Hey old friends, and I emphasize the word OLD

Hello SJ and any other OGs from WON who may be lurking about.  This is bAr0n, I spaced out during registration and put in my last name as my user name lol (fixed! -SJ).  Anywho, hope you are doing well.  My life has been a crazy roller coaster ride since those late 90s glory days of swat2/swat 3 on WON.  I'm 49yo, father of five kids and fled my native NY 10 years ago and have been living in Alabama since.  All of this upheaval has not included much time for gaming, yet, swat 3 still holds a core place in my mind as one of the greatest and most influential experiences in my life.  Ironically, my 16yo who grew up watching me play swat over the years recently downloaded and installed it for fun.  Having not played the game in years (my computer situation has generally been terrible and definitely has not included a gaming rig), I fired it up once again for old times sake and it is still magic.

Then a funny thing occurred to me, we have pretty much arrived at the 25th anniversary of the first single player version being launched.  That really blows my mind.  Of course, it wasn't until 2000 a year later that the multiplayer was launched and I had the privilege of meeting SJ in the WON lobby all those years ago who I must recognize as the true hero of Swat 3 and SJ I am eternally grateful for your years of hard work preserving this triumph of human creativity for posterity.  All the Sierra devs and studio ppl who made the original game have long since rode off into the sunset I suppose, however, SJ is the one who has kept it current with Last Resort making it really enjoyable to play on my 24" monitor in high resolution with the upgraded textures.  So in my estimation, the original sierra dev team started swat 3 but SJ finished it and deserves to be recognized as such being on par with Mr. Rod Fung and that whole team.

After retiring from swat 3 I spent years playing counterstrike on my outdated desktop until fatherhood and my career ate up all my time and I hung up the keyboard once and for all.  But that is the real beauty of swat 3, it is like a parallel universe where 1999 never ended and I can travel back in time whenever needed to visit my old pals Tobias Stromm and Victor Getts lol.  After 25 years there probably is not much more left to say or do with swat 3 other than an old fashioned "hello" in honor of a pretty significant milestone anniversary.  SJ, I am so grateful to you for adding a lot of joy to my life through your hard work and tireless dedication.  There is still in 2024 a lot of young folks talking about this game and how great it was, and for that I give you all the credit.  Cheers to 25!!!

Hey there bAr0n! Nice to hear from you again bud! You have been busy compared to me with only two kids, lol.

We are definitely getting old, lol. We are reaching the age that a lot of people around us get health issues or have passed away. I still live in the same city when we first met online and I am still doing the same real life job (now mostly television shows though instead of full length movies).

Thanks for your complimentary post but people should remember that one of the reasons why I still love to work on Swat 3 and this mod is because I am really lazy, lol. I can't be bothered to learn new game engines. Swat 3 was designed to make mod work easy. I can satisfy my creative side in photoshop by working on new textures and by running this website.

Of course I love the game still but I love tinkering with it just as much.  There are many aspects about the game that I think are superior to modern games like Ready Or Not.

SJ, it is so awesome to get to chat with you again! I still remember way back on WON you telling me about your work in the film industry. I was fresh out of film school and had washed out of the biz after working as a PA (got sick of making coffee and hauling heavy film equipment all over NYC lol). I admired your persistence back then to stay in the biz and even more so today with all the upheaval in film, tv, etc.

It is so wild for us and everyone in our lives to be this old, yet still so young at heart. I don't think I will ever be able to wrap my head around it, perhaps a lot of it was all the chaos swirling around in the 21st century which makes that that late 90s/early 2000s era seem so appealing because it is the last time where the world seemed like a familiar place.

Probably the best aspect of Swat 3 was how the sierra devs really engaged the community and encouraged us to mod the game, it was about as close to being open source as a studio game could ever have been. Outside of obtaining the the original source code, which took on a sort of Indiana Jones holy grail quality in many late night chats, in a lot of ways sierra really left us the keys to the castle which I haven't encountered in many other games.

I know just what you mean about tinkering and sticking with classic software. To this day I still use photoshop 7, I learned how to use the CS versions for my day job, but prefer that version for personal use. It was such a wild time back then, activities like web design were so fresh and exciting in the early days of the web. I remember buying an HTML 4 book and later a javascript book and using that to build websites in notepad on my Win98 machine lol. Swat 3 gave me the inspiration to create some of my first websites, originally for a swat 3 clan and then Baron's Swat den.

My early career ended up being in software training and technical support so I had to learn a lot of programs that were popular back then just for my day job, but swat 3 was my entry point for one of my life's big passions, which is working with 3D textures. In 2000 I bought a program called Bryce for creating virtual environments and then poser for 3d characters. Suffice it to say that has been a very rewarding rabbit hole to go down!

Along the way I have found other amazing 3D programs that barely ever saw the light of day but did some really amazing stuff, yet my one major obstacle has always been not having learned to use a 3D modelling program. I have been able to teach myself 2D programs like PS, Illustrator, etc. but 3D modelling has been a brick wall where I felt like it was something I would either need to go to school for or get tutored in. Maybe I will get around to that when I retire lol

It is such a blessing that you have created this website and the LR mod to keep S3 current, here we are 25 years later and they still haven't topped our favorite game!

The reason I think I have been able to stay in the film/tv industry so long is my location. Toronto has it's ups and downs but generally there is enough work during the good times that even mediocre stupid people like me can get work, lol.

Over the years my attitude has really taken a dump towards this business and I would probably do something else if my job skills were transferable. Many producers and production managers really are scum bags and drain all the fun out of the job. Cinematographers can really be uptight buttholes too and think we are emergency room doctors that are saving lives.

The older I get the more I am just looking for a hassle free jobs. I look for projects shooting near my home and that work no more than 10-12 hours per day.

I finally got my wife into playing 3D games (ie first person) and I spend a lot of my free time playing survival style games were her. It is very easy to get distracted and not touch the Last Resort mod for months at a time.

Currently I am working on Mission G (the construction yard) making AI upgraded textures and making a lot of new replacement textures. My youngest kid keeps playing with the source code for SCNedit to help make my life easier to edit the Swat 3 maps.

PS: I changed your username to bAr0n so hopefully it doesn't cause you login issues

It was always striking to me when I first started to hear about how hollywood was using filming locations in Canada because it was less expensive either due to government incentives and/or lower overall costs.  Everything in places like Los Angeles and New York has become so ridiculous that it makes sense to film in Toronto which is more logistically reasonable.  I totally relate to your experiences working with toxic people in the film biz, especially when the final product is complete garbage but somehow it pays the bills so inspiration just goes out the window.  My GF at the time who is my wife was working in the fashion industry after going to school for that around the time I had washed out of the film biz and it was the same soul crushing experience for her, there seems to be this "creative" industry attitude that it is a privilege to work in it and you are never going to finish paying your dues because there are a million people waiting in line to take your job blah blah blah.  Sad to say these horrible people make creative industries probably less enjoyable to work in than McDonalds lol

S3 is definitely a labor of love, as with any other creative pursuit you hit a brick wall and need to take a step back for a fresh perspective to reflect on whether there is anything left to be done which could be a period of months of even years.  What is great about all these years that have gone by is that S3 really has stood the test of time and seems like even more of a creative triumph today than it did back then because it set such a high bar which I really don't know if any other game has been able to match.  At this point I admire it as a true work of art much like a classic painting, sculpture, film etc.  The open nature of the game's architecture and the dev tools that were provided did truly make it the perfect sandbox that we may never escape!