This Brief History of Slime is an abbreviated version of Wedgey's original article.
June 1999: clive gout, a student who is enrolled in the same programming unit as me, sends all of first year cs (computer science) this weird game called slime volleyball. the graphics are shit, the physics are as dodgy as hell, but it's addictive. and it's a one player game. quin pendragon, a first year in the same course as me, sets about writing a two player version with better physics and still crappy graphics.
august 1999: quin emerges with two player slime. it's a hit. quin is the hero of all first year cs students at uni. quin claims that the coding of the game was a hackathon.
october 11-12 1999: first slime tourney is held. quin and scotty brown quickly assert themselves as the ones to beat. quin wins in the end, in between games of tetris on his hp calculator.
october 13-15 1999: the first slime tourney drew out the slime hermits, and all of a sudden, a heap of people wanted to play. so a bigger tourney was organised very hastily. form doesn't change much in a few days, and quin emerged the winner again, after an epic hour long game (remember, original slime games aren't played in a fixed about of time). of course, the people that were watching that grand final will remember scott having to go half way through the game to a physics tute, and then coming back and losing in the end. brendan was lurking in the background with his video recorder, people at the big day out in perth in 2000 or 2001 may have seen some footage of this game on a big screen.
2000: the dark ages. slime was still around, but wasn't really actively played. i tried to get some tourneys happening, but we could never get enough people interested. but the freshers in 2000 picked up on the game and kept the slime spirit alive. kinda.
january 12 2001: "slime goes open-source" quin proclaims on his web page.
january 31 2001: the first slime mod is created. flying slime is born and becomes popular with uwa students.
april 2001: wedgey wants quin to put stats into slime. like clangers, aces and all that kind of stuff. the ideas are rejected. "the source is up there, do it yourself." so i did. hence, slime with stats was born.
may 2001: slime with stats evolved into afl slime - slime with stats and the slime wearing afl guernseys. not very popular initially, but it did eventually catch on with a minority of slime players.
may-june 2001: slime tourney 3 is held, this time using afl slime which guarantees no "quick fives" or hour long games. sixteen people sign up to play (one for each afl team), but only about half of the games are played. scott and quin meet yet again in a final, with scott finally winning a tournament. this tourney is planned to be the lead up to a much greater tournament from july through to september, mirroring the 2001 afl season. in fact the third tourney mirrored the 2001 afl pre season series (apart from the outcomes, the fixtures were the same).
july 2001: over the uni holidays, wedgey writes a replay saver for afl slime, so that people can view any replays later on. he also investigates the possibility of writing computer controlled slimes for afl slime. the first attempt is quite impressive considering nothing like that had ever been attempted by the uwa slime crew, except for the fact that it can't serve and has a weakness when playing against the back wall. (this later became the red slime in one slime version one.) a later attempt is much harder to beat, and it can serve (black slime). the major slime tourney only has one game played before being abandoned.
august 16 2001: any decent one slime player shall have this as a holiday, as this was the day that one slime was born. in an hour between lunch with tim hayward and tim lightfoot, wedgey hacked the previously coded ais that were destined for afl slime and created a new one player game. scott brown reckoned that it was his idea. wedgey claimed he thought of it when he wrote the ais initially. but they're both mentioned here. wedgey didn't care when no one played it in its first week. this was also the day when power slime took a giant leap forward towards being playable. this day shall be known as slime hackathon number two.
august 20 2001: army slime was born. initially bystanders went "wtf?" when the ball suddenly changed direction with no slime contact. players loved it for the new ways to play and outwit opponents, and the frustration of not being able to counter special moves. army slime later became power slime (although others offered jedi slime for a name).
august 31 2001: the number of hits for one slime is starting to pick up. over two thousand hits have been counted since the 16th.
september 15 2001: one slime registers over 7000 hits in a day, a huge leap from the 2000 or odd that have been registered daily since the start of september. this is the start of something big.
september 21 2001: the fourth slime tourney finally got off the ground after three attempts. unlike the 185 games originally planned, the tourney is restructured and 19 games are played instead. the structure of the competition allows people that lose one or two games to still be in a running for the finals. wedgey and scott meet in the grand final, both having only lost one game to each other in the previous two tourneys. wedgey wins in a best of three series, leaving scott with only one title from four grand finals.
september 30 2001: one slime rockets to the top of the tartarus (uwa student web server) hit list, easily becoming the most popular site on the server. sitting just outside the top ten (due to multiple one slime file hits) are quin's original slime and tim's power slime.
october 21 2001: tim develops a power slime ai. it's incredibly difficult to beat, due to its cunning use of powerups.
october 31 2001: one slime improves on september's figures registering over one hundred thousand hits in a month.
november 9 2001: the afl slime replay centre is taken down from the server, due to badly coded scripts and the googlebot downloading 0.7 gigs of replay pages. this was seen as fair "given that your slime volleyball site receives about 50% of all http traffic to tartarus".
november 25 2001: the great slime hackathon three took place, with danno, quin, clive, and tim combining to write a networked two player slime and a rewrite of one slime. the result was disappointing, the networked game was very slow and discouraged any immediate dedication of time to fix it. mame games ruined any chance of the second coming of one slime being completed, however, the slime code was completely de-obfuscated for the first time.
january 22 2002: wedgey, scotty and damo draft up rules and play test modified physics for a new slime game, cricketslime, the first real mod of slime, possibly paving the way for other non-volleyball slime games.
may 26, 2002: quin gets an idea for a soccer game. there is a 15 page essay due in 36 hours time, when he decides to write the game. by morning, it is basically done. soccerslime is the result of the fourth great slime hackathon. within hours of the game being posted, traffic filters through to the site at about a hit per minute.
may 28, 2002: a lot of sub-standard essays for modelling complex systems were submitted, due to the resurgence of slime (yet again!) in the honours lab.
oct 11, 2002: at scotty's 21st, vinnie, one of scott's mates, arrives and asks him "hey my brothers are playing this game on the net and i was reading this story about it and there's something about a scott brown... is this you?!" and scott goes "yeah yeah, you know danno, that's him too, and the guy who wrote it is coming tonight as well!" so vin gets excited and quin got to meet him later on when he finally arrived from woop-woop. and that story is actually this story, so you're in it now as well vinnie :)
oct 18, 2002: final of slime tourney 6. wedgey wins a close game against scott, breaking away in the last minute to win 26-23.
early 2003: one slime gets over 30000 hits in a day for the first time.
january 2005: garrett, my champion pool playing partner from a recent overseas tour, emails saying "Hey, do you happen to know anything about a computer game called slime volleyball? I'm asking cause I saw on the bottom of the screen that the game was creating at UWA by three guys and one was named Daniel Wedge. Maybe i'm crazy though." mate, you're not crazy, you've just earned yourself a place in slime history! catch you in nyc soon :)
august 2005: i got a heads-up that there's a wikipedia article on slime... omg... all we need now is for someone to update the UWA wikipedia page, and say that it's the uni that "the slime guys" went to :P
october 2005: one slime moves to oneslime.net. farewell tartarus, and we thank you.
september 2020: i finally moved one slime to html5!
