Part of the following story is flawed. I'm leaving it here for
humour purposes. For a more truthful depiction of what really happened,
read the bottom of the page.
Once upon a time, an alpha of Sonique 2 was leaked (note: this isn't the
alpha/beta that was available for a while in the the official
Sonique page. That beta - now dead too - was developed by the new
development team. The alpha here was developed by the original team).
I remember Sonique fans were completely hysterical about this alpha. They
went to great lenghts to shut down every site hosting it, supposedly out
of fear Lycos would drop development because of this high treason. The
real reason, of course, is that they wanted to be the only "kool boyz" to
own such a rare tool and flaunter it in front of helpless newbies that
badly wanted it too.
A good image of how things were dealt with those days at the Sonique
forums can be depicted by
this protest article that was posted at one of them.
Unfortunately for them, a copy landed in my hands. In yet another attempt
to prove my theory that "once something appears on the Internet, no amount
of effort can take it down", I hosted it, accompanied by a very crude
page, at my university server. And so RareWares was born.
So here it is for you. The rage-inducing Sonique 2 alpha in all its
unfinished glory. The interface is quite bloated, matter of factly, and
functionality is minimal. Maybe I am not really into eye-candy overkill...
If this was the future of Sonique, it is not a surprise it completely
bombed.
Ah, yes. As it turns out, Lycos noticed they were just wasting money
with their Sonique division and decided to fire all developers. An
outcry ensued, and they hired two new developers to continue Sonique 2
development. Soon after, though, they realized they owed nothing to a
handful of squabbling nerds with too much time on their hands, and
finally let Sonique die a (mostly) peaceful death.
If you are looking for old, official versions of Sonique 1, look at The Museum of
Sonique.
Date: 2001-29-06
Version: 2.0 alpha
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: sonique2.zip - 1.531kB
Andrew McCann himself stated/requested/pleaded that the leak needed
to be stopped (as he was in negotiations to buy Sonique2 from Lycos), the
leak could have potentially screwed things. (BTW it was leaked only
accidently by Tony Million as he left it in a open dir on his private
(yet publically accessible) home server @ http://www.tonymillion.com))
So it was nothing to do with fanboys trying to stop the world getting
it.. it was merely holding back the leak until after negotiations had
finished..
Secondly, the skin in the leaked alpha was merely a working demo and
never intended to even ship with the player.. ever.
Thirdly Lycos sacked all bar Andrew and Ian.. Lycos did not intend to
kill Sonique ever.. when Andrew and Ian quit on their own accord, Lycos
later decided to locate more people to develop a program they never
actually tried to completely kill (they merely needed to cut it back)
Of course all said is only to the best of my knowledge (I was there
the hour the alpha was found on Tony's ftp, I was talking to Tony when
he said it was an accident but added (in the direction to the likes of
Andrew and co.) "at least someone had the balls to release it" (or
something close to that))
I was there when Andrew requested the leak to be stopped as soon as
possible as it was potentially making things much worse for Sonique (he
said it via the forum, IRC and ICQ, plus his girlfriend at the time Anna
did as well, who BTW was the one who originally broke the month long
silence about the mass layoff of Team Sonique).
Of course I am not Andrew or Tony or Ian and can't speak for them.
But my story is about 100x closer to what really happened compared to
yours (I am confident my version is rather accurate)
To conclude the epic Sonique tale... Tony wrote Tuniac after he left
Sonique (http://www.tuniac.com, or for a more recent compile go to
http://www.wasteofcash.com/tuniac/)
Currently we are lazy, and Tony believes he is now a photographer not
a programmer. Blur is MIA. Tuniac2 with an OpenGL GUI, SQL database,
etc, etc. is like 10% done (and for a month.. or two... has had no
updates)