Triton | Code Like It's 198x

In the summer of 1992 three Swedes signed off the text file for their first serious demo with their real names and a set of house rules: contact us by our real names, we do not swap software, and “we won’t join any other group either”. The group was Triton, and the demo, Crystal Dream, came second to Future Crew’s Unreal in the PC demo competition at the first Assembly party in Finland that July. Triton is remembered for more than its demos. Its coder Mr. H wrote Fasttracker, and with Vogue he wrote Fasttracker 2, a PC music program the Italian press was calling legendary by 1997. Vogue, Magnus Högdahl, later ran Starbreeze Studios, the company Triton turned into.

Fast facts

From: the Timrå area, northern Sweden.
Formed: winter 1991–92, from an earlier group called The Physical Crew.
Members in 1992: Vogue (Magnus Högdahl), Mr. H (Fredrik Huss) and Loot (Anders Aldengård); Lizardking wrote music for Crystal Dream 2 and later releases.
Best known for: Crystal Dream (1992), Crystal Dream 2 (1993), Fasttracker and Fasttracker 2.
Became: Starbreeze Studios.

From The Physical Crew

Triton told its own origin story in the README that came with Crystal Dream. The group formed in the winter of 1991–92 out of The Physical Crew, whose earlier releases, PC Demo and Vectra, it admitted “were no products of some serious work”. Working with Vogue went well, the partnership turned into a demo, and the group took a new name for it, after one of the moons of Neptune. Vogue had started out programming the Amiga and had been a member of the Amiga group Phenomena in 1991.

Each member had a job. Vogue rendered the demo’s ray-traced pictures in Synthetic Image, a ray-tracing scene editor he had written as his final project at upper secondary school. Mr. H wrote the music software and designed the hardware to go with it, and the README printed his circuit diagrams for anyone who wanted to build a sound device for the printer port. Loot is listed with the others; the rules told coders to get in touch, “(Not LOOT)”.

Crystal Dream and Crystal Dream 2

Crystal Dream was meant for Hackerence 5, a party in Härnösand, but, the group wrote, “we ran out of time and couldn’t show a 100% version”. It was finished in July 1992 and entered at Assembly ‘92, where the organisers’ results placed it second behind Unreal. Its sequel, Crystal Dream 2, won the PC demo competition at The Computer Crossroads, held at the Swedish Exhibition Centre in Gothenburg at the end of May 1993. Triton’s demos reached the British public-domain libraries: in October 1994 one advertised “CRYSTAL DREAMS (2) - Triton Demo - excellent” in PC Gamer, on the same list as Future Crew’s Unreal and Second Reality. The Crystal Dream entry covers both demos.

Fasttracker

Mr. H’s music routines grew into a program for writing music. Demozoo dates the first Fasttracker to December 1992 and credits it to him. In February 1994 the Italian magazine The Games Machine, surveying music programs for its readers, listed “Mr H’s Triton Fast Tracker” for the PC: a tracker made almost identical to the Amiga’s ProTracker, so that anyone who knew that program could use it straight away, but with eight channels of sound instead of four.

Fasttracker 2, by Mr. H and Vogue, followed in November 1994, according to Pouët and Demozoo. It saved music in its own XM module format, and by 1997 module players advertised support for files from both Fasttracker versions. A reader’s classified advertisement in the Italian MCmicrocomputer in September 1995 offered version 2.03 of “Triton Fasttracker, the famous program for composing mods”, “direct from Sweden by modem”. By February 1997 The Games Machine was calling it “the legendary FastTracker II”.

Development stopped at the end of the decade. On 23 May 1999 the Starbreeze website announced that Fasttracker 2 had been “put on hold indefinitely”, because “it’s impossible to maintain the program while I run Starbreeze and Fredrik is working at Ericsson”. Magnus Högdahl wrote that they were considering releasing the source code, but had not decided “how, when or if”. A development version, 2.09, had already leaked from a beta tester, and Starbreeze put it on its own download page. The program still has users: the modern ft2-clone for Windows, macOS and Linux says its XM player was “directly ported from the original source code”.

Into the Shadows

The step into games came through a demo. In 2002 Högdahl told Edge that at the end of 1993 the American publisher Scavenger, impressed by one of Triton’s demos, contacted him with a proposal to turn his and Fredrik Huss’s skills to game development. Scavenger turned down a first-person shooter, and at the end of 1994 Triton Productions, by then a company, started work on Into the Shadows, a 3D action role-playing game for the PC. The team moved to the United States at the start of 1995. “We were all rookies and didn’t have a clue what a game development company should look like,” Högdahl said. Scavenger, he found, had only three employees; the four development teams it presented as its own were separate companies.

Into the Shadows was praised at E3 in 1995, and Edge reported that it was generally seen as the best of the four games Scavenger had agreed to make for GT Interactive in a $6.5 million deal. Högdahl was its only full-time programmer. Then the money stopped. “We didn’t get paid. That is a pretty strong sign,” he told Edge. The team went back to Sweden, and Scavenger fell silent in the autumn of 1996. The Italian magazine Zeta reported the game’s cancellation in April 1997.

Starbreeze

Triton became Starbreeze Studios, PC Gamer reported in 2002. The new studio’s next project, Sorcery, for Gremlin, was cancelled when Infogrames bought Gremlin, and its first game to reach the shops was the fantasy action game Enclave, which Edge reviewed on the Xbox in September 2002. Starbreeze followed it with The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (2004), The Darkness (2007), Syndicate for Electronic Arts (2012) and, with the film director Josef Fares, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2013).

Högdahl did not stay to the end of that run. In 2009, Edge reported, seven senior employees, “including Starbreeze founder Magnus Högdahl”, left to form MachineGames, another Swedish studio. Starbreeze later became a publisher as well as a developer, and in December 2018, after disappointing early sales of Overkill’s The Walking Dead, it replaced its chief executive and applied to the Swedish courts for reconstruction, a form of protection from its creditors.

Sources

Triton, README file distributed with Crystal Dream, July 1992 (web, secondary copy in the scene.org archive): the group’s formation, The Physical Crew, the name, Vogue’s Amiga past and Synthetic Image, Mr. H’s music software and circuits, members’ names, house rules, Hackerence 5. https://files.scene.org/view/demos/groups/triton/cd_trn.zip
Assembly ‘92, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): PC demo competition, 1st Unreal, 2nd Crystal Dream. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1992/assembly92/results.txt
The Computer Crossroads 1993, results compiled from party reports and results packs (web, secondary): venue, PC demo competition, 1st Crystal Dream 2. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1993/computer_crossroad93/results.txt
Public-domain library advertisement, PC Gamer (UK) vol. 1 no. 11, October 1994: “CRYSTAL DREAMS (2) - Triton Demo - excellent”.
Feature on music programs, The Games Machine (Italy) issue 61, February 1994: “Mr H’s Triton Fast Tracker”.
Readers’ classified advertisements, MCmicrocomputer (Italy) issue 154, September 1995: Fasttracker 2.03.
The Games Machine (Italy) issue 94, February 1997: “l’ormai mitico FastTracker II”.
MCmicrocomputer (Italy) issue 172, April 1997, and issue 174, June 1997: a module player supporting FastTracker I and II files; XM listed as the FastTracker II format.
Demozoo, group entry for Triton and production entries for Fasttracker, Fasttracker 2 and Crystal Dream II (web, secondary): dates and credits. https://demozoo.org/groups/337/
Pouët, production entry for Fasttracker 2 (web, secondary): release date. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=13350
Starbreeze Studios website, Fasttracker 2 page, news of 23 May 1999 (web, secondary, archived copy): development on hold, the leaked 2.09. https://web.archive.org/web/20000303090109/http://www.starbreeze.com/ft2.htm
ft2-clone, README (web, secondary): XM player ported from the original source code. https://github.com/8bitbubsy/ft2-clone
“Game of Chance”, Edge issue 118, Christmas 2002, pp. 59–61: Scavenger, Högdahl’s account of Triton Productions and Into the Shadows, the GT Interactive deal.
Zeta (Italy) issue 25, April 1997: Into the Shadows “recently cancelled”.
Jim McCauley, Enclave preview, PC Gamer (UK) issue 115, November 2002, pp. 6–7: Triton became Starbreeze, Sorcery and Gremlin, the Xbox Enclave already released.
Enclave review, Edge issue 114, September 2002.
Retro Gamer issue 102, May 2012: Escape from Butcher Bay and Starbreeze’s The Darkness (2007).
Syndicate feature, Edge issue 234, December 2011, pp. 70–74: Högdahl and six others leave to form MachineGames in 2009.
Syndicate review, Edge issue 239, April 2012.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons preview and review, Edge issue 253, May 2013, and issue 255, July 2013.
Wireframe issue 4, December 2018, p. 14: Starbreeze’s new chief executive and reconstruction; Overkill’s The Walking Dead.