The History of ARC/Spark

The game of ARC has evolved surprisingly little over its long course of history. From TEN to WON to Sierra, and now to Spark, the game of ARC has proven itself as one of the most durable games of all time. Though such a lack of evolution has perhaps been detrimental to its popularity, it has also, no doubt, been the source of its incredible lasting power.

ARC was originally developed by John Vechey (jv) and Brian Fiete (bf), and has been a cult hit since before 1997. It was hosted on a server rented out by Hoopy, and clients ran it via hfront (Hoopy Front End). Jv and bf then took ARC to Total Entertainment Network (TEN) in 1998 for its 1.0 release. About a year later, in 1999, TEN ceased to exist, and ARC disappeared with it.

But in December of 1999, World Opponent Network (WON) acquired ARC, and attempted to make it a source of income, by adding ads into the game's interface. However, this idea never took off, and in 2001, WON also went under.

Sierra Entertainment acquired WON, which also hosted many other popular games, such as Counter-Strike. Sierra's bold move once again allowed ARC to stay alive longer than its owner. ARC was updated a few times by Sierra, but these were only security patches. In 2002, development was handed to a community member called err0r. Due to lack of cooperation from Sierra, no patch was released for years, and after a long time of waiting, err0r resigned his position in 2005, handing leadership of the admin team to Goose, one of the first players of the game, and Sonique, a prominent admin.

In 2007, Sierra Entertainment posted a news release on their website expressing intentions to terminate multiplayer support for several Sierra titles (including ARC) as of August 16th 2007. Fortunately, a player called Remote had begun developing a replacement clone of ARC, which in due time became known as Spark. Remote ran Spark on his Codemallet servers, alongside other games he had developed, Battle City and The Odyssey.

In the beginning, Spark looked and acted almost exactly like ARC, but as time wears on, and as new content is continually being developed by devoted players, Spark is beginning to evolve in new ways of its own.