Clusterball is an action-sports game that plays out in a three-dimensional graphical environment. The player controls a sci-fi aircraft and maneuvers environments based on the Arctic, the Taj Mahal, Stonehenge and other locations. In Clusterball, the player must collect as many balls as they can from the playing field then fly them through a ring in the center of the stage to collect points. Various weapons and power ups are strewn around the stages, enabling players to steal their opponents' balls or invert the controls of the other player, making movement much more difficult. The balls lie on magnetic ramps and the aircraft must slide on these ramps to collect the balls. As the player tows more and more balls, which create a tail behind the aircraft, the aircraft becomes gradually heavier, therefore more vulnerable to enemy attacks. The game was designed to enable online multiplayer gameplay.
Development
Origins
Clusterball began as a research and development experiment at Daydream Software. Initially, it was spearheaded by company co-founder Jörgen Isaksson. The project derived from Daydream's worry, according to the team's Nigel Papworth, that the production pipeline used by its titles Safecracker and Traitors Gate was "too costly and time consuming to be a viable long term solution" for the company. Development began in early 1997. In designing Clusterball, the team sought to create a unique online multiplayer game without violence, as Daydream did not release violent titles. The company told investors in June 1997 that "feasibility study and research" was underway for a game codenamed Project 3, later revealed as Clusterball. A prototype had been created by that time to test the game's technology. They settled on a combination of sports and flight simulator gameplay, with elements of racing and inspiration from the gameDiamond Mine. The design was also driven by a desire among certain Daydream employees for "a game where you could fly around in a landscape and see very far" into the distance, according to the team's Matti Larsson. Clusterball was started concurrently with Traitors Gate and was developed side by side with that game. When asked how the team initially came up with the idea for Clusterball in an interview with Eurogamer, Daydream Software's Nigel Papworth responded with "We sat around and discussed what we thought were the greatest aspects of real life games and computer games, and concluded that ball games rule in real life, flight sims in the digital universe. The conclusion was to build a flight sim ball game!"
Release
The game was released on July 17, 2000 for both PC computers and as a downloadable title off of Real.com. Plans for a Mac OS X version of the game were announced but later scrapped.
Reception
Legacy
A sequel to Clusterball called Clusterball Arcade was released for iPhone by Resolution Interactive, a teamconsisting of ex-Daydream Software members.
