Operation Can't Wait Any Longer (a.k.a. CWAL, pronounced sea-wall) originated as a group of people who were regulars in the
Starcraft Suggestions forum on battle.net, who, on November 6th, lead by the one who calls himself Iolaus, arose in armed conflict and attempted to forcibly remove the Starcraft CD from the grip of
Blizzard Entertainment- by writing short, ad-libbed stories.
While the initial attempt wasn't quite successful, it did encourage a number of people to join the effort and
write. CWAL took as a group of self-appointed commando liberators (the
alter-egos of whom ranged from zerg-infested humans to a nigh-omnipotent being whose ego generates its own gravity well) who dedicated themselves to obtaining the glorious Starcraft Beta CD from its captors before
Blizzard could successfully enable a mind control algorythm and make zombie slaves of all who bought their games.
Since their initial debut in 1997, the look and feel of CWAL has changed a good deal. The Player's Lounge of the
battle.net webpage was eventually abandoned in the face of
lamer anger in favor of the Rubber Room, and has become less a
Starcraft-oriented group and has branched out into more unusual creative routes. Granted, a number of the longer stories have as of late taken a traditional
Good and Evil approach (read: CWAL versus an
evil genius of some sort), but if one looks, one can find artists, programmers, medieval recreationalists, gothic thinkers, Christians, Humanists, and generally all-around less than completely sane individuals writing the same style of brain-spew works of fiction that earned CWAL a place in the Thank You section of the Starcraft credits.
There exist a number of sub-groups of CWAL- the most notable of such are the Organization for the Enslavement of Earth's People (
OEEP), Citizens Advocating Random Destruction (
CARV), and the Newbie Patrol (
NP). While all authors belonging to subgroups are recognized as members of Operation CWAL, their characters are generally only partially affiliated with CWAL, sometimes completely opposed to CWAL, and sometimes in the act simply to kill people and/or destroy things with only peripheral interference from police and/or the military.
Paingiver Productions is also largely affiliated with CWAL, but is mostly the brain child of
Maggott, "Emperor" of CWAL.
When CWAL was first created, "membership" was a simple concept- if you wrote, then you were a CWALer. After
Starcraft was released, the people who had first joined CWAL decided that membership was a more concrete concept and began rating a prospective member's story- enough good ratings and one was granted in. Eventually, as an organization such as CWAL is prone to, the system was re-written by the members to recognize any sort of CWAL-related effort- mostly either decent artwork, a comic, or a story, be it epic in scale and involving national armies, assassinations, and political intrigue, or simply something entertaining about a
beaver arming himself with a
chainsaw and messily slaying those who would stand in his way- including a number of alien-looking robots,
security guards whose IQ doesn't square to a whole number, and secretaries sporting razor-sharp painted fingernails and
stiletto heels that double as deadly weapons.
After a number of server changes, CWAL is now more or less permanently based at www.cwal.net, more specifically in the Rubber Room, the
forum that hosts most of the action. As with any forum, the RR comes complete with a vicious
rivalry or three, a number of random posts and raging
debates interspersed with items of personal interest and the stories/crude drawings presented for mutual criticism.