Smiling Gator did its best but fell prey to harsh economic times. Fans of the Florida-based company received disappointing news at the beginning of the year. All of this happened in 2006. A statement printed on the website informed fans that it was shutting down.

Former executives from Time-Warner decided to develop their own first person shooter MMO in an attempt to compete with Sony Online Entertainment’s Planetside. The planned game, After the Fall, never saw development, although some other company may pick up where the After the Fall developers left off.

After the Fall is not the first MMO that failed despite high hops. Tabula Rasa made it onto the shelves before the company succumbed to financial woes. The MMO market is currently glutted with many different offerings. Eve Online, World of Warcraft, and Star Wars the Old Republic will continue to dominate the market.

So, what is an MMORPG, what is an FPS, and what is an XORG? An MMORPG stands for Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game. World of Warcraft still stands as the ultimate MMORPG: Just ask Chuck Norris. FPS stands for First Person Shooter. At the time, Half-Life 2 was the last word in FPS. Call of Duty probably holds that title now. Finally, XORG stands for Extreme Online Role Playing Game. Smiling Gator’s game sought to create an innovative gaming experience. Smiling Gator wanted to do more than just capitalize on the MMORPG craze. They wanted to advance gaming.

Unfortunately, no playable demos of Twilight War: After the Fall were ever released. The game stands as an unfinished potential masterpiece: Smiling Gator closed up shop in 2006 after two years of development. Perhaps some new developer will take up Smiling Gator’s baton and make the XORG everything it could have been. As the future of gaming looks to independent developers more than ever, only time will tell how the face of online gaming will change.

While the game’s stunning success was at its peak, an upstart company named Smiling Gator licensed the Half-Life 2 engine, which was called The Source. The goal was to create a first person RPG that would blow the immensely popular World of Warcraft out of the water. The game was called Twilight: After the Fall. The Florida company plugged away for two years, attempting to match the stunning success of Half-Life 2. In 2006, however, the company shut its doors.

What happened in this developer’s story? How did Smiling Gator create such massive buzz (Twilight: After the Fall even had fan fiction created for it), only for the game to turn into vaporware? The verdict by some was competition”World of Warcraft, smelling competition from an upstart, crushed them. Others said that inadequate funding was to blame. Whatever the cause, Twilight: After the Fall stands by many, unlike Half-Life 2, as the greatest video game never produced.

Described by its original creators, Smiling Gator Productions, as an “Extreme Online Role-Playing Game,” Twilight War promised fast-action combat, player-versus-player battles, story missions, vehicles to commandeer, a barter system, factions that players could join, and loads of exploration, all taking place in a game world that could support thousands of online players at once. The game was to take place in an expansive environment partially decimated by an apocalyptic event known as “The Fall,” and populated by humans, mutant creatures, and an alien race seeking a new home world.

The game’s official website remains live, and the background and screenshots it features hint at what Twilight War might have been. Images from the game show players exploring lush-looking forest, urban, and desert landscapes, encountering creatures both biological and mechanical. Descriptions promise players the chance to customize a wide range of character details, including skills, attributes, and mutant or human race, and the ability to apply those traits to a variety of game situations, combat and otherwise.

Sadly, gamers may never get to experience the world of Twilight War, but by all indications it looks as if it might have really left its mark on multi-player online gaming had the developer not been forced to abandon it.

A desktop environment is different from an operating system, because it simply provides the interface for accessing programs. Operating systems are the engine that contains programs and determines precisely how those programs will operate. It is possible to install different desktops and switch between them, without affecting the programs and files of the operating system.

X.Org was founded in 2004, although it builds on work from previous projects. It continues to use code developed by independent contributors, and the nature of it being a non-profit organization is that anyone may offer code to be apart of the program. Any code that is used becomes the property of X.Org, in the sense it is protected by a freeware license that allows anyone to use or modify it, except for integrating it into a proprietary system.