Tweet
SpriteEdit
Initially, there was no immediate need for the source code though. Sure, there were a number of bugs that the fans couldn't fix themselves, but a number of them could be worked around, while others could be tolerated. However, as time progressed, more and more complex and powerful mods were released by the community, that demanded more and more of the official game engine. The MedMod and first version of the Apolyton Pack were (at least in some aspects) rather primitive and conservative in how they changed the came compared to later projects such as Dale's Ages of Man! and Peter Triggs' Call to Conquest (not to mention some ambitious projects that never really got off the ground, such as MrBaggins' Poor Get Richer project and Locutus' History of the World mod). Many ideas had to be implemented using the scripting language SLIC, but powerful as it is, even that has its limits. It became increasingly obvious that the changes the community desired to make required changes in the game engine itself, something which wasn't possible without either support from Activision or access to the source code.
Defence of France ReconsideredSo a number of people attempted to write letters to Activision and to start petitions, requesting some kind of further support from the company in the form of source code, new development tools, documentation, etc. But in the rare cases where these attempts even came so far that they reached Activision, not much ever came of them. Then, in late 2002, the Democracy Game virus infected the CtP2 community. A lot of modmaking activities were put on hold, or continued on a low pitch, while everyone joined in on setting up the first CtP2 Democracy Game. It was soon decided that a recurring theme in this Demo Game would be the lemur (or 'leemur'), the favourite animal of former Activision designer Winnie "St Swithin" Lee and sort of a running gag throughout the history of Call to Power. Of course, the Internet is after all only a small place (and because Peter Triggs had email contact with former Activision programmer David "Pyaray" Ray, who was still in touch with St Swithin), so it wasn't long before Miss Lemur herself popped up to thank the community for the honour (and went on to become somewhat of an Off Topic regular).
Defence of France Reconsidered (2)With St Swithin (or st_swithin), and later also Pyaray active on Apolyton again, it was only a matter of time before the umpteenth attempt to get the source or other resources from Activision was noticed by former Activision (lead) programmer Joe "Mr Ogre" Rumsey himself, probably the only man in the world capable of helping us. This attempt, started by The Big Mc, was quite a good one: I don't think anyone was ever more persistent than The Big Mc and ever got any further. His first email was sent somewhere in March or April 2003, and he only stopped once Mr Ogre took over in July. He (eventually) managed to get one of the contact centre guys to do some serious asking around and give us some real answers (though not the ones we wanted to hear), and even got so far that a written (snail-mail) letter to the Activision legal department was being prepared by the Apolyton community. That's when Mr Ogre stepped in, and used his knowledge and contacts to see what he could get done at his former employer. Some considerable lobbying on his behalf accomplished that he was eventually allowed to take a copy of the source code and remove all the comments from it (to avoid any embarrassment or (legal) problems for anyone involved), so that the code could then be released by Activision. After having completed this no doubt formidable task (in his own time!), Mr Ogre submitted the result back to Activision in September. A little over a month later, on 28 October 2003, Activision's Doug Pearson wrote history by sending the code to Apolyton.
Or won't ever. 
