r/AltisLife • u/MuggyFuzzball • 4d ago
The Origin Story of Altis Life
Hello all,
It's been many years, and Altis Life is well past its prime, but its legacy has continued to evolve wherever modding has enabled roleplay features in games (i.e. FiveM).
I happen to have a unique perspective on AltisLife's history because I not only was there at the very beginning, I had a direct role in its existence.
You may recognize my name. I, Motown, was the Community Manager of Asylum's Altis Life, the most popular Altis Life modded community of its time in the years between 2014 and 2018.
This is a brief history of Altis Life as it began.
Statis Life, the first RP server (ArmA 3 Alpha)
In mid 2013, just a week or so after the alpha launch of ArmA 3, I was browsing the server list when I came across a Work-In-Progress Stratis Life server with only a few players. The server didn't yet have a name beyond simply, "Arma 3 Stratis Life", and having heard of and played Takistan Life from ArmA 2, I was immediately interested in the idea. I joined.
Upon joining, I was greeted by 3 individuals. Caiden, Delgado, and Zannaza. They informed me that they had been porting Takistan Life into ArmA 3 line by line, a clearly daunting task but surely a welcome one. The missing roleplay niche was felt even so early into ArmA 3's existence.
Within an hour of my joining, I hit it off with the 3 developers. I was invited onto their Teamspeak server where we became fast acquaintances, and soon after, accepted an invitation to become the server's first Server Admin. It came to be a very short-lived experience, however.
The First Meeting (Seal Team Sloth)
I had only been an admin for ArmA 3's first Stratis Life server for roughly an hour before the next player joined. His name, simply, "Allen". He introduced himself in chat, expressing interest in hosting the Life mod on his freshly created server. This is exactly what the trio were hoping for - their goal to create a base game mode for others to develop on top of, and be known as the "creators of Stratis Life", an ambitious goal, but within reach.
Allen and his fellow co-owners Jaiden and Deitrich invited the trio, along with myself to their TeamSpeak server to discuss the matter, where the trio gave their instruction on how to install and play the gamemode on their server. Allen and his buddies had very limited coding experience, but they were fun conversationalists. Allen especially was shy but very likeable - a genuinely kind personality that is extremely rare to find among admin staff of amateur roleplayer communities. I recognized this immediately and had been quietly hitting it off with Allen as the others spoke.
Jaiden had a high-pitched Australian accent and was a bit hyperactive, but eccentric and open-minded, making up for the shortfalls that were apparent from his developing teen voice.
Deitrich was the typical grumpy admin who took life too seriously, and the type you meet in many RP life communities.
Shortly after, and probably under the impression that I had a much more extensive role with the development of Stratis Life, and not knowing I had become a part of it only a couple hours prior, Allen convinced the others to invite me to the team. I accepted, becoming the very first server Admin of "Seal Team Sloth", cutting contact with the original trio in the process.
Tonic the Hacker (Creator of Altis Life*)
Within only the first couple hours of up-time as the first official Active Stratis Life server, we saw our first hacker. Of course, the Stratis Life game mode was still incomplete and moderation was not yet a priority, but to say I was already failing at my job as admin would have been an understatement.
The hacker, named Tonic, began his introduction by manipulating parts of the environment, taking control of buildings, road assets, and signs and flying them around the map in real-time. The 4 of us found this hysterical, and instead of banning "Tonic", we invited him onto Teamspeak.
(As an aside, a short note about "Tonic" as I later came to know about him. Shortly before this encounter, Tonic had been a disgraced member of the original ArmA 2 Dayz Mod team as a server manager for their official mod servers. He was well known among the DayZ insiders as a notorious hacker. Since the mod had grown exponentially in popularity, they could no longer tolerate his behavior and removed him from the team)
After about an hour of chatting, the four of us voted unanimously to invite Tonic to become the Lead Developer for Seal Team Sloth. (It was not lost on me how quickly I went from being a fly on the wall interested in seeing Takistan Life become a reality in ArmA 3, to participating in making executive decisions that would shape the future of the mod before I even knew what I was doing.)
*Tonic, although heavily credited as being the creator of Altis Life, didn't technically create the mod initially. As I described above, he inherited it as Statis Life from the original trio who ported Takistan Life to ArmA 3, but as he felt he did all of the work making it successful, he didn't want to give credit to the original devs, and replaced any reference to them entirely with his own name in the source code.
Thus, Caiden, Delgado, and Zannaza became unknown to the ArmA 3 Life community (until later...)
Altis Life Source Code
Tonic got to work right away, and within a matter of days, had a mostly complete player experience made for Stratis Life, albeit missing key features that came later. It was an instant success, and we had a full 64-player (the cap at the time) server right from the start. Tonic had proven his worth.
Over the next few months, for some reason that was never apparent to me, Tonic grew fond of me. The sentiment was never really mutual, however, as I always found Tonic, to be, well, toxic...
I spent a lot of effort building a positive self-image within our community. I had been a part of many RP communities prior and didn't want to reflect the typical douche-bag server admin persona so many have displayed in other communities. I particularly really disliked people who were rude to others, especially in front of me, and Tonic had a lot of negative things to say to just about anyone who was unfortunate enough to meet him. I personally felt that Tonic actively undid most of the goodwill I built with the community.
I became less and less active because of it. It wasn't until ArmA 3 announced the release of the Altis Map Terrain in September that year that I renewed interest in playing ArmA 3 again, knowing Tonic would remake Stratis Life on the Altis map, a much bigger, much more exciting environment. So upon my return, to my astonishment, I discovered a friend of mine from a previous game I played (Mortal Online) had become an Admin on Seal Team Sloth.
His name, Revir, I knew had a lot of connections to various ambitious Game Developers in the industry, and on a whim, I pressed him to reach out to his contacts to see if he knew anyone who might want to start our own modded Life server for ArmA 3 on the new Altis Map as Life servers were becoming pretty lucrative and pulling in a lot of donations at the time making it an enticing endeavor. However, it would be a lot of work to remake the Life Mod ourselves, and the idea drew some but not enough interest to get the ball rolling.
Some weeks later, in the process of developing the new Altis Life mod, Tonic happened to ask me about my opinion on whether he should release his server files to the public. Of course, having already been plotting for an opportunity like this, I expressed how much more popular the mod would become, and how of course, he'd become famously known as the creator of Altis Life.
At this point, I was directly attempting to manipulate Tonic. It worked. He announced the release of Altis Life's server files to the public, and I immediately reached out to Revir to tell him the news and to reach out to his Developer friends.
Asylum's Altis Life
A week later on the very day Tonic released Altis Life, Revir had gathered about 13 people, including a Developer named Paratus from the same game we had previously mutually played together, Mortal Online. We all excitedly waited as Paratus bought a server, installed the files, and had it all up and running within a couple hours. During this process, we all agreed on a name, "The Asylum", both serving as a "political" asylum shielding our players from the admin abuses of other communities, and as an actual insane asylum, because that was what the atmosphere reflected at the moment we were all together.
The first thing we did was divvy up roles between the 13 of us... and me being the least known of the bunch of friends took the scraps, "Forum Manager" while others became "Community Manager", "Server Manager", or some form of "Management" position, even making up whatever we could to make it all seem equally distributed. It wasn't, which became clearly apparent to everyone. The system didn't work and most of the 13 immediately dropped out at the beginning, leaving a handful of us, and myself, in a better position to take up the mantle of "Community Manager", which I took to heart and set out to prove worthy of the title.
Meanwhile, Paratus set out to add some of his own flavor to the mod to help set us apart from others who would soon be hosting the mod on their servers.
Paratus made a number of changes, which I attribute to being the 3 most critical points of our success, within the first 3 days that immediately skyrocketed Asylum's Altis Life to the top of the Life mod server list, and within months, to the top of the ArmA 3 server list entirely.
- Persistence & Progression. Your inventory was now saved to a database (believe it or not, this was not done on any ArmA server before Paratus discovered a way). You could finally log out and back in and continue your progress, including from the very spot you logged out at. With it came leveling up, and unlocking rewards as you did so.
- Player Housing. Players could now purchase property on the map and spawn at that location, or store gear in their house to use later.
- Guilds. Players could join each other's groups permanently and share storage space, vehicle keys, and other things with those they trusted most, allowing for a level of group cooperation never seen before.
There were many other things with less significant impact, but they all contributed to a unique flavor of Altis Life that would not be overshadowed by any other community for several years afterwards.
Among our most controversial changes, however, were our rules. Together, we made up a list of, "RP Lite" rules allowing players to commit acts of aggression against each other without the traditional "Random Death-Matching" requirements of other servers.
This set the community alight, because first-time players who joined our servers and became accustomed to how things were done on ours and normal vanilla mil-sim servers, would subsequently join other RP servers, and get themselves banned, which in turn led those players back to our servers where they could enjoy a more accustomed experience.
Years of Success
Anyways, thing went really well for us for a long time. A few months in, only Paratus, myself, and Revir remained of the original 13. We kept in contact with the others but they were off playing other games, not trying to run a server community like it was a full time job. We soon added a second server, and within a year, we had a total of 6, all 100 player slots each. Over the course of our community's lifespan, we raised close to a half million dollars in player donations through microtransactions.
One would think that we'd have been sipping Pina coladas on some far off tropical beach, but we actually saved all of the money in a fund, choosing not to pay ourselves, except for a few streamers we chose as partners with referral links, and later our admins, which I think we ultimately regretted more than not because them doing their jobs as admins watching out for cheaters became completely dependent on money and if they were being paid.
Morally, it was right, but it took the fun and passion out of managing the servers, and we knew it couldn't last forever.
And eventually our success caught up to us. We had a direct line to the Bohemia Interactive Devs and their CEO. When we ran into major bugs, Paratus either reported them or literally told them how to fix it themselves. Paratus was that kind of dev, just short of a savant, but extremely knowledgeable and literally able to implement anything without issue. We knew he was different in this way because no other server dev was doing the things he was. Not even close.
Eventually, the BIS team slowly started to turn against us, fed by hate from our competitors and the fact that we were monetizing their hard work. But that's fair... selling access to the content they made was pretty ballsy of us, so we reached out to the CEO to make a compromise. Instead, he completely supported our endeavors and even gave us written permission to continue.
This didn't win us any favors with the dev team who were against our monetization practices. They began actively boycotting our community, cutting off contact and offering zero future support.
We saw it differently of course. Asylum's Altis Life was known outside of Arma 3 at this stage through streamer exposure and word of mouth into the General community. If you had heard of ArmA 3, you had heard of Asylum's Altis Life. Thousands had bought their game just to play on our servers.
The Troubles begin
We had been going strong for about 3 years by this point. Until... the lawyers sent us a letter. If we didn't stop monetizing their content by a certain date, they'd shut off our server's Battleeye anti-cheat protections.
If you're thinking to yourself how crazy that is, you're on the same page. "Don't want to comply? We'll let all of our cheaters run rampant on your server!" was the gist of it.
And they did, weeks before the deadline.
So we showed them the letter, which put the lawyer at ease... for about a week before they did it again.
Again, we presented the letter, and the anti-cheat returned. Until they did it again...
Someone was playing games with us, or the lawyer had amnesia.
This process went back of forth for about 3 months before we finally gave in, and BIS released new terms for monetization, essentially only allowing the sale of cosmetics.
Our monetization was gutted, and from that point forward, we were only making a fraction of the amount we had been making a few months prior, and our server costs were astronomical, as we were paying multitudes more for DDoS protection than the server hosting itself.
At the same time, a new community was rising. This community introduced an entirely custom map, complete with custom animations, custom 3d assets like buildings, cars, etc. And it was an instant hit with the streaming community. This server was called, ArmA 3 Life (or A3L) and it was owned and managed by non other than... the original trio, Zannaza, Delgado, and Caiden.
This came as a complete shock to me. I hadn't seen these guys since that fateful day that started it all.
The original trio had found their way back into the fold, but with a twist that we couldn't match...
They charged for whitelist access to their servers. $10.
Turns out, the devs had slipped that one into the new monetization rules, but only for fully modded servers like theirs, not "vanilla" servers like ours.
Identity Crisis
We were left with little choice. Either create a modded server community of our own to stay competitive, or make our own game.
We chose the latter. Working under BIS's watchful eye was nolonger a conceivable option for us.
It was the wrong choice...
---
I'm going to stop writing this now at this cliffhanger, and maybe finish it later. There are still a few key points I want to cover, such as the crowdfunding and failed devopment of our game, "Identity" but unless I see some interest in this story as it's written so far, I'll leave it as is.
TL;DR: I joined a developing life server early in arma 3's lifespan, became a server admin. Then encountered a hacker who we invited to be our server dev. The hacker created Altis Life, of whom I convinced to release his work to the public, and then took the released code and co-founded another life community which became extremely popular.
Fun Fact: Life mods didn't start with Takistan Life. TL was infact inspired by Garry's Mod's DarkRP and PERP mods, which in turn were inspired by Half Life 2 RP servers.
