The Harpoon Community and Harpoonpages.com are honored to present the 13th Annual Pooner Award winners. Freek Schepers and Jesse Spears became Pooners on Jan. 2, 2009 by popular vote open to all Harpoon players.

The Pooner Awards began in 1996 under the direction of Ed Ladner aka “Dr. Who.” From Day One, the awards have been community organized and executed. In the early days, the majority of votes were placed on the various Harpoon mailing lists with Ladner keeping a tally of votes during the month of December. Come early January, the winner(s) were announced.

As the years passed, the voting venues increased in number, forums joined the fray but the real home remained the Harpoon Users League List (HULL) mailing list. Ladner handed over the reins to Tony Eischens for the 2005 awards.

As is the case with everything Harpoon, the transition included much controversy that slowly died down over the ensuing years. Through it all, the community voted and publicly thanked those who work hard at keeping the game alive.

Proper etiquette is to call a Harpoon player a “Harpooner” and reserve the title “Pooner” for the award winners.

Definition of a Pooner:

• A person who gives of their time, talents and riches to the Harpoon community.
• An award given yearly to recognize the efforts of the above.
• The yearly Pooner Award recognizes extraordinary effort often within (but not restricted to) a single 12-month period.
• The lifetime Pooner award recognizes those people who seemingly single-handedly keep Harpoon alive and contribute heavily year after year.

2006 saw 10-year anniversary of the awards. Eischens and Brad Leyte parted with the traditional award of community acknowledgement and a digital-award plaque. They invested time and a significant amount of money to acquire a Tom Clancy- and Larry Bond-signed copy of “Red Storm Rising” for the 2006 Pooner Jan-Paul Koester and Bond- and Chris Carlson-signed copy of “Dangerous Ground.” Many thanks to Bond, Carlson and Advanced Gaming Systems Inc. President Don Gilman for their contributions to making the 1996-2006-milestone award year a success.

Back to the 2008 award winners and some of their Harpoon history.

Schepers, the 2008 Pooner Award winner, began playing the game in the mid-’90s. He describes his early experiences as, “slow (or more accurately, the scenarios provided were very ambitious for the processing power of the PCs).” He must have been playing Harpoon 2 at the time despite also being a Harpoon 1/Classic player!

After trying many of the Harpoon iterations, Schepers settled on Harpoon 3 to focus his efforts towards understanding a single game. He started designing scenarios about five years ago and that may be what Schepers is most known for in the Harpoon community. Schepers shared his words of praise for Herman Hum’s scenario testing, database authoring and general assistance. Schepers’ enjoyment of the game comes from playing the game (especially multiplayer) as well as coaxing the maximum capability and skill out of the AI during the scenario design process.

Spears, the 2008 Inductee to the list of Lifetime Pooners, can be found in the credits of almost every computer Harpoon product. Most of Eischens’ contact with Spears came during the Harpoon 3 PC development process, in which Eischens was a beta tester and Spears the programmer. Spears almost single-handedly created Harpoon 3 from the cremated remains of Harpoon 2.

Spears first played Harpoon when employed at Three-Sixty Pacific. His tasks there included making improvements to the Macintosh version of the original Computer Harpoon game. As a note at just how old the games are, Spears was tasked with making the game run on any size color monitor, a leap from black and white monitors. Spears also did all of the Mac conversion work for the Harpoon Designer’s Series of battlesets and game improvements.

Spears says, ”Also during that time, I started working on various pieces of technology for Harpoon 2. I worked on prototypes for the navigation system, most of the map code (the vector representation, and the various projections we used), the math code (high-precision math without floating point is tricky, especially if you want it to also be fast), the altitude grid representation, and a fuzzy logic engine (included in Harpoon 2, but not used much as it turned out ... We just ran out of time to implement the rules for it).”

Spears loves the game. The following brings home the idea, “After I resurrected it as Harpoon 3, I often found myself getting distracted by playing the game when I should have been working on the code (I was ”testing” it.).”

That fellow Harpoon players, is what makes a Harpooner a Pooner

Click here to see the entire Hall of Pooners.