FilePlanet: Powered by IGN

Kaos - Joe Halper: Frank created Trauma Studios to protect the Desert Combat name. There was a small deal made with EA to continue releasing updates to Desert Combat. EA realized that it came to the point where people were playing Desert Combat more than they were playing BF1942. The beauty of it for EA was you still needed to have that BF1942 CD in the tray in order to play so all we did was increase their sales and shelf life of the original title.

There also weren't any tools for modifying Battlefield engine so we had to create all of our own from scratch. We struck another small deal there with EA and DICE to release the "Mod Development Toolkit" later on.

The bigger deal was with the developer DICE in Stockholm, makers of Battlefield 1942. They were already at work with the Battlefield 2 engine and were watching the progress of Desert Combat (as well as playing the hell out of it). They liked what we did and were interested in having Trauma Studios work on a project for them. That was when I got the call from Frank asking "Can you work in New York City?"

I was the first to start with Frank at the New York City based Trauma Studios. We quickly built the team from a few original members from Desert Combat as well as taking on some new programmer talent. The project was the research and development of new Gameplay elements for Battlefield 2. The passion and energy our team put into this was amazing and the turnout was an outstanding success for Dice. It went so well that Dice Stockholm bought out Trauma Studios and made us Dice New York. As Dice New York we not only helped finish Battlefield 2 but we pitched original IP to EA.

The biggest thing we learned with both EA and Dice is they knew when there was a good thing going and they wanted to capitalize on that as much as possible. We had a killer team with an unbelievable amount of passion and energy that had a significant impact on the success of their Battlefield franchise. The relationship was going really well and EA and Dice no longer thought of us as the "guys that created a mod.

Kaos - Joe Halper: We were just finishing up Battlefield 2 with Dice Stockholm. We were also working very hard on prototypes for a new unannounced original title that was starting to get a lot of attention by EA. This unfortunately was quickly being overshadowed by a new development. EA began an initiative to take over Dice and make them an EA development studio. Part of the plan was to move our development team out to Stockholm so we could be better focused on the new title we were working on. Although this was an understandable business decision on their part it wasn't something we could see ourselves doing.

We never had a grudge against EA or Dice and we really did enjoy working with them. We spent a great deal of time and energy working on some very successful projects and continuously proving our ability to produce outstanding results. So in the end it was definitely a difficult time to get through. We were each given the choice to move out to Stockholm but we decided unanimously to reject the offers and stay in New York City.

Kaos - Joe Halper: We started Kaos Studios in late 2005 with some of the core members of the original Desert Combat team as well as the people that joined when we were Trauma Studios. We had around 14 people at that time but grew very quickly at Kaos. We are now around 80 people and still growing.