About the Timewarp Crew

Back in early 2005 a small mapper called Swanky had the idea of pulling out a small, yet high quality mappack for UT. With work-arounds, forum announcements and months and months of hard work, this first mappack was named Flags of Time mappack, by the Timewarp Crew. The former Crew were me, the idiot who had to do all the administrative works, PR, betatest, quality assurance and stuff, milb, who did the very first version of the homepage, Revelation, who assisted in betatesting, Fragnbrag, that guy who always comes too late just to give you the most awesome maps for your package, Derdak2rot, the hardworking Frenchman who submitted two maps for the very first FoT mappack, as HortonsWho and Koeckchen, who both submitted one map each.

Reactions were great. I had achieved what I was aiming for - a high quality mappack.
A few weeks after the re-release (there was a patch), we thought about different scenes, different maps and different styles and we finally opened up our minds towards a second mappack, that started out on a much larger scale given the easier gametype we wanted to map for and the preplanning phase. The package grew so much that we had to release the whole bunch of maps in two turns, Frags of Time Vol.1 and 2. It took us nearly half a year to bring this baby out the door, but again, comments and critics were mostly positive.

After we did the two most popular gametypes, we had a small break, not knowing what to do. A little bit more than one year after the initial release of Flags of Time, we felt we really had achieved something through hard work: three releases of three great pieces of work, contributed by some of the best UT mappers by that time. We had discussions about further gametypes, but we were unsure about which gametype we should choose, and we finally made our minds up towards Domination, a gametype that is very hard to balance, and that has a lot of small things to take care of.
JohnnySix joined us in the progress, introducing a new kind of Controlpoints, ControlLights and details in one systemfile that became almost a new standard for gameplay-relevant eyecandy.
Also, Wolf the scripter joined us with a weapon mutator which I originally opted to release with a small single player campaign which was unfortunatly never finished.
Unlike this episode, the third incarnation of the FoT series, Fusion of Time, a Domination only mappack rolled out our factory. This was the first time someone did a high-quality Domination ONLY mappack! Yay!
I thought it would also be the last time I was leading the Crew as my RealLife started to bug me with army services and such - nothing to waste any more words here.

However, FragnBrag took over the job as a leader. By that time the Crew involved more than a dozen members, people as paranoid, Revelation, Rakiayn, FragnBrag himself, cooloola, milb and many more that are well known by now.
His plan was to live up to the standards and release a fourth pack - with Assault maps only. This was truly the most difficult job to do. Assault is known for its complex and difficult mapping progress, just as hard as it is to balance off properly. In fact, it was so hard to pull off that he changed his mind towards including different gametypes, and so more Deathmatch maps and even one more Domination map found their way in the Crew´s fourth project. Finally, in December ´07, the second volume of the FoT IV was finished - over a year in the making.

As stated somewhere above, I thought Fusion of Time to be the last mappack from me. I was wrong as I am so often. Although I didn’t really want to release or lead another FoT mappack, it was me who initiated the fifth instance of the Crew. We are hoping for a release in 2008.
I also gave cooloola the permission of using the FoT title for a UT3 1on1 mappack. I’m curious how it turns out.
After that, the FoT series will seemingly come to an end. I´m unsure about future plans. People come and go, and so do their ideas, but maybe the Crew will come together again, and may it just be for another simple, small mappack, or may it be something big. We will see.