 When five members of Shiny Entertainment 's MDK development team broke off to set up Planet Moon Studios in 1997 with software engineer , Scott Guest , they decided to make their first project fun and original , a game with graphics and gameplay unseen at that time . Nick Bruty , Bob Stevenson , and Tim Williams initially conceived the idea of pitting players as spacemen , pirates , and giants against each other and having fun . Initially projected for release in late 1999 , the game suffered delays to its development largely due to the illness of their chief programmer , Andy Astor ; he was suffering from stage IV mantle cell lymphoma in late 1999 . The team realized they needed more resources and by 2000 , they had hired two more programmers and an artist . Producing a next @-@ generation game required them to keep up with 1998 – 2000 's rapid advancement of technology , which resulted in further delays . The team upsized the graphic textures as they changed the graphical software to support NVIDIA graphics cards . Within a year after development started in 1999 , the initial minimum graphics specification climbed from requiring Voodoo 1 graphics cards to those of the GeForce @-@ series . Planet Moon deemed game engines available during development too restrictive and inappropriate for their requirements , and built their own . Called Amityville , it could support Glide , OpenGL , and Direct3D . The team used it to create the required " lush and vibrant " outdoor environments , and terrain deformation effects . 
