Awesome, Clonk fans on HN! To this day, I don't think there's any game series I spent more total hours in than Clonk. Also starting in 1998 with Clonk 4, especially with one particular friend from school, we played these sometimes every day for hours, all through Planet, GWE, Endeavour, and Rage (did I miss one?). As far as splitscreen multiplayer is concerned, it's still one of the best and most versatile computer games ever written, in my opinion. Bastard of a learning curve, though, which is why I never managed to get anyone beyond that one friend hooked, and I stopped playing it when our life paths started diverging... :(

I also remember Matthes Bender as more of a distant, benevolent ruler keeping the project running but staying very much in the background. IIRC by the time Clonk 4 came out he already had his consultancy going, so he was probably glad to offload the community stuff to other people.

By the way, Clonk is still going: there's OpenClonk, as well as an open-source continuation of the original Rage branch. Even the CCAN is still online!

Nice, a dedicated Clonk player. My obsession didn't last as long. Many years later, King Arthur's Gold scratched a very similar itch: https://kag2d.com/en/ The community is very small now. Peak was 10 years ago, but still an excellent multiplayer game.

I think it must’ve around '98 when I played Clonk 4. I even downloaded some custom assets via an Internet cafe to floppy disks to play with them back home. The mail was actually a physical letter. Maybe the devs became more active later when internet communities started to grow.