Written by Members of the SP2 Discord.
Jesse
Jesse is the original owner, founder, and former overseer of the SuperPower Community Discord Server. Jesse began initially playing SuperPower 2 around 2013, mostly going under the radar between then and the eventual founding of the Discord. Before the Discord, he would rarely make appearances in multiplayer servers; and would mostly play two-player servers with himself and IceyVVind. It was not until around 2016 he would begin frequently playing on multiplayer servers and interacting with the Community. He was led to create the Discord as a means to try to unite between the small, but devoted members of the SuperPower Community. Until the Discord was made, the SuperPower Community related on the dated and un-intuitive Steam Discussions to communicate. The Discord allows community members, server hosts, game modders, and the GolemLabs developers to all communicate in real time. His legacy in the Community lies on the creation of the SuperPower 2 Discord server.
Aside from SuperPower, Jesse is a college student residing in Pensacola, Florida. He is very proud of his hometown, and isn't afraid to let people know where he's from; he is a proud Floridian, Southerner, and American. Jesse's passion is cars, he an avid car enthusiast and will talk your ear off about cars for an eternity. Politically, Jesse holds right-wing political views, and is a supporter of President Trump.
IceyVVind
A little known fact about me is that I had never purchased Superpower 2 Steam Edition myself, and was actually convinced by Jesse way back in 2014 to play it if he bought it for me. This had led to me starting off not knowing a single thing about this great game, and playing for hours on end with myself and Jesse. Jumping to fall of 2017, Jesse had pointed at to me that the community wasn’t really united. While initially hesitant, I had decided to go along with his idea, which led to a small amount of people joining little by little, and then the server exploded with members, with every member of the development team for SuperPower 2 joining. It eventually led to our tight-knit community that we have today. I am known for open-minded and upbeat attitude as well as just being a generally understanding member of this community. I take pride in the history of the world and the history of old school rap and the style that is created by people of that time.
Gotagetgoing
The Logo for "Our Blue Marble"
Hi, I’m Gotagetgoing, but I’m more commonly known as 'Gotaa' in the Superpower 2 community.
Being a member of Steam since 2008, my time with Superpower 2 lagged behind one to two years after joining Steam. Playing an illegitimate copy of the game with shady origins, my love for the game was nonetheless very apparent. As it started my interest for geopolitics, prompting the study of political science as a whole, and remains one of my most played games ever.
Supporting its addition to Steam through Greenlight, I subsequently purchased the game the same day it was released on Steam. As stated in the Blue Marble section; my time working on the retexture project had its ups and downs. My failure to get the textures working properly had its toll on my patience, thus making me freeze my ambitions of creating the project at all. This came and went, and in 2017 the project truly gained traction, after tirelessly assembling the original texture tiles, did I figure out the projection used to draw the original map; the Equirectangular projection.
Work began on a proof of concept for a future texture mod, named the “Blue Marble” project. Don’t think I could explain my excitement, after all these years, the new textures were finally working. No seams, perfect alignment. I knew this would be unprecedented in the history of Superpower 2 modding.
Moving on, I figured NASA could potentially have high resolution images of the Earth. However I was not sure if the projections of these images would be ideal. The NASA images were 1:1 with the Superpower 2 Earth projection, much more detailed, and modern. Suffice to say, my excitement went through the roof. I set on to build a work-pipeline in Photoshop to prepare the NASA images for Superpower 2.
As stated earlier; the textures had to be ‘sliced’ up into 72 tiles, after some time I learned that Photoshop had a function to slice an image into several tiles. Initially - images from NASA were extremely high resolution, and I’m lucky to be an avid PC gamer; my custom built gaming PC was just enough to work with these ludicrously sized satellite images. However I still had to deal with low hard-drive space, as the cache used by Photoshop when editing the NASA images were in the hundreds of gigabytes. I also skipped out on editing the PNG images, and instead worked on the much less intensive JPG versions (though they were still very resource intensive on my PC).
After some time I also discovered that Superpower 2 could render a night-time texture, I simply went onto NASA’s website, grabbed their satellite image of Earth at night, and slapped it into the game. To my surprise; it just worked.
I do not have a professional background in digital design. All of my skills used to create OBM were all learned from years of using software like Adobe Photoshop as a hobbyist. I’d say the thing I’m most proud over, is the OBM water texture (the bitmap responsible for drawing specular highlights). Rather than using a pre-existing image, I used Earth bathymetry and topographic imagery to craft it from scratch. Later I updated it to show all kinds of rivers that populate the globe.
Approached by a programmer (ZDisket) from the Superpower 2 community, after releasing Our Blue Marble, we set out to create Redux. I recalled Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” speech and mixed it with NASA’s early Earth images named “Blue Marble” resulting in the name “Our Blue Marble.”
ZDisket
I first started playing SuperPower 2 by pirating the old version back in early-ish 2015, then got the (still pirated) GOG version. After playing a bit of Multiplayer, I decided to buy it in Steam. In the way, I met some people, but one of them was somebody who would become a major player in the future. While helping him, I got familiar for the SP2 client SDK (late 2016), which I later used to release City Lights, Signed and Secure, and later Redux (with Gotaa’s key involvement), which were early based on improving gameplay, later on helping counter the rising hacker threat and then became both. I’ve been working lately on simply maintaining and improving Redux, and helping counter the council despite not being in the AHL.
Fun fact: Some wannabe hacker asked me for “SP2X” once and I gave him a virus. Was good while I was rekting his comp, but later on it was used as ammunition against me.
Gadkinson
I first joined the community roughly a week after the game released on steam. While it took me ages to get very good at the game, when I did was when my interest really exploded. What prompted me to join the Discord is basically the same thing that kept the game alive in some regards. Drama. I made many enemies, many of whom would go on to reveal themselves as collaborators, or even key people in the council. Many rumors went around about me on the steam forums, and, as much as I hate to admit it, I wanted to see how the community was reacting. It was maybe a 3 months after the discord was created that I joined (Browsing through forums). People were… suspicious to put it lightly. Luckily, the rumors didn’t really have a much basis. What I would argue helped prove my case was the Anti-Hacking League. SP2X had been a new issue around this time (few weeks old), even though, as I’d find out, it had been in development for a long time. The resulting time from then to now has been an all-out war between ideologies. For the council, their distaste was personal. For me, mine was between belief and their actions. It’s a war that’s not only been fought by me, its been a war fought by most people in the community. Despite that, many of us have retained (even a little) passion for the game. For me, I still love the game… It brings back emotions from good, to bad.
Cypher
I first started playing SuperPower 2 in 2016 when the game was on sale for 2$. I was previously interested in history and military designs but I did not know much about geopolitics or economics and I have never played a geopolitical simulator before so I decided to give it a try. I was known as Flakenpunch and I mostly played on conquest servers such as AJSM's or Maxwell's. I took a break from the community for most of 2017 until February 2017 when I decided to make my return and I joined the SP2 Discord. I was shocked to see the chaos which hackers have caused to the community, but I became an active member and a RP server host. Some people suspected me of being a hacker because of my sudden reappearance on the community amidst the chaos. I became a moderator for a short while in summer 2018 but I lost it when I was falsely accused by certain individuals of being a hacker. Eventually the hacking crisis died down and in June 2019 I applied for moderator in the SP2 Discord and was accepted into the Staff Team. In November 2019 my Discord got banned for participating in raiding weird porn servers with my friends which caused a minor incident in the Discord. As of now I'm still an active member and a moderator at the SuperPower Community Discord. Despite all the drama which has taken place I'm very grateful to meet people from all walks of life and viewpoints in the SuperPower community and that is why I remain here.
Aside from SuperPower, Cypher is a student in the Midwest United States. He is interested in aircraft and martial arts. His favorite games are Ace Combat and Metal Gear. His Steam Account is Cypher and Discord is Cypher#0386, his Minecraft username is Liquid_BROTHER.
AvroCanadian
(Written on behalf of AvroCanadian) Joined the SP2 community the first day that it was released on steam and quickly became known to invade America or become the superpower of each server as Canada. Arguably one of the best military players and have defeated all old guard players with in the game with the exception of Syco, also one of the best economic players until Uberfox was released which strictly limited economies of countries due to limitations based on population which ended my ability to push China literally out of the global economy and crash them. still called upon to save the “West" by ‘old players’ in the struggle against the ‘East’. Despite being one of the former most hated players in the SP2 my reputation changed as I modified my play style to avoid invading America and focused primarily on defeating and detering Russia and China alone if need be and winning a major portion of the time. Joined forces with xxxbornagainxxx to ensure western prevalence against the forces of evil and also noted for taking on Infamous and numerous other oldguard players at the same time in confrontation. One of the most right wing and nationalist people in the SP2 community and was apart of the SP2 community split as the community split between communism and Capitalism (Bodenist Party of Canada group) #TeamFortressNorthAmerica #LetsGoCanada
Erkoc
(Picture Pending) I’m not someone who usually plays RTS games or strategic games. I played first person shooters my entire life( born in the USA). I would play games like Halo and call of duty until I was curious about what was going on in the world. This curiosity educated me more and gave me the idea to craft creativity. I was wondering if there were games based on the world. I discovered Geopolitical games while surfing through the web. Then at one forum I found SuperPower 2. I thought it looked stupid so i neglected it. I judged based on how it looked and thought about how crappy the game was going to be. One day I was really bored and thought that maybe I should try out this 2004 game. I pirated the GOG version of the Game and started my experience. I started playing SP2 around 2015 during my Middle school years. I’ve been playing Single Player for months and I would always pick Turkey as my choice. I would usually research both Strategic and Missile defense systems rather than focusing on my economy or my politics. The results of me researching nukes only provoked China into invading me and the collapse of NATO.Once I understood the concepts of the game’s mechanics, I tried Multiplayer. I have to be honest, I wasn’t the type of person who played as any nation, including Turkey, and cared about historical wars or strategies. I would always try something very different, but before I did any of that in Multiplayer games, I would do things rather stupid. Though I was sure about the ways of how the game is suppose to work based on mechanics or simple mechanics because I still haven't understood the full gameplay, I wouldn't RP properly; for example: I would play as Iran and research Nukes out of nowhere and have everyone pissed at me. I’ve been banned in many servers for my first years of playing this game. After a few months of making friends and telling me what to do, I finally understood the ways of how Role Play worked. Funny that it wasn't til 2017, where i finally understood the economic system of the game and how production and consumption matters. Of course i did know what taxes and interest rates were. I thought about hosting games at one point but the Pirated GOG version didn’t allow it. Yes, i have port forwarded my game, but i was still unlucky. I have realized that maybe it was time to buy the game. The game was over 5$ in steam so i bought it in G2a for 2$. I started hosting my games, but unlike any other host I thought myself to be very strict. People have called me an asshole based on how i took my rules too seriously. I would usually press the Ban button rather than kick. I would usually ban the people who have not done VTA or used GTM. I’ve got some respect from people, but it wasn't til the day I joined the Sp2 Discord. Joining that Discord was either the best day of my life or the worst. The respect for me, however, hasn't really died out yet. I did get some promotions on my privileges. I was promoted to Server host and Turk moderator. As a matter of fact, I have contributed a lot to this server. I have helped people with mods and bugs that caused their games to crash. One mod I’ve worked on a lot was the AGE OF DISCOVERY MOD (still in development). The Author of the Mod was not me but Aqua. We had good times doing the hard work that was needed to produce the mod. I’ve also worked on mods of my own. I have created a SP1 map in 1997 (not 2d, just the nations that were there) with the help of redux, but when the patch arrived, i couldn't host my modded game. Following through my experience in the community, the game and the Discord server was filled with Europeans( not that i care for who they are, just being specific) some rather felt frustration in their lives due to current events as far as i have witnessed. They felt no hesitation for calling me out based on what i wanted to represent. Now I will be honest, i’m not a person with liberal perspectives ,but i was a very a neutral begging person at the beginning of my experiences, during the early months of 2017. In the game and in the discord server, I would usually calm my emerging foe that called me out due to my nationality. I wouldn't retaliate due to my great patience i possessed. That patience soon drained in me and I started to retaliate in the months of 2018. I would post offensive things that would not only bother the few people who called me out but rather the whole server. My retaliation only created a bigger mess in the server. People would know who i was in a negative mindset. I proved that i have became an aggressor or a clown rather than a defender. I wasn't proving anything about my self being a defensive person but rather a man of junk. My contributions to the server does not level up the constructed alienation to this community anymore. The negativity may have changed my attitude but not my full perspectives or my life. In the end, the sp2 community was in a stance of perfection. I was still able to make good friends in the SP2 community. People in the server still provide for the players of the SP2 community and always prove common ground. They are the very people who show that the game has not died out since 2004. They are also the very people who have not allowed the hackers dominate the existence of this game. If you ask me, It was worth the experience.
Hensolo
My first time playing SuperPower 2 was in 2014. I already was a big fan of geopolitical games like Rise of Nations, and the game back then was 2€ because of a sale, so I decided to try it out. I don’t remember myself learning in singleplayer, rather I think I jumped directly into Multiplayer. I wasn’t a great RP’er, my English level was very bad and I got banned from Infamous :_). I’ve had some months, even years of not playing SP2 at all, approximately between 2015 and 2016 I didn’t play at all. Then, I decided to jump back (now with a better English) and started playing. I don’t remember where exactly I played, but I remember joining Aqua’s first history server. I liked the concept and joined most of his hosts. I was one of the first to join the community discord, as I was coming from Aqua’s discord. After joining the discord, I pretty much left the community again. I muted the discord and didn’t play at all for like 7 months, skipping all the drama until these last 5 months. After being active for a couple of months, I decided to run for moderator in July 2018. I did not get chosen. Then I tried again in September, and I succeeded. This community has had its ups and downs but I can certainly say it has been great fun so far. Thank y'all and I hope we keep growing! Note from May 2020:I can certainly say that being a moderator/enforcer in this server has been a great learning experience for me personally, and I am incredibly grateful for the staff members and every single person that I've shared thoughts within this community.
Outside of SP2, Hensolo is a student in Barcelona, Spain. I show interest in politics and economics, and I've been keen on understanding and learning about the financial structure of the modern world. I also enjoy water activities, reading about psychology and science, and other things. I hold socially left-wing views and economically center to center-right. I advocate for a Federal Spain.
EATB (PsychoticUnvanquished)
After being recommended MrNoDStudios’ “Superpower 2: The Rise of Canada” playthrough series on Youtube and shortly afterwards CommisarBro’s “Rise of Djibouti” series I decided to purchase the game during the Summer Sale on Steam in 2016. After several hours of playing through single player I discovered the world of the Multiplayer and RP community as well as the discussion forums which got me increasingly interested into the game. I quickly became a frequent player on ChairmanMao’s RP server, Infamous’ RP and Nikola’s RP . After hosting massive amounts of hour long LAN games for a couple of mates, I decided to give hosting public servers a try and began to frequently host “Psychotics RP Server” weekly in August 2017. In late 2017 early 2018 I began getting involved in the modding community and releasing detailed mods with custom soundtracks, data and intro videos such as the Soviet Union Modification and the unreleased 1955 Modification. Shortly after being well known as an active server host and skilled modder despite the very short time of experience I was promoted to Enforcer role on the SP2 Community Server in which I got involved in community debates regarding several members of the Superpower 2 community. In March 2018 I began to become increasingly inactive in the SP2 Community, was demoted of the Enforcer role. Between 2018 and 2020 I worked closely with Aqua on Age of Discovery, and between 2020 and 2022 I worked on a SP2 clone named Deterrence as I was unhappy with SuperPower 3 (which I cancelled and have no intentions on resuming development). Beginning in Q3 2023 I've been working on "SuperPower 2 Anniversary Edition" mod with BlasterMillennia, ZDisket, and Gotaa, which completely overhauls the game map. I shall be publishing updates on this soon.