Originally it was just a hobby project I believe. Matt started it when he was still in University, on the Amiga. I have the source code to "Terragen 1" (aka Terragen 0.1) sitting around somewhere, but I've never had an Amiga to test it on.
After that I believe he ported it to the PC and then made it public in a limited demo form, probably realizing the commercial potential but unsure what he wanted to do with it just yet. He was still in school at this point and he published the first Terragen website on his school's server. You used to be able to access the original page using
archive.org - the address was
http://www.york.ac.uk/~mpf103/terragen/ Unfortunately it seems that the university is now blocking archiving of its pages and that means all previous archives are now inaccessible as well.
I suppose it was around that time that the original mailing list was setup on Onelist, later to be bought by another company, finally turning into Yahoo Groups. I believe it was founded by Rainer Duckerhoff who is still around from time to time. A year or two ago Yahoo claimed they'd be getting rid of older messages in large groups, but it seems that most, if not all of the original messages are still there in the archives, all the way back to 1998.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/terragen/messages/1Anyway so TG was made public, people started downloading and talking and checking it out, and it grew from there. The fact that it was free and doing things that no other program at the time could do, producing already great results, was very interesting to people. The community grew fast, now over 5000 members on the Yahoo group I think, and in only 2 months we have over 1600 members registered here.
After Matt left school he worked more on TG then got a job at Digital Domain, one of the top film and TV special effects companies in the world, where he laid the groundwork for Terragen 2 in creating the underlying "TGD" rendering system. Matt worked at DD for 4 years I believe and during this time public updates of Terragen were infrequent, which frustrated many. Matt did manage to negotiate a good deal with DD whereby he could keep much of his source code and release updates for TG, despite the proprietary nature of his work at DD.
Since he has left DD Terragen 2 has been the main focus and of course we're all familiar with the delays there as well. However significant changes have continued since Matt's Digital Domain days and with the release of the Technology Preview I think we have turned over a new leaf in Terragen and Planetside's development. 2007 is the year that Terragen will come into its own and prove itself.
Still, despite all the progress, I sometimes enjoy revisiting the very oldest TG versions. I have 0.4, which still works on XP...
- Oshyan