History: from Attack Retrieve Capture to Armor Critical
Attack Retrieve Capture (1995–2007)
Attack Retrieve Capture (ARC) is a 2D, team-based online shooter. Two to four teams fly small ships around a top-down map, fighting with lasers and special weapons in capture the flag, switch and deathmatch modes. Capture the flag was always the favourite.
ARC was made in 1995 by John Vechey and Brian Fiete, two students at Purdue University, under the name Hoopy Entertainment. It was one of the earliest online-only action games. In 1998 it reached its 1.0 release on the Total Entertainment Network (TEN), where the pair met Jason Kapalka. After TEN, ARC passed to the World Opponent Network (WON) and then to Sierra.
In 2000 Vechey, Fiete and Kapalka founded PopCap Games, the studio behind Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies. ARC is the game that came before PopCap.
Sierra kept ARC running for years, but ended its multiplayer service on 16 August 2007.
After Sierra: the community keeps ARC alive
When the official servers went away, players kept the game going themselves. Community projects such as OpenARC and arc++ rebuilt and extended the game, and players made dozens of graphics and sound patches and a large library of maps. Much of that work is preserved in the ARC archive.
Spark and Armor Critical
Spark began as a community clone of Attack Retrieve Capture. Renamed Armor Critical, it has been around for more than a decade: a 2D top-down, team-based multiplayer game with challenges and ratings, true to ARC's style of play.
- March 2026: the Armor Critical open beta was released.
- Early 2027: a next-generation, 2.5D version built in Unity is planned for Steam.
Armor Critical is made by the Armor Critical team, not by iLogic, though two iLogic members are among the developers of the next-generation version. Its official site is beta.armorcritical.com.
iLogic
iLogic (Impossible Logic) was founded in 2006 by oTaCon and aTreYu as a clan for ARC and GunBound. It is still going, and today it plays Armor Critical, along with plenty of other games. See the roster and the games we play.