Rebuilding Titanic: Part 1 - Early Titanic Projects (Patreon)

By Kyle Hudak

A Quick Note

Some of us have spent years recreating Titanic, much of that time with Titanic: Honor and Glory. This is the story of how we got here, from my perspective. It will focus primarily on the process of building the ship, research and mistakes made along the way, key events of project and on the paths that led some of us on the team to THG, and a few diversions into related areas. I'll also briefly discuss some of what led up to THG, including Titanic: Lost in the Darkness. I'll try to include a good deal of work-in-progress and otherwise rare or unseen images from the course of the project. I'll be glossing over a ton of stuff, but I hope to at least paint a map of the project from before its inception and into the future. I will post this in parts, with those after the first couple being early access for Patrons.

So What's All This About?

People have been obsessed with Titanic since the day it sank. Much ink has been spilled about why, so I won't bother with that. Suffice to say, there are a lot of odd folks out there with a strange obsession over an old liner. But there's a subset of Titanorak that's obsessed with on thing in particular: Exploring Titanic. We want to explore every room, try all the knobs, walk all the decks. This despite the fact that, at the end of the day, Titanic was just an ocean liner. A boring one to boot.

Similarly-styled rooms on the Oceanic (left) and Olympic (right).

Titanic was part of a long line of Harland and Wolff ships that tended not to buck the system. Titanic's Lounge was just a copy of ones from previous vessels. Same for the Smoke Room. The Dining Saloon chairs and tiles could be found on other ships that were arguably even fancier.  Most of the corridors and cabins had standard, simple white paneling and exposed steel ceilings. And then there was Olympic, the nearly identical sister of Titanic. Titanic doesn't even rank near the top for some ocean liner enthusiasts.

And yet, some of us are completely enamored with this ship. Even before 1997, before 1985 even, before the world of digital modeling, there were those looking to recreate the ship in some way. Library archives which held the original blueprints of the Olympic Class ships were practically plundered by modelers and researchers of all sorts looking to be the ones with the most authentic recreations, to the point that some of those plans today can't even be properly digitized due to their fragility. Others just made do with that they could find, some building giant models. One such person is Father Roberto Pirrone, who spent 5 years as a teenager building a huge cutaway model of Titanic which is now on display aboard the Queen Mary. Decades later, Fr. Pirrone would start building a whole new Titanic model.

www.occatholic.com/master-shipbuilder/ - Father Pirrone with his Normandie model.

So why do we care so much about running around this vessel, and why do some of us obsess over every detail? Why do we debate the colors of fabrics and carpets and woods, even the color white? Why do we do this? Well... who knows. What can be said for sure is that many of us on the THG team grew up with this interest, from the post-wreck-discovery rush of new information to the effect that one 1997 film had on the Titanic world. We grew up playing the one good game that was available, watching the documentaries, building the model kits, and wanting to wander the ship. Maybe even watch it sink. What I want to try to do here is answer one simple question: How did we get here? Maybe the "why" will also become clear.

1996 - CyberFlix Started It

In the mid-1990s, Knoxville-based game studio CyberFlix began working on the tentatively-titled “Titanic: A Journey Out of Time” with the goal of creating a game like no other. Set on the doomed liner with a sinking that played out in real time, the game would feature a vast swath of Titanic for the player to explore, as well as a gripping story with world-changing stakes and a host of odd (and sometimes creepy) characters.

While perhaps not as obsessed as certain others are about accuracy, CyberFlix wanted a reasonably accurate Titanic. They enlisted the help of William Broyles, Jr., screenwriter for Apollo 13, to dig up research material for the game. Later on, CyberFlix would also bring in Titanic historian Bill Sauder (who would later go on to help with Titanic: Honor and Glory for a time) to assist with accuracy. Photos found online, primarily through the Library of Congress, were a major part of what they had to work with.

Still, the Titanic of what would become Adventure Out of Time was imperfect and incomplete. In one instance, they had copied the design of Olympic’s Turkish Bath, not knowing it greatly differed from Titanic. It was already far too late to change when this was discovered - they had to get the game done sometime, after all. And while there were some photos available, there certainly would have been a lack of material on the lesser-known and photographed parts of the ship. Paired with artistic license, this would result in a ship that was a bit fancier than the real thing. Corridors with velvet wallpaper, a carpeted Scotland Road, and other very odd locations.

A Typical 1st Class corridor in AooT with velvet walls and carpeted floors.

There was also a sense that things were missing. Absent dining saloons, a Lounge you could only access during the sinking, a Library whose sign you could see but which you could never enter. Countless doors with jiggling knobs. Most noticeably, the game was effectively in 2D with pre-rendered environments. This on-rails approach was necessary for computers of the time, but it limited your ability to get a good look at things. As amazing as the game was (I spent many nights at a family friend’s house using their ancient PC to play the game while eating PB&J sandwiches), it left you wanting more as a Titanic explorer.

AooT's representation of an E Deck staircase.

But in 1996, just before Cameron’s Titanic swept the world, it was pretty much the best Titanic experience you could get, one that’s still great today, and one which would inspire many more projects as computers got more powerful and the tools to create things virtually became more widely available.

2003 - “The Complete Titanic Walkthrough Project”

There's probably no shortage of digital Titanic projects that have been attempted since Adventure Out of Time. Some may have been just exterior models, or limited interiors. Some may have been for specific purposes besides exploration, or personal projects not meant for public consumption. Other projects were more ambitious, with goals along the lines of creating the entire ship. There may be countless old projects that most of us will never know about, either because they went unseen, never progressed far, or were lost to the electronic ether where even Wayback Machine cannot reach. Of these projects, an early one I happened across had popped up (as many of these projects do) on Encyclopedia Titanica. 

Early images from Krinn's project, including a mock-up of an intended information display system.

On March 15th, 2003, Encyclopedia Titanica forum user Kevin Krinn posted a thread about their new work-on-progress Half-Life mod, a Titanic walkthrough project with a stated goal to “map out every room so you can explore the whole ship.” It featured only a few images, but Krinn would continue to post updates over the next months. After a year-long hiatus (apparently due to taking up a career as a truck driver), Krinn briefly returned at the end of 2004 to continue work on the project, which was apparently now being developed as a mod for the new Half-Life 2.

After another year-long absence, Krinn returned again in early 2006 to state that they had restarted the project from scratch, taking advantage of the Source Engine’s various graphical features like lighting and reflections, though a sinking was off the table due to concerns about how the engine would handle that. However, the project seems to have never been finished (Krinn’s last post was in May 2006), though a website still exists showcasing a few images from the project.

2005 - Titanic 3D

Titanic 3D's Grand Staircase, complete with a theater.

In 2005, an online 3D chat platform called ActiveWorlds Europe (a contender for what one may call the early “metaverse”) added a virtual Titanic to their lineup of worlds. It consisted of a pretty basic exterior model with low-resolution textures, a simple (and very inaccurate) Grand Staircase, and a whole ballroom complete with a movie theater. The virtual ship also had a few other spaces that, of course, had no resemblance at all to the real thing, mainly serving as either places to walk around or as a shop and a museum. Despite this, it was still one of the first experiences available for free online that people like me would end up using.

ActiveWorlds Europe would go on to launch a new version of Titanic 3D in 2012 with some heavy involvement from yours truly, which I'll talk about a little more in a later post.

Early 2006 - Titanic-Story

https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/discus/messages/5919/132777.html?1220280936 

In January 2006, Daniel Mechling revealed Titanic-Story, a project that promised to let you explore the ship along with a story whose premise wasn’t obvious. Mechling stated that they were working on modeling Titanic’s interiors while someone else was making the exterior.

The project seemed to have crawled along for some time, with some demo releases and a handful of trailers and soundtrack videos going up over the years.

A memorable 2007 trailer promised "the most detailed Titanic in 3D ever made." It's unclear to what extent Mechling was looking to recreate the ship, but it was clearly being done with a certain attention to detail, albeit with a few liberties in lesser-documented locations.

https://www.tumblr.com/titanic-story-blog - WIP image from 2013, 7 years after work began.

The project was eventually put online as a point-and-click Flash game allowing you to “walk” around a limited part of the ship, though the version that’s online seems like it’s missing some content.

Mid 2006 - Ship Simulator

In August 2006, Dutch developer VSTEP released Ship Simulator. The game was by no means a Titanic one, featuring a number of different vessels, but Titanic was included. The model was a moderately-detailed exterior with an extremely barren (and textureless) 2nd Class Staircase allowing access to the aft decks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8PDtlSwTAs 

There was a basic Bridge with the usual instruments, but you couldn’t really sink it and there just wasn’t much to do or see once you did a few rounds on-deck. Still, it was probably the best playable model of the ship you were going to get in full 3D for the time. The 2008 sequel also featured the same model with no real improvements aside from a new deck texture.

Late 2006 - The Mafia Titanic Mod

On September 11th, 2006, another ambitious Titanic project would begin: Robin Bongaarts’ Mafia Titanic Mod, a mod for the 2002 game Mafia. Bongaarts had been pining for an explorable Titanic for some time. Not satisfied with what had been on offer so far, he decided to start building something himself with the goal of building the entire ship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcpaMXCUxsA 

The Mod underwent a lot of improvements in quality as it progressed over the years, with more people joining the effort later on. Even I would end up becoming involved for a few years. The models always seemed to be changing, with many different iterations of exterior and interior models. There were several versions of the Grand Staircase (including one made by me), and gradual updates to assets as research and skills improved. In the Mod's later years this would happen less, with spaces finally being finished to a satisfactory level.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/mafia-titanic-mod/images 

As far as early Titanic projects go, the Mafia Mod is probably the most impressive and has gotten the farthest. It’s in 3D, it has NPCs (who all start to fight each other with chairs across the ship if you engage a certain Easter egg), and it features a whole bunch of rooms across the ship. There’s even a bit of a story there. For being based in a game from 2002, it also has a pretty decent level of detail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgDdQ4oc8Pw 

The Mafia Titanic Mod saw its first release in 2021, 15 years after development began, and can be downloaded and played now, so long as you have a copy of Mafia (the Steam version will do just fine). Bongaarts and the team really managed to pull off something special with this project. And the best part is that now, over 2 years after the first release and 17 years since it began, it’s still being worked on with the hope that more of the ship and additional features can be added in the coming years.

But by the time people were crashing Titanic into things in Ship Simulator and Robin Bongaarts was starting work on his mod, someone else with a Titanic hankering was just getting started on something that would help lead to where we are today…

Continue to Part 2: https://www.patreon.com/posts/97880017