the long-running grand TC becomes very visible
In September 2004 the website of the MP2-modding-project Mission:Impossible — New Dawn went online. But the mod was in the making for a much longer time, as it was started as a MP1-mod way before MP2 was published. The team had enough zeal to port everything they had done to MP2. And I can assure you that already a lot had been done, as now and then I was allowed to see ‘secret pictures’ illustrating the progress. The general approach of the team is as professional as it can be outside a game-developer company. I was shown screenshots of one map before and after complete reworking. The first version’s quality already was way above what the average mapper in the modding-community is able to accomplish. And there are only few modders who are willing to sit down again and completely work over a result like that. The whole team — the core of which is German-speaking – has a very long breath and now allows us a stunning glimpse into their work by releasing a teaser-trailer (refer to the links at the end for downloading).
    Like many other mods, ‘New Dawn’ follows the tradition of adapting a major action-movie, or series of movies; in this case ‘Mission:Impossible‘. The style, production values, and quality of the trailer reflect this, as it easily can be mistaken for a trailer of an upcoming silver-screen action-thriller. The fact that ‘New Dawn’ is a grand-scale real total conversion (TC) of a computergame gets impressively emphasized.
    A TC is a complex project which normally can not be handled by a single individual, as the workload simply is too big, and too many diverse expert-skills are required. There are highly skilled all-arounders in the modding scene, but the workload of a project like ‘M:I — New Dawn’ is absolutely not bearable by a single person. The shipwrecked and abandoned one-man TC-attempts are ample proof for this. Sometimes the failed single-handed sailors even are thrown into a personal crisis and leave the community or even online-interaction in general, at least for a time, sometimes forever. To be member or leader of a modding-team does not at all guarantee that those crises won’t come up. Again the list of failed projects is ample proof. (But this does not imply that project-failure is the only cause for frustration leading to crisis.) Prominent examples from the Max-Payne-scene are the cancelled single-handed attempt ‘Blade Runner: Evolution’ by well-acclaimed all-arounder StratonAce, and the current events around the team-driven project ‘Rogue Ops‘.
    On the other hand the corpus of work to be done for a TC allows the generation of creative ‘secondary products’, mostly in the form of machinima (the ‘New Dawn’-trailer is a perfect example). If this ‘offshoots’ are well done, they heighten the status of the maker and the whole team. The only limiting factors again are creativity, skills, and time-at-hand, which in turn are influencing the motivation and the degree of dedication.
    For years ‘New Dawn’ has maintained a strict policy of secrecy and in-team interaction and communication only. Material is only presented publicly when it meets the high standards of the team-members. This may well have heightened the team’s inner cohesion and prevented them from crisis.