Controversies
Before publisher Take-Two Interactive released Battlecruiser 3000AD in September 1996, it had generated one of the longest and largest flame wars in the history of Usenet. This flamewar lasted for several years, garnered over 70,000 posts, and yielded a series of sites that documented and parodied its history.
Smart and Take-Two advertised that Battlecruiser 3000AD used a neural network to perform artificial intelligence tasks in the game. However, this claim has been criticised as highly improbable by other games designers. In one article in a computer games magazine, Keith Zabalaoui, former NASA programmer and one of the designers of the Close Combat series of strategy games, was quoted as saying, "I have a hard time believing it's in there... the concept of training to do the complex tasks required in a game is inconceivable. It's mumbo jumbo. I guarantee you that if there's a neural net that does anything in this man would be in the Computer Science Hall of fame."
Upon its initial release of Battlecruiser 3000AD, the game contained many bugs that made it unstable, according to a GameSpy.com reviewer, who asserted that "Smart consistently overrates his own products and his own abilities." For his part, Derek Smart claimed that the buggy release was the responsibility of Take-Two. After the initial release, Smart issued several patches and upgrades for the product over the next few months, and eventually a final patch was released to fix some of the major bugs. In February 1998, after obtaining publishing rights from Take-Two, Smart released the game on the Internet for download free of charge.
Derek Smart filed a lawsuit against Take-Two (who also released the game in the UK through a sub-license deal with GameTek) for alleging breach of contract. The lawsuit was later settled out of court, and both parties released statements of resolution in late 1998. Smart regained the rights to the game via the settlement. He continued to develop a new version through his personal company, 3000 AD.
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