tramdesign.net

About

After becoming very involved with the game Kingpin: Life of Crime, Paul “Tunnleram” Ille decided to design custom levels to release to the community and, in turn, TRAM Design was created in 1999 to serve as a place to showcase those levels.

The Kingpin scene was great. It was raw, fun and I don’t think I’ll ever play a game that can match it in terms of memories. I made a lot of extremely good friends during that time and was happy to contibute to the community. – Paul “Tunnleram” Ille

In late 2000, it became clear that the Kingpin scene was thinning out. Several projects meant to build on to the game, fell apart as did their teams and it seemed in the course of just 2-3 months the player counts were cut in half. It was at this time, TRAM Design went beyond creating levels and decided to develop a modification that could potentially keep the existing players around and maybe even bring a couple back.  Paul “Tunnleram” Ille formed a team to do just that and in early 2001, that team released CRASH Squad.

The “Crash” mod was exceptionally well done… – Greg Goodrich, Xatrix co-founder and later vice president at Fox Interactive

CRASH Squad had some great success. For several months there were a handful of packed servers and for a while clans were even forming for competition.  Unfortunately, however, everything must end and as the end of that year approached, so did the release of Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

It was natural for the move to RTCW because Xatrix, the creators of Kingpin, had formed a new design shop called Gray Matter. They were the developers for RTCW so it made things somewhat familiar for us. It was unfortunate that the rest of the team that helped me create CRASH Squad never stuck with the transition. – Paul “Tunnleram” Ille

Within the excitement of the RTCW release, TRAM Design developed the very first custom multiplayer level for the game and positioned itself directly in the middle of the level design community. After a few level releases, the idea for a new modification was born and once again, Paul “Tunnleram” Ille, started to build a new team to work on a much more ambitious project called DeGeneration.

To be continued…