Welcome To Bonk 3: Arena

Posted in Anno Domini Mon Oct 16 2023

Was reminded by somebody of Bonk: Brink of Extinction, a cancelled attempt at doing a western-developed entry in the Bonk/PC Genjin franchise back in 2010 or so for the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii's respective small-downloadable-game services. Supposedly the game was finished when the sword was put to it, although exact reasons have yet to be confirmed - some people suggest the then recent 2011 Tohoku Earthquakes and the game's natural-disaster theme (the story revolves around a doomsday comet) sealed its fate, while others ascribe it to Konami's acquisition of Hudson Soft and shutdown of Hudson USA. Developer Pi Studios shut down around that time too, although whether that was a cause or a result of the cancellation remains cloudy.

Anyway, the prototype's out there and it's about as good as you'd expect a western low-budget sequel to an extremely Japanese platformer franchise to be (ie. not very). Out of curiosity, I looked it up on The Cutting Room Floor and discovered something bizarre: Apparently this is based on the Quake 3 engine?!

Naturally, I had to investigate.

The first tip-off - and really, it's less of a tip-off and more of a smoking gun held by a blood-spattered man in a "I KILLED THIS DUDE" t-shirt - was a file in the core game archive called productid.txt, a text file simply reading:

This file is copyright 1999 Id Software, and may not be duplicated except during a licensed installation of the full commercial version of Quake 3:Arena

...which is used by Q3A for various copy protection purposes (ie. to stop using the demo version with the commercial data files to bypass the CD-Key check).

The other is a lot of the file formats still being the same. Config files are the same as ever, menus use the UI scripting system from Team Arena, maps are BSP, everything's in the places you'd expect.

The one oddity is the model format, where character models typically use three files: A md5mesh file that only contains the header for a valid MD5 model (the Doom 3 model format), and a bmd5mesh and bmd5anim file that are visibly different from their Doom 3 counterparts. A techy friend of mine theorizes that these are a version of MD5 that was crushed down from plaintext to binary to speed up loading. Which makes sense, this thing was supposed to be a WiiWare game and the Wii wasn't the fastest system on the block.

Curiously, there's no mention of Id or their engine technology anywhere player-visible, including the credits. Which is strange, because Id was and remains a strong stickler for getting their credit, to the point of the modern Call of Duty games still crediting Id for engine technology despite having Ship-of-Theseus'd the entire thing by this point. One has to wonder whether this was officially licensed or slightly on the DL.

Which leads into the next question: Why the hell would you use Quake 3 for a 2.5D platformer? Well, that's actually the easy question. The developers, Plano-based Pi Studios had done a lot of Id Tech work throughout the years, including on the early CoD games, and had recently shipped Quake Arena Arcade, an Xbox 360 adaption of Q3A, so they were clearly pretty comfortable with the tech. Why reinvent the wheel, especially when all the other wheels were still crazy-expensive?

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that this prototype is a Cursed Artifact. Thank you for reading this post and chewing up two entire megabytes of your limited mobile bandwidth with that GIF up the top of the page.