A brief history of Liero

Liero - originally envisioned to be a top-down-view game - eventually came out as a clone of MoleZ, a similar subterranean shooter game featuring moles instead of worms. The game was first published in 1998, in the Finnish "mbit" computer game magazine by Joosa Riekkinen. It quickly became a popular pastime in Finland and even won some “game of the week” awards. It soon began spreading on the internet, particularly interesting the owners of low-end computers.

In 1999, Joosa became disillusioned with game development and decided to retire the game. Development stopped in January 2000 at the final version '1.33'. By this time a multitude of fan sites for Liero had already cropped up on the world wide web. The one which was to become the foundation of the community was "Wormhole - The Ultimate Liero Level Editor". The core of the site was the Liero editor Wormhole which let you convert BMP files into Liero levels, the Liero Blood Increaser which could set the blood spray all the way up to 32750%, and the Liero Graphic Editor which allowed users to create custom skins for the worms and projectiles. The community began to blossom on the Wormhole guestbook page.

In the following years, the community moved off the guestbooks and message boards into the new heart of the community - The LieroNet Forum. Participation spiked and several new editors saw the light of day, with the most groundbreaking of them all, LieroKit and LieroHacker by Gliptic (Erik Lindroos). This new breed of editors could penetrate much deeper into the Liero game files and allowed editing weapons, changing the palettes, and altering of the physics of the game.

Simultaneously - a somewhat separate community evolved in southern Poland with the prominent clan “Liga Liero”. The polish community quickly outgrew the international community, but due to the language barrier its strength never truly carried over into the wider world.

The next generation

The next step in the evolution of the game was the development of the first working clones. The most notable were Wurmz! by Patrys, LOSP by Gliptic, LieroXtreme by JasonB and Gusanos by Basro (Mario Carbajal), and let's not to forget NiL which was the very first clone of the all, and the first Liero for Linux, but was not widely played. All these projects took the game their own slightly divergent directions and with most of them being highly moddable, some with multiplayer features. It is also worth mentioning that innumerable clones projects were begun and abandoned by as many individuals, including 3D clones, Wii versions and anything you can think of.

The most successful of the clones, LOSP was eventually developed into OpenLiero, which in 2007 was renamed “the official new version of Liero” when released as Liero 1.34. Unlike the other clones, OpenLiero was meant to be an exact simulation of the original Liero and still requires the original game files present in order to run. The idea behind it is to preserve the original game feeling but to allow the game to run properly on modern systems, and other platforms, and removing some notorious bugs. After some deliberation, new game options were added, such as the replay recording feature, new game modes, player profiles and eventually a restructuring of the game menu.

In 2011 Joosa was approached by arand (Martin Erik Werner) with questions about licensing. It turned out he was making yet another clone based on the OpenLiero source code. The goal was to remove all proprietary content from the game so that it could be included in Linux packages. His version, aptly named lierolibre was released in 2012 and was adopted in 2013 as one of the promoted game versions on Liero.be, so as to give the avid Liero enthusiast complete freedom of choice.

While the community has mostly vanished into the world, many old sites still survive the tooth of time. Most of the old community content created between 2000 and 2005 can still be found through way-back-machines, Google searches and not-yet-dead links on the Liero sites you may come across. The most important surviving sites are presented above in the resource section.

The Internet Age

One of the great talking points in the early era of clone-making was "network play". Many developers attempted to create online games, but only LieroXtreme really had any noteworthy success. But while it did have many fans it differed greatly from the original Liero and the purists remained restricted to the horrors of meeting people in real life in order to play a good game of Liero. This would however change abruptly in 2019 when long time Liero community member Basro (Mario Carbajal) combined the networking engine of his other game, the popular football game "Haxball" with the source code of Liero. Cowabunga! The wonderful world of Liero is now available for anyone to play with an unlimited number of friends, and an assurance of absolute mayhem!