2; action meets adventure, you get Tomb Raider. We said, 'OK, there is no action meets strategy yet'". To solve the display issue which makes combining the action and strategy genres difficult, the development team created an interface which combined a first-person, in-the-field viewpoint with a 3D topological radar and transparent drop down menus which allow the player to monitor and control the battle situation at all times. The game's artificial intelligence was reused from Dark Reign: The Future of War. Battlezone was released by Activision on March 11, 1998. The game went gold on March 5, 1998. Expansions In 1998, Macmillan Publishing released Battlegrounds, an authorized level pack for Battlezone, after conducting a contest in which players submitted their own creations. The pack contains 45 Instant Action missions, and 52 multiplayer maps, provided with a new utility for launching and managing maps. Also in 1999, Macmillan Publishing released the Team Evolve-made addon pack for Battlezone: The Red Odyssey. This expansion contains a new single-player story arc pitting the Chinese Red Army forces against both their allies, the CCA, and their enemies the "Black Dogs". The "Black Dogs" were a roughed-up, beaten-up offshoot of the NSDF with the reputation of ending up with the toughest missions. The Chinese forces introduced both Portal technology that allowed travel outside the Solar System and a 'Cloak', which hid their ships while disabling weapons. In 1999, a Battlezone Gold Pack was released which includes Battlezone, two authorized add-on packs: The Red Odyssey and Battlegrounds, and an official strategy guide. Nintendo 64 port In 2000, Crave ported the game to the Nintendo 64 under the name Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs. Compared to the PC version released a year earlier the game includes an additional Black Dog campaign distinct from that of The Red Odyssey, but the multiplayer is very limited. The game features a standard deathmatch mode where up to four players combat each other and a number of computer-controlled bots, a race mode where the objective is to navigate from one beacon to another for a set number of laps, and a strategy mode in which players choose three computer-controlled bots to assist them and simply attempt to eliminate all other players. End-of-support Last patch for the PC version was 1.4 released in November 1998. In 2002 the multiplayer support ended and Activision shut down its servers but released the source code