After more than 10 years, the first major venture to turn gaming into a profession has shut its doors.

Effective immediately, the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) will cease operations. Therefore, all CPL events currently scheduled for 2008 are hereby canceled.

The CPL was launched in June 1997 with the pioneering mission of promoting and sanctioning video game competitions as a professional sport. For ten years the CPL events experienced increased growth - commencing with a small LAN event in Dallas, Texas, and culminating in world-class competitions across five continents.

However, the current fragmentation of the sport, a crowded field of competing leagues, and the current economic climate have prompted the CPL to suspend its pro-tournament operations. The CPL regrets that this news will disappoint those that were planning on attending the summer and winter events this year.

Many thanks to all of the sponsors and partners that helped CPL establish the groundwork for professional video game competitions. Their vision and pioneering spirit should always be remembered.

Counter-strike existed and thrived before the CPL, and I played CS competitively before it, as well.  But CPL brought CS competition into the spotlight.  While never really getting enough press and fans beyond other CS players and game sites, the CPL did generate a worldwide buzz that carried over into other games. They also helped establish a rulebase and a legitimacy for it being almost a sport.  I only competed in CPL events in it’s first couple years, but I remember them fondly.  It’s sad to see this phase of gaming die.

The father of roleplaying has left the building. I spent much of my formative years with the games he designed, and I thank him.  And for you youngins, every roleplaying based computer game stemmed from this guy.

I just read a long, but very to-the-point, thread by Michael Fitch on the Quarter to Three forums. The latest blow in a seeming barrage against the state of PC gaming. Michael is the Director of Creative Management at THQ, the publisher for Iron Lore Entertainment’s PC game: Titan Quest. ILE, just last week, closed operations for good. Even after releasing a fairly critically acclaimed game. Although, a publisher would probably rarely shoulder the blame of a studio failing, he makes some points on the state of PC Gaming and why good games and good developers have a hard time succeeding on the platform.

He brings up many of the same points as have been addressed before, and that have been brought to the forefront especially in the last few months. Number one complaint from developers, publishers, and industry gurus?

Piracy. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. No, I don’t want to re-hash the endless “piracy spreads awareness”, “I only pirate because there’s no demo”, “people who pirate wouldn’t buy the game anyway” round-robin. Been there, done that.

This follows several other smacks upside the PC head:

• a report stating that PC gaming piracy could represent up to 90% of people playing the games.
• An interview with Chris Taylor, where he states the “old model” of PC gaming is dead, and that a new secure gaming model is needed for the future of the platform.
• CliffyB’s statement to MTV that PC gaming will become secondary to Epic games… a gaming company founded on PC games.
• Infinity Ward’s blog confessing their amazment at the amount of pirated versions they detected when gathering online player stats.

This is a disturbing trend. No, not the piracy, but the disheartening comments from PC game makers. Piracy on the platform is not a new concern by any means. I remember well the early days of PC gaming. Before most PC’s had hard drives, and we were lucky to play in 4 colors (CGA). Yes, I remember having to turn to page 34 in the game manual to type in the 13th word on the 27th line before I could continue on with my grand quest to kill the odd magenta sprites with my blue 3-pixel-long sword. I also recall going to PC user groups long before a public internet existed, where we traded BBS phone numbers, and people would sell dozens of game disks. Game disks were all the pirated versions of current games they could fit on one 5 1/4″ floppy. We’d visit those BBS’s and there we would log on and play our turns on a usually pirated version of Tradewars 2002. No, that wasn’t in the year 2002, it was just named that. It was in the late 80’s. And it wouldn’t be the users pirating, it would be the BBS owner. And finally I remember the “dark books”. The keyed books that were of a construction paper color so dark as to thwart people photocopying the thing. I’m pretty sure I owe my aging vision problems to the brown Keef the Thief dark book.

(I really love to show my age for some reason.)

Based purely on my “feel” of the past and current age of PC games, I thought piracy had improved. Honestly piracy was almost the accepted norm back then. I remember walking home with my $50 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the galaxy text based adventure. I had been saving for it, and bought it right when I saw it in the store. I come to find out that I may have been the only person I know that actually bought that game, and yet everyone had played it. The state of piracy, if anything, seems to have either stayed the same or slightly improved. And yet, PC gaming was still years from its golden years of Quake and Halflife… so how did upstarts like Id and Valve survive and thrive in such a hostile PC gaming market?

Just as I seek to delve headfirst into the gaming industry, with my goal of making PC games the rest of my life, now is the time I need more reassurance that the bottom will not fall out. Sure, I will always be there slogging away with my mouse and keyboard, but who will be with me?

There are a few rays of light. Shortly after CliffyB’s proclamation against PC development, he and his company became one of the founding members of the PC Gaming Alliance, along with Microsoft, Dell, AMD, Activision, Intel, Nvidia, Razer, Acer. This group vows to invigorate and revolutionize PC gaming, instead of allowing it fold into the chasm of consoles. In addition, the biggest game publisher, Electronic Arts, is testing the waters with a type of game immune to piracy: the free game. No one is more surprised than this former EA employee!

Besides, it’s not as if console games don’t have their own piracy problems.

• What are your obsolete gaming skills? » Has the advance of time rendered any of your videogame abilities redundant?
• Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys » Contrary to popular assumption, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at operating temperatures and even if removed from a motherboard.
• ‘Perry Bible Fellowship’ Comic Is Ending »
• Google Lunar Xprize » Google is offering $30 million to the first people to put a robot on the moon.
• Portal 2 Confirmed » On tonight’s episode of X-Play, lead designer for Portal, Kimberly Swift, confirmed that there will be a Portal 2. Video of interview at the link.
• Gene research may help explain autistic savants » Mice lacking a certain brain protein learn some tasks better but also forget faster, according to new research from MIT that may explain the phenomenon of autistic savants in humans.
• Austin Czech Historical Association »
• Self-healing rubber bounces back » A material that is able to self-repair even when it is sliced in two has been invented by French researchers.
• GetByMail » Remote Access & File Sharing by Mail
• Making your windows folder smaller!  »
• LitePC Technologies » trim Windows operating systems
• HDDVD is Dead - Toshiba Press Release » Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders.
• Samuel Adams Hop Sharing Program » Samuel Adams beer is selling their hops to microbrewers at just above their cost, to help alleviate the strain of the hop shortage on microbreweries.

Finally, a Guitar Hero for people who actually play guitar. Not to say Guitar Hero isn’t a blast, but there was always that twinge of something missing. That feel of actually playing the music. Now a development group called Gametank is releasing details of just such a game: Guitar Rising.

This will be a PC game, and it is due out before the end of the year.

Here’s the teaser clip:

Needing only a mouse to make broad movements, the OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA) was demonstarted at this years CeBIT to be able to control a player in Unreal Tournament without a keyboard or any other input. Reviewers were allowed to test the machine out at CeBIT, but sadly all the videos I have are not in English.

This thing could be even more impressive than the Wii controller if it really works. And it could be phenomenal if this were used in conjunction with the Wii controller. I really want to try this out. The brochure states that it should be out with a year, and that it will initially run around $300.

OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator PDF brochure

And here are some videos of it in action at CeBIT 2007.