding website. If you wanted to go to message boards about a videogame, you searched up the videogame and went to the websites,” he says. “Nowadays, the entire internet has transferred to these big corporations. A lot of the Jedi Knight community and snowboarding communities are now on Reddit or Facebook or whatever, so you don’t have an individual identity for your Jedi Knight playing versus your snowboarding.”
Then again, he thinks the dotcom crash was, in the long run, a good thing for The Massassi Temple specifically. “It was a hobby that turned into something commercial, and we lost something there, because I was focussed on more sites, getting more impressions, showing more ads, making more money,” he says. “When the dotcom bubble burst, and all those ad dollars dried up, it transitioned almost immediately back into a hobby, and that’s a net positive for the community, because I don’t have to worry if I don’t update it for a year, it’s still there. It’s still alive.
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