About

The youth of those years, you could say only recently having got their hands on computers, mostly played games — and we were no exception. Back then, contests between teams (gaming clans) in popular 3D shooters and strategy games were all the rage. To get started you had to begin training and competing, and for that you needed a name of your own. It was born by picking the best-sounding combination of words from two columns on a scrap of paper. The choice fell on “Black” and “Crystal” — the clan was named BlackCrystal.

And soon the motto followed:

«Show what you can. Learn what you don’t.»

It may not be perfect English, but what was once invented for games became our motto for life. Many years on, we still show what we can and keep learning new things.

The story of our clan in the gaming community begins with Quake II and the just-released Quake III Arena. Between work at a computer store and the Mayday gaming computer club, we trained and competed against the other teams of the gaming scene of the day. And once the place got awesome internet and awesome rigs (GeForce GTX 150 or so), we began taking part in international competitions and running our own under the name Mayday Quake League (MQL). They left an ocean of fond memories and terrible photos ;)

From 2000 to 2003 was probably the peak of it all: the clan competed in Starcraft, Diablo, Counter-Strike, Quake III Arena, Quake Live and who knows what else.

We gather design experience at a print house — small back then, later grown considerably. Here we professionally mastered everything needed for printing: digital printing, the finer points of offset and silk-screening, printing huge banners and posters, cutting and applying the cut-outs to any surface, folding, lamination, assembly and all the rest. The most important and useful part — working with print software, vector, raster and 3D graphics, fonts (creation and localisation), preparing artwork for video cassettes and DVDs, layout of posters, business cards, books and magazines.

Here the ability to program was put to use optimising the daily work: writing CorelDraw scripts, building an accounting database and all sorts of programs for our needs, price calculation and more.

By 2007 came the idea that the experience we’d gathered was enough to take on more serious projects in the field of information technology, and we founded OÜ BlackCrystal — an IT company doing production accounting systems, network setup, online stores and company websites, big projects for big organisations, websites for various cultural events and so on.

A company of one multifunctional person keeps working, crafting software and enjoying life.

Here the BlackCrystal gaming clan comes to an end — some of us found jobs, kids, more important things to do. But friends still meet now and then for a game’s sake, reviving the memory of BlackCrystal and stirring up nostalgia with local tournaments.

One of our clanmates wanted his own computer club — and pulled it off. It was named after the clan: the BlackCrystal club. Respect to everyone who took part, helped out and visited the club. Every day it gathered a crowd of enthusiasts, with events and tournaments in both computer and board games.

Sadly, in 2015 the club came to an end because “everyone got a computer at home”. Or maybe not… Perhaps its founder will tell the full story one day.

And here we are.

With the dawn of the AI era, where code is written by assistant agents, the developer’s profession has changed dramatically.

BlackCrystal still builds software for the web and still consists of a single multifunctional person, but the word “development” now means something a little different:

• describing the problem effectively and setting the tasks for AI assistants;
• composing the right system design and setting up the development process;
• making sure the solution is correct and complete, with everything important documented and every requirement accounted for;
• the result of our work can be carried on by both AI agents and a human.