Clonk is a multiplayer-action-tactics-skill game. It is often referred to as a mixture of The Settlers and Worms. In a simple 2D antfarm-style landscape, the player controls his crew of Clonks, small but robust humanoid beings. The game encourages free play but the normal goal is to either exploit valuable resources from the earth by building a mine or fight each other on an arena-like map.The inventor of the game is Matthes Bender. The first Clonk was a two player melee game in which the players fought with rocks, flints (basic explosives) and catapults. Through several versions Clonk developed into a hectic and quite complicated game with numerous tactics and possibilities. The classic versions of the game are freeware and can be downloaded from http://www.clonk.de (may be in German only).In early March 2009, Matthes Bender told the other developers of Clonk Rage that he wouldn't have any time to work on Clonk anymore. As the Lead Designer of Clonk since Clonk 1 and Directing Manager of RedWolf Design, the company selling the Clonk titles, he left a significant vacancy. The development of Clonk Rage, the last commercial Clonk title, was mostly done as a hobby by the other developers and although they wanted to continue doing that, they felt that more contributors were needed. RedWolf Design agreed to put the game engine's source code under an open source license, the ISC license. The source code was published in a public repository, allowing everyone to freely modify the source code and game content and discuss the future directions in an open forum.