History
From GXCWiki
Contents |
The Founders
GXStudios (the company behind GoCrossCampus) was founded by five undergraduates
- Matthew O. Brimer (Yale '09)
- Brad Hargreaves (Yale '08)
- Sean Mehra (Yale '08)
- Jeffrey Reitman (Yale '08)
- Isaac Silverman (Columbia '08)
The Meeting of the Founders
The "About" section of the GXC site contains this explanation of how all five friends met:
It was early May, 2007, and Isaac was on a month-long self-discovery camping trip in the woods outside of Winnipeg, Canada.
Early one fateful morning, a large tree crash-landed upon his tent just as he stepped outside to begin his morning yoga routine. Without a tent and having all his belongings crushed underneath a great deal of wood, Isaac decided to hike towards the nearest signs of civilization — which just happened to be a local indie rock carnival, where Jeff was working as a carnie operating a Log Flume near the concert stage. Jeff despised his job and would often modify the flow of water so as to carefully flood the boats of loud and annoying children.
On that same day Brad, having no knowledge of Jeff, was attending the very same carnival with his girlfriend... but found the cotton candy stand to be far more appealing than spending time with her. Isaac, having emerged from the forest and looking to shower for the first time in weeks, bought a ticket for the Log Flume. Brad, after gorging himself on boysenberry cotton candy, continued to evade his significant other by snatching a ride on the Log Flume as well. As it turned out, the tree that destroyed Isaac's tent was in fact the haphazard axe-work of Sean, who was employed as a lumberjack at the time in the same Winnipeg woods. Not realizing what he had done, but hearing off-key music and ironic lyrics blaring from the edge of the forest nearby, Sean soon found himself in a large crowd of Canadian hipsters nodding their heads vigorously to the beat of a song Matt was playing on the carnival stage.
Matt just so happened to be the the lead guitarist of Cloud Donkey and the Apathetic Laptops, the up-and-coming indie rock band headlining at the carnival. Unfortunately the fog machine exploded midway through their hit single "Pathetic Dialup Modems," the shock of which caused Jeff to accidentally break off the control lever for the Log Flume, which in turn unleashed the ride's entire water supply onto the nearby crowd. Brad and Isaac, coming across the final turn in the ride, were immediately launched out of the trough due to the extra surge of water, flying through the air towards the concert stage, only to be buoyed along in a crowdsurf of mash-pitting hipsters.
Matt jumped off the stage and joined the fray, and Sean was soon surfing above moptops and faux-hawks as well. All four eventually landed in an enormous puddle of water near Jeff, drenching him as he frantically attempted to recover from the watery chaos. The five young men stood up, wiped themselves off, and realized that fate had brought them together for a reason. Then and there, Matt, Brad, Sean, Jeff and Isaac decided to found a company. The rest, as they say, is history...
It is not unfair to consider this story with some amount of skepticism.
Game Versions
Spear
Spear was the codename given by GXStudios for the original GoCrossCampus software.
Gameplay
Similar to Risk, Spear gave each user armies to place anywhere on the map each day. Once the user had placed their armies, they could order those armies to attack or move at no cost. The amount of armies a user received was determined by a combination of whether the user had gotten a reliability bonus for logging in and placing five turns in a row, whether the user's team had conquered an enemy territory the turn before, and whether the team had reached a "recruitment bonus" mark. Additionally, all users could set up spy polls in the original inception of Spear.
Server Issues
In the fall of 2007, Spear suffered from server issues due to the fact that it was originally coded to work on one server and not multiple servers. This culminated on November 4, 2007, with the pause of the Rice and Ivy League Tournament after a whole team was unable to log in and place due to server issues.
During the break, the software was recoded to work in a master/slave configuration. After the move to new servers, GoCrossCampus began to resume in early December 2007 with the restart of the Rice game and the Ivy League Tournament 2007.
Longbow
Longbow was the codename within GXStudios given to a software change in GoCrossCampus. This update seeked to revitalize GXC by changing the interface as well as the gameplay by the additions of features like commander dossiers and real time movement.
Launch
Longbow was officially launched in early September 2008.
