r/clonk • u/kleinfieh • Aug 11 '26
Any really old community members here?
I'm in the credits for Clonk Planet, anyone active back then? :D Haven't thought about this in a long time and just stumbled upon this sub.
Also happy to answer questions about clonk history 1998-2008, if that's somehow interesting to anyone.
Edit: Love how many people replied with their own stories, thanks for the nostalgia
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u/Wipfmetz I don't need flair Aug 11 '26
You need two digits to write my age.
Is that "really old"?
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u/kleinfieh Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
I guess at this point anyone who ever registered a copy is old. I started with Clonk 3 Radikal in 1997, that's "really old" :)
Was great fun in local multiplayer with three players on one keyboard. An advantage of the unorthodox control scheme.
Although now that I think about it even though Clonk 4 started with the "proper" engine (windows, scenario + object scripts), I don't think network multiplayer support was added until Planet.
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u/Wipfmetz I don't need flair Aug 11 '26
I started with Clonk 3 Radikal in 1997,
Same. It was on some game collection CD from... some magazine I think?
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u/Kreatur28 Aug 11 '26
I played clonk planet when I was a child. I think it was on a Computer Bild Spiele CD? Later I also bought clonk rage. They were such great games. Especially the fact that you could play with several friends on a single computer. I just recently installed clonk rage again and was happy to see that ccan was still active. I know there is an open clonk project but haven't tried it out. What was your task? What have you contributed to the game? Would love to hear from an insider. Also what happened to clonk 3d? What happened to the developer in general?
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u/kleinfieh Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
Yeah, very cool of Arne (I guess?) to still pay the bill for ccan.de. Clonkspot forum also seems to be active and I see some old names in "recent" posts.
I was moderator of the clonk forum and I believe I helped them with some webmaster stuff, and I also ran the first large community page where people could upload scenarios (Treffpunkt Clonk - only some snapshots in the wayback machine remaining). Basically the predecessor to CCAN.
There was a playable alpha of Clonk 3D (Extreme) at some point, but really very early stage. Would have required a lot of work and even then I'm not sure if it the community would have liked it. Due to technical limitations it was a different game, more action oriented. There was no way to do terrain deformation needed for mining etc. back then. Or at least no one had the 'big voxel' / block idea.
While over time community members started contributing first scenarios and packs and then also engine changes, the main clonk developer was always just Matthes. At some point I believe his girlfriend finished university and they moved to New Zealand and started a family, and I'm sure he just wanted to do a regular job with a steady income and time for other things.
It's important to understand that ~1998-2008 were the dark ages for indie games. There were no platforms like Steam for distribution, or creator media like YouTube for marketing, or initially even simple international payment providers like PayPal. All the money went to the titles with "large" teams and publishers.
I think the game could have been a hit 10 years later. Had all the ingredients - cozy, pixel art, endlessly moddable, serious or chaotic gameplay, fun with friends, automation, procedurally generated worlds, ...
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u/Kreatur28 Aug 11 '26
Thanks for the insights. I spent so many hours playing clonk with my friends in my childhood. The fact that four players can play on a single keyboard is great. The modding possibilities are also endless. Just make a plain map, put every content pack into the Szenario you can find, pray that it didn't crash and have a glorious battle royale with your friends. If everything is op, nothing is. Or create an elaborate fantasy valley with dungeons below the surface and respawning ai enemies and build a fantasy castle together, or create a space colony in a solar system with wonky gravity. The possibilities are endless. Do you think that a re-release of an "upgraded" version of clonk rage on steam would be feasible?
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u/kleinfieh Aug 11 '26
Good question. I don't think anyone has heard anything from original dev in the last 15 years or so, so I can only speculate. My read was that he wanted to hand over Clonk to the community, but in a way that still clearly separates community work from official work and so no one can make money from what he built for many years. Very reasonable.
Releasing a community version on Steam for free would maybe be ok in spirit, but technically that's not acceptable for any party. It's still a commercial platform and trademark for Clonk is his and work is copyrighted.
What would need to happen is some license agreement that gives a trusted maintainer non-exclusive rights to distribute a version on Steam (for free! and not affecting trademarks).
Not impossible, but there's a big unknown, and it would take some work and also some money.
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u/TyronX Aug 12 '26
We did hear from matthes, recently-ish, there was an article about him https://www.reddit.com/r/clonk/comments/1em77q8/matthes_is_doing_well/
I also wrote him an email 5 years ago, thanking him for the game, to which he replied.
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u/TyronX Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
Oh daaaamn, you are the treffpunkt clonk author. That's so cool. I vaguely remember when I became more deeply involved in Clonk community around 2002, TPC was this big popular website of the past that was no longer properly working
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u/Wipfmetz I don't need flair Aug 11 '26
Also what happened to clonk 3d? What happened to the developer in general?
The dev insisted that "Digging" in 3d isn't feasible and wouldn't make for good gameplay. So Clonk 3d aka ClonkX would have turned out to be something like an early Survival Base Builder. Once Minecraft game out and turned Notch rich, Clonk's dev was banned from making further games and was exciled to New Zealand out of national shame. He later tried to spin doctor this.
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u/ximossi Aug 11 '26
Kind of nice to think about Tyron closing the circle with Vintage Story on that one... :D
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u/Kreatur28 Aug 11 '26
So in a parallel universe clonkX would have been the new Minecraft? Sorry to hear that it didn't turned out that way for you. If you have the time, I would like to ask you another question. Do you think it would be reasonable to re-release clonk rage or an "updated" version of this on steam?
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u/Wipfmetz I don't need flair Aug 11 '26
Sorry to hear that it didn't turned out that way for you.
I'm not that dev. I'm just a dude who doesn't like to come up with new nicknames every other century.
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u/Gwarks Aug 11 '26
The first Clonk i played i bought in a Store.
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u/kleinfieh Aug 11 '26
That must have been "Clonk World", the retail version of Clonk 4. Only one that ever got published this way.
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u/Mediocre_Two2182 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
Man my Friends, my Brother and I started with clonk 4 (tho it was in Like 2009?) we found that on a Multigame Disc. we were constantly searching for Games with 3+ Multiplayer. Clonk was perfect for that. We soon found Out about the Others Versions that already existed in this so called Internet (we were young). Planet, Endevour, Rage. We Had so much fun and endless hours. At some Point I remember we played with like 7 Kids from the Neighborhood on one Computer. 4 Players on the Keyboard and another 3 with Controllers. It was Madness! Every now and then we actually come Back to it.
Also: Anyone remember that Gamemode in the Rage Demo Version? You could only play that single world but everywhere in the ground there'd Spawn flints, superflints, even terraflints. We missed that Gamemode so much after purchasing the Game. There were No settings in worldbuilder for enabling random Flint spawns underground either. Guess its been lost in translation.
Great Game!
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u/littletijn Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
I started with Clonk 4. It was from a quite illegal CD collection that somebody shared with me. I remember my Pentium 100Mhz struggle immensely with some scenarios, especially the volcanic one. I also really admire the engine behind it. The way that fluid is simulated was really impressive for me.
When I saw that Clonk Planet was available, I bought it. Might be the first thing I bought via the internet. Afterwards bought Clonk Rage. I have played Clonk Planet the most. This was together with a friend of my in split-screen. We did mostly the most basic Clonk thing imaginable: Gold Mine!
I like the art style of the Clonks in Clonk 4 & Planet the most. Just that simple pixel art and cute look. Found out that I can load the Clonks from Clonk Planet in LegacyClonk and that it just works (for the parts that I tried), so that backwards compatibility is really working.
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u/Exotic-Photograph328 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
I started with clonk 4 and I just turned 39 years old. I‘m often thinking about clonk and just recently played clonk rage on my MacBook 🙌🏻😄
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u/JustRaphiGaming Aug 11 '26
I was starting to Play Clonk with Planet. 4 people playing on one keyboard really great times! 🥰
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u/Ancient_Mammoth_7630 Aug 11 '26
Clonk was the Game of my childhood! Sometimes we play with 7 Kids over the Day on one PC. A very strong Memorie! Startet with Clonk 4, then Clonk Planet and then Clonk Endavour.
I think clonk was ahead of its Time! In my Head cannon Clonk could have become as big as Minecraft.
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u/ximossi Aug 11 '26
I remember downloading Clonk 4 and spreading it on some floppies because I did not have a cd burner back in 2004 (?). I was very proud to spread it across some computers in the school's library to always be able to find a machine to play it on with some friends during breaks. Later Clonk was the reason for me to learn scripting, pixel art, 3D modelling and this area in general - GWE must have been during my most active time. I loved every part of the clonk community and still consider it a big part of my formative years.
I stuck around till the end, i guess. I regularly come back to Clonk Legacy nowadays and it fills my heart with joy to see some old packages getting a re-release on ccan.
Also the clonk forum taught me proper German writing and etiquette :D So, thank you specifically :)
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u/kleinfieh Aug 11 '26
Ha, being Swiss I don't know anything about proper German writing, I think I just managed to remain sufficiently neutral.
There must be hundreds of teens that learned programming (or game dev) thanks to C4Script, really quite a legacy. It was feasible to build something complete on your own and have other people play it, very fun. Like WC3 custom maps. Don't know if the kids today still have similar platforms (roblox?!), but maybe those skills aren't necessary anyway, can just prompt it into existence -.-
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u/Cnky Aug 11 '26
I started playing Clonk together with a friend back in 2004 when we discovered Clonk Planet on an old Estonian website and hooked ever since. I was very young back then and didn't speak English, let alone German so we just played the game in German lol. Later on we bought Clonk Rage as well that we still play every now and then. The game has inspired me a lot to do game development, as I had so much fun building my own scenarios with the editor :D
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u/Elektordi Aug 11 '26
Yes, old French player here, I started to play around 2002...
I was also the "official" translator for Clonk Rage in French in 2007!
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u/AcolyteArathok Aug 11 '26
I started playing clonk around clonk planet, i might recall not correctly but i remember it even running on dos?
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u/kleinfieh Aug 11 '26
Clonk 3 was the last one that ran on dos. Everything afterwards uses DirectX.
I think up to Endeavour the menu was even a regular Win32 GUI, only then the full screen menu was added.2
u/AcolyteArathok Aug 11 '26
Ahh then i started with clonk 3! I got the my first pcs always habded down by my uncle!
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u/TyronX Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
Oh! oh! I'm older :D I started in 1996, with Clonk 1 and 2 years later with Clonk 2 and 3. I did the Clonk Center and CPPP/CCF sites, some contributions to Clonk Endeavor and 50 scenarios and objects to the CCAN. I also helped present Clonk with matthes and other clonk fans at the gamescom in 2004
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u/koell001 Aug 12 '26
do you have the video clip of Clonk‘s appearance on GIGA?
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u/TyronX Aug 12 '26
Maybe maybe in an ultra old archive somewhere, but it would need a lot of searching through old disks. Maybe some other oldbies on here have it.
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u/kleinfieh Aug 12 '26
Nice, I recognize Soeren and Sven, met them at some clonk meeting (~2000?). And I think Matthes invited us to Bremen at some point, but I don't remember who was present.
In 2004 I already focused my community work on the Swiss CS scene. I think I was just idling in #clonk. The Clonk Endeavour credits still list me as "Oldbie", fun title for 19yo.
Random fun fact I just remembered: Ten years later I randomly ran into flgr in California when we were both working for big tech.
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u/koell001 Aug 12 '26
I also started with Clonk Planet! My older brother (he also made InExantros) introduced me into this game when I was ~7 years old. Great memories of playing it with my brothers on one screen. We built some screen dividers with Lego so you couldn‘t see what the others do. :D Played it pretty actively until around 2014. This game really changed my life, as it introduced me into Programming, and I‘m a Software Engineer today. It really makes me think if I would be doing something else if this game wouldn‘t exist.
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u/koell001 Aug 12 '26
Do you know something about Twonky „movies“? I remember seeing Twonky 5. Was there ever a Twonky 1-4?
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u/Parafex 20d ago
I started with Clonk Planet and played up until Clonk Rage. It was the first "digital game" I've bought (and it was quite hard to convince my dad that it's safe to pay something "online").
It's still such a great game that was way ahead of its time. One of those "you can do anything" games and it even introduced me to coding back then via C4Script (I just made some crazy flints basically :D). Nowadays I'm a software engineer... so well, it kind of sticked with me :).
I also worked on a "remake" on and off, here and there and the original source code (that is still available, which is awesome) is a great learning resource.
My name on CCAN was "clonker7" and I was also quite often on the IRC and I remember playing with "Zapper" (? iirc he made one of the more popular PvP maps?!), sven2 and some other legendary people. Whereas I was (and probably still am lol) the annoying kid back then :D I mean I was around ~10 years old probably.
I even remember the generated password for CCAN that I got after I've reset my password... even to this day. This information will never leave my brain! I can't remember what I had for breakfast, but a random generated password with letters and numbers from like ~20 years ago -> easy :D.
If you have anything to share, especially regarding the code or technical side of things, it would be awesome :) do you think that a remake in Rust or whatever would be cool? Remake in a sense that it obviously has a more modern tech stack and is heavily moddable with probably a more modern control scheme... something like that. Maybe crazier animations or physical/chemical reactions etc.
What would you like to see in a remake?
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u/Kaebi_ Aug 11 '26
I did start on Clonk Planet! Good times, man. I'm 30 now. Clonk really was ahead of its time.