FireTeam

• Developer — Multitude, Inc. • Director — Art Min • Producer — Bill Money • Designer — Harvey Smith Ned Lerner • Platforms — Microsoft Windows • Genre — Action Strategy • Modes — Multiplayer

• Illustration — The original FireTeam box. The game has three offline training sessions for player to familiarize themselves with the basics of the game. The rest of the content can only be played in the online multiplayer. The multiplayer consists of short matches with a time limit of 10 minutes each. There are four different game modes for the matches: Deathmatch, BaseTag, Gunball, and Capture the Flag. Players pick one of three characters to play in the game: a light-armoured scout, a commando, or an offensive oriented gunner. The chosen class can be switched while the player is dead in the game. The game initially contained 32 maps separated by the four games modes, but intended to add more maps to the game in the future. Between matches players can talk in chat rooms to strategize. Included in the box with the purchase of the game was a headset for use with the game's real-time voice chat.

FireTeam was designed by Ned Lerner, Art Min, and James Morris (creator of the Panasonic M2 graphics libraries, programming tools, and operating system). The gameplay was a deliberate attempt to adapt the dynamics of MicroProse's X-COM series to a real-time environment. Early news coverage of the game tended to center on its ability to let players talk to each other online without voice modems, and Multitude acquired patents on portions of the voice technology. The developers ran a 40,000 person beta test before focusing on the voice technology, turning FireTeam into Firetalk. A single-player campaign had been planned, to be developed by the just-founded Irrational Games, but this was dropped before release.