We didn’t have much contact back then, but somewhere in 2010 they gave me a call and showed me a private YouTube video of basic vehicle sync in Just Cause 2,” Woet said. “I met Trix and jaxm while being a member of the SA-MP beta squad and left the team around the same time as them. “Woet”, a former member of the San Andreas multiplayer beta team, quickly saw the promise in the modding duo’s early work – sensing the future potential of the bombastic addition. Fortunately for Trix and jaxm, the modding world isn’t lacking in talent, so it wasn’t long before a group of eager creators jumped on board.
The enthusiasm was there, but it takes more than two community members to build something of this scale. It was at that point, driving around with another player, that I truly realized my love for the game.” “The earliest video we released of jaxm and myself driving through the snow was the result of around eight to 12 hours of programming and reverse engineering. “Once the full version of the game was released, I immediately began reverse engineering it, looking for regions of code and memory that I could make use of to influence the game,” Trix admitted.
Breathing new life into existing properties was a personally fulfilling hobby for someone with Trix’s degree of engineering curiosity.
The small team wasn’t commissioned by the game’s developer to work on this multiplayer feature, but Trix didn’t need the guarantee of a fat paycheck to devote endless hours to the project: a steady day job as a malware analyst gave him both the financial means and technical knowhow to engage in a procedural undertaking of this magnitude. “After he downloaded it, Trix felt the same way I did about the game and from this point on, we started throwing around ideas for what could be done with the game. “At this point, I practically started begging Trix to check out the Just Cause 2 demo. The graphics were fantastic and the performance of the game made it evident that it was really well optimized,” jaxm said in an interview with VideoGamer. The sheer scale of the game, even from the demo, was incredible. “In early March 2010, I came across Just Cause 2 and was blown away immediately. It became the perfect modern piece of software for the duo to sink their creative teeth into. Skilled modders “jaxm” and “Trix”, had just abandoned supporting their work adding multiplayer modes to Grand Theft Autos Vice City and San Andreas (dubbed Multi Theft Auto) when they spotted the Just Cause 2 demo. Six members of the game’s dedicated community could. Could you imagine four models of salty protagonist Rico Rodriguez swinging from mountain to mountain, spraying bullets at vehicles hundreds of feet away? Just Cause 2 didn’t have a multiplayer feature at launch.