MINERVA - read-only archives

Heh. I'd completely forgotten that brief attempt at a multiplayer offshoot of Parallax - it would have been aligned with the Natural Selection backstory, thus would've been set in the pretty distant future. And had no effect whatsoever on past events.

Think of it as a minor, intellectual excursion - an alternate future without the Combine, as it were. (Nobody outside of Valve would have even heard of this 'Combine' thing at the time I wrote that stuff, anyhow.) Therefore, Someplace Else doesn't refer to ns_sugarlump, and nor does anything else. Although ns_sugarlump would have referred to the whole Parallax backstory thingy, which also got 'borrowed' for MINERVA...

(Oh, and Incident Two was going to be a mini-map-pack for Opposing Force, but that too grew out of control. Set in the mid-nineties, and was what Someplace Else was babbling about!)

That greatly clears up some questions. Still, details are revealed about Someplace Else in the fragments, the problem is just figuring out which parts of the story are part of the MINERVA storyfamily and which parts of the story are just part of Natural Selection.

Incident Two was set in nid-nineties, and Parallax in 1974. That clears up some stuff, a shame none of the mods made it to the final stage.

Oh, and if ns_sugerlump still is on some harddrive of yours, or screenshots, I'd really like to have a look.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that little question I asked. ;) Also: A straight answer from Adam? Gasp! (Well, okay, I know he's fairly reliable about "you're actually not looking at the right material', but ...)

Also: it really says something about this discussion that, out of sixteen bullet points in Sortie's post, precisely one was known for certain, based on self-evidently unambiguous text by Adam. ... come to think of it, I'm tempted to say that's actually pretty good for this discussion ...

In addition I had the fun of searching for forgotten information all over the Internet, and actually finding something that even Adam forgot, and then making silly theories out of it. It was, however, fun to see how deep this MINERVA story-family goes, seems like the backstory was all planned out in 2001, and the is even older.

So much material, forgotten. We really need to expand Ace's list with all these fragments we've found, a central portal to all MINERVA-Related information ever found.