The Tribes series begins in 2471, when scientist Solomon Petresun invents the first cybrid, a bio-cybernetic hybrid artificial intelligence named Prometheus.

In Starsiege, the Terran resistance manages to drive Prometheus' forces out of Earth and onto the Moon where they are believed to be eliminated by General Ambrose Gierling and his squad's suicide attack.

To counter this threat, Petresun (having technically achieved immortality through his studies) proclaims himself the Emperor of Mankind in 2652 and succeeds in unifying and rebuilding the Terran civilization.

Pursuing his goal of fortifying the Earth against the inevitable cybrid retaliation, Petresun ruthlessly exploits Martian and Venusian colonies, spawning massive resistance movements among the colonists by 2802.

Set some time between the 33rd and 40th century, it shows the Great Human Empire, now ruled by "Imperial King" Tiberius, having hunted down (almost) all remaining cybrids and expanded beyond the boundaries of the Solar system through the so-called Interstellar Transfer Conduit.

The next (chronologically) game in the series, Starsiege: Tribes, 1998, sees the conflict between the Blood Eagles, the Children of Phoenix, and other tribes formed by the renegades of these two (such as the Star Wolf and the Diamond Sword) escalating into countless blood feuds before finally culminating in the devastating Tribal Wars about 3940.

[1] Tribes 2 added additional vehicles (such as a two-person tank and a three-person bomber with a belly turret), weapons, and items.

While a very stable build existed as late as 1 month before release, several changes were introduced in the last several weeks of development that compromised stability on most systems configurations.

Developed by Inevitable Entertainment and published by Sierra, it offered simplified but significantly swifter gameplay (fewer maps and vehicles, and a subset of the original's voice commands) and network support for up to sixteen players at a time.

The game was shown publicly in September 2009 at PAX in a relatively playable state,[7] but was eventually canceled after InstantAction sold the Tribes IP to Hi-Rez Studios in October 2010.

[8] In February 2006, GarageGames "leaked" short videos of a tech demo which featured "tribes like" game play on their Torque Shader Engine.

[12] In 2013, Hi-Rez Studios announced they would stop releasing updates for both games, but planned to maintain active servers and customer support.