Real Time Strategic Carnage (RTSC) was an old PC gaming website I created in 1999 for real iime strategy (RTS) games on the PC. It had a bit of a heyday, coinciding with the RTS explosion in the late Nineties and Noughties. As a completely a solo effort, it quietly ran out of steam around 2011, becoming too cumbersome to maintain.
It’s notable for a few things, like a big list of contemporary RTS games with guides and catalogues of Custom Mods. There were big feature sections for Total Annihilation, Dawn of War, Homeworld and others I found interesting enough to indulge in.
Its most enduring section was the Startopia game guide, which somehow became its finest moment. (Startopia’s an awesome game by the way; you really should check it out.)
You can click the link below, download and unzip the 227Mb archive of the RTSC site to your local drive. Start with the index.htm page and you should be able to browse it without any difficulty.
old_2011_rakrent.com.zip archive
It all still works, and its entirely harmless. It’s ancient html, designed for a PC tower back in the day when a screen size of 1280×1024 and biege hardware was pretty much the norm. Most of the external links will have dried up by now, and obviously, any connections to my original rakrent.com won’t be there, either.
It makes for some fascinating Internet history. Some of the early fan sites were wonderfully hand crafted, and a lot of people went to the trouble of maintaining their own servers.
Enjoy!
Rakrent.com 
It’s always sad when another piece of web 1.0 is lost to time. Thanks for running this site, especially the Startopia section.
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It’s nice to see so many people are still trying to find this sight. What a classic site, I hope it come back.
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RTSC came in relatively late to the scene, but outlived a lot of the early home made websites. Like a lot of its contemporaries, it was a labour of love, with a lot of custom art, spaghetti html and an increasing amount of annoying maintenance. You can revisit quite a bit of this world via the Wayback Machine website ( https://archive.org/web/web.php )
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The Startopia guide is valuable for its uniqueness. After all these years, it is still the most comprehensive guide to this funky little space station management game. It still surprises me with the little tidbits it can show about the game’s humour and many partly hidden mechanics. Why some peeps keep filling up the Siren Love Shack or why others get stinkin’ drunk so fast.
The Homeworld series, Dawn of War, Total Annihilation and others are good guides to great games, but the curious lack of good Startopia guides to all the things hidden just underneath the hood and presented in a way worthy of the janky humor of the game was what I missed most.
I will still hold fast that Settlers II is peak Settlers.
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Hey, I’m the guy who contacted you about and has subsequently reproduced (more like hacked up I guess) the Startopia guide for Steam. I’m so happy to see this uploaded in its original form! Thanks for helping keep this part of gaming and internet history alive.
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No worries. It’s all a wee bit too quiet around here – numerous RL adventures and lecturing and all, but I’ve got no intention of abandoning it.
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Glad to see it preserved in this state! I contacted you a while ago to migrate a few of this to a wiki, but it always felt wrong to copy a lot of things 1:1 and modifying huge sections was draining (not to mention wikia began to focus more into fandoms over general wikis). Made me admire the insane amount of effort you put into this even more. Keep up the good work.
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I was looking for this for so long
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Every now and then I still type it into google knowing full well it won’t come up… Glad I ran across this. Thank you 🙂
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Thanks for archiving this – and for all the time you spent maintaining it, eons ago that it was. I was an obsessive Total Annihilation modding dork as a teen, and it means a lot to see an era preserved in amber like this.
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