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It started with a rush and a tingle, and lingered with a sigh of
contentment. The sense of longing you felt drew you in like a moth to a
neon sign. No matter where your future led you, you have always
remembered the first time you...took sword in hand and ventured forth
into new worlds to slay hellish creatures and announce your presence
with authority. Yes, you fell for a MMOG (or, if
you're old school, a MUD), and she became your first true online
gaming love.
Ten Ton Hammer asked some of our developer friends to wax nostalgic
about the first blush of MMOG love, and they jumped at the chance,
proving yet again (although it hardly requires affirmation) that you
never forget your first. Read on to learn about the experiences that
guided these devs to a career dedicated to fun and games.
to do is work with games' revelation until quite late, actually. It was
1997 and
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/154">Ultima
Online was just released. I had played several MUDs
on
the old BBS systems long before that of course, but Ultima
Online still
felt like my first true venture into the online gaming genre. I
remember installing the game, creating an
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Funcom's
Erling Ellingsen
account and, after what must have been several hours of patching (on a
28.600 modem), I was standing in the middle of Britain with nothing
more
than some scraps of clothing and a hundred gold pieces. I remember
quite vividly that my very first action in a graphical online game was
to give those one hundred gold pieces to the first person I met in
return for being led to the nearest bar where I could have my first
virtual ale! Of course, once I was there I had to start begging people
for money to buy the actual ale, and by then I was already in love with
this dynamic, exciting virtual world.
After a while I downloaded one of those server emulators for Ultima
Online. I never hosted a server myself--heck, I never even
played on an
emulated server--but I wanted to download the software so that I could
start manipulating the world, pull some of the strings, and perhaps
pretend to be Lord British for a while. I remember spawning monsters,
setting up shops, and running around in my own little world...all
alone. From there the road was fairly short to trying to put together
my own little online game, which resulted in a couple of years of work
in the evenings and a Zelda-like, top down 2D online game called 'Era
Online'. It was a bug-ridden nightmare, of course, I'm hardly a good
coder, and it didn't get better by trying to implement all sorts of
peripheral features such as cooking, fishing and home decoration. But
it was a fun process making it, and I believe it did have a few hundred
players back in the late 90's.
From there on I actually went into an entirely different career for a
few years--newspaper journalism--before eventually caving in to my
dream of working in games that, admittedly, started with Ultima
Online,
one hundred gold pieces, and a tankard of virtual ale .
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Erling Ellingsen, Director of Communications, Funcom
Anarchy
Online |
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/115">Age of
Conan |
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/265">The
Secret World
me decide to jump into the industry. If I had to pick something, I
think it would have to be the entire genre of multi-user dungeons
(MUDs). I grew up playing MUDs since the age of 15 and it brought me
into massively multiplayer online games. The one MUD I
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"This is me
backstabbing another player when he was fighting 2-on-2. Ruthless
killers always take advantage of the situation! I created the
map on the top right using zMUD auto-mapper. I mapped out every area so
I could know exactly where I was at and could double click to a room
for fast-walking."
- Glen Swan
played on was a full player-killer (PKILL aka PvP) MUD from the late
90s. PvP MUDs were very rare back in those days and I happen to
stumble onto it by way of my neighbor who played. Id never experienced
such a thrill in any type of video game back then and I've been hooked
on
online gaming ever since.
Those were the best days of my life. We would skip school just so we
could kill players on some text-based game. It wasnt something we
bragged about or even acknowledged to our friends at school. However,
we were
diehard MUD addicts who spent our every waking hour playing one game.
It was so bad, my friend and I actually LARPed (live action
role-playing) the games we played most. We would buy wooden sticks at
the local store, tie towels around our
necks for cloaks, and then attack each other as if we were PvPing in
game. The air conditioning unit would be safe and the entire back yard
was
our battleground. This is something we can't forget...but wish we could.
MUDs were not just a first love but instead my passion and my life. As
sad as this may sound, online games prepared me for life today. Most of
the skills and knowledge I possess today was not gained from school; it
was
gained from playing online games. I learned how to program from staring
at MUD code, I learned how to type by playing a text-based game, and I
learned how to communicate by confronting angry vile PvPers
who were relentless.
Everything I am today, I owe to the many players around the world and
the online games that I played. I skipped out on a good portion of my
normal life to concede to online games. Something that, even today,
affects a lot of people around the world as they play some of todays
online
games religiously.
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Glen "Famine" Swan, Senior Assistant Community Manager, Funcom
Anarchy
Online |
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/115">Age of
Conan |
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/265">The
Secret World
with was
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/210">Meridian
59 from 3DO back in 1996. It was actually the first
ever MMO
even before Ultima Online. I used to play
it day and night on a 56K modem. It had a 3D mapping
first-person view and great midi music. The game was really hard, for
each level you would only gain one HP, and each time you died, you
would lose that precious HP and all your possessions.
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Skeletons
roam the streets in Meridian 59.
The servers had 200-300 people connected at once, so the community was
really
strong. Player Killers were feared and hunted by the whole
server as they could kill you in less than one second, sneaking up on
you while you were low on HP and fighting mobs.
The game had a guild system with guild halls, 5 or 6 different magic
schools, a karma system which forbid you to use certain schools...it
was
complex yet accessible and fun.
We were playing in a French guild and did a few live meetings. Some of
us continued on to Everquest on the Karana server, and most are
probably still playing MMOGs today!
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Cedric Gerard, International Marketing Manager, Ankama
Dofus
| Wakfu
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MMO gaming
love?
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/38">EverQuest,
and theres never been another experience like it for
me and gaming. I played Ultima Online briefly and
was intrigued. As a veteran
online gamer from the AOL, Compuserve and Genie days, UO opened up
the
multi-player environment in ways we had only dreamed. I was never an
Ultima fan, still am not really, but a real world
with real people
was pretty damn cool.
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A
screenshot from the upcoming EverQuest II expansion, Sentinel's
Fate...now with more panda.
Then I found EQ, and it was over for me. My first day in game I ran my
monk, somehow, from Qeynos to the Karanas and Guard Tower 2. It was
dusk, the sun was setting, and I saw this huge shadow across the way,
behind
a tree. Hmm, what is that? BAM!
You have been Slain by Froof!
I was
hooked from that day forward.
EverQuest and
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/eq2">EverQuest II
made me decide I wanted to be involved with the gaming industry. Both
games were exactly what I enjoyed at the
time. I thumbed my nose at
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/41">World
of Warcraft for years because thats what the
hardcore players did, right? Then I played it, and I was pissed that
Id spent so
long away from the game for reasons that had nothing to do with WoW
itself. When I realized the social impact an MMO could have, that
gaming could have, I wanted in.
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Curt Schilling, Founder and CEO, 38 Studios
Copernicus
fact
the first MMOG that I played. Interestingly, it was a work assignment
up until that point I'd only played single-player games with
multi-player, not one that was designed solely for playing online. I
was working in QA at that time and we were tasked to QA the next big
update back in the days when Codemasters published it.
That game was The
Realm Online which, remarkably, is still in service
today, operated by
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A wedding
in The Realm. Ah, pixelized romance!
Norseman Games. I believe that
a person's first MMOG is laden with emotion and memories in the same
way your first love is, or the first album that you bought, or your
first house. I remember thinking, 'Wow, my job just flew up to the top
end on the extremely fascinating scale,' and I kept my head down lest
someone should discover how much fun I was having at work.
The wonder at seeing other real, live humans walking around on screen
and in such numbers was incredible. There were hearty discussions in
character and inane banter in an early iteration of 'txt spk' to
balance out the equilibrium. It was a living, breathing world that
promised adventure, opportunity and excitement and potentially
never-ending content think of that!
Despite the countless hilarious escapades that were had with the admin
commands on the test server with my colleagues, (teleporting each other
to terribly dangerous places, conjuring mobs inside each others' houses
and abusing the in-game broadcast system), I think the one memory that
really stuck in my mind was the memorial the players created using
in-game flower items carefully positioned on the ground in the form of
a huge Stars and Stripes to remember those lost in 9/11. It really was
a very moving gesture, especially given the difficulty of accurate item
placement I'm just sorry I can't find a screenshot of it
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Samantha Russell, Director of Community Relations,
Codemasters
Online
Lord of the
Rings Online
holocube.
In the mid-1990s, I was exploring text-based MUDs on the Internet for
the first time. Most of them involved solving the same puzzles and
quests as every other player. Many were all about killing things. And
then I happened upon TOS TrekMUSEa MUD set in the
Star Trek universe
just after the events of the Undiscovered Country
movie.
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Wes Platt
looks like he has the makings of a fine Starfleet cadet.
So, I applied for my first characterGavalin Xavier Brodyand signed
him up for Starfleet Academy. As a cadet, he was assigned to the USS
Yorktown. During a training cruise, while the ship was in orbit of
Earth, I took a holocube that I had created, put it on the Yorktown's
transporter pad, and beamed it down to academy headquarters in San
Francisco. I beamed it back up.
The next day, the ship's captain booted Brody from the Academy for
unauthorized use of the transporter.
That was my introduction to the premise of real-time actions and
consequences in a virtual world, and that incident set Brody on an
interesting story path for the next couple of years.
It eventually led me to develop my own text-based game, OtherSpace.
And
once I had a successful game of my own, with a persistent universe
where actions and consequences shot around like chain lightning, I knew
that was my calling.
I love building worlds. I love creating memorable characters and snappy
dialogue. I love crafting fun experiences for players in a real-time
environment.
When I got the chance to work on
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/177">Fallen
Earth, a game that builds upon
the consequences of the past and lets player actions set the stage for
the future, I didn't even have to think twice.
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Wes Platt, Lead Game Designer
Fallen
Earth
Age
of Camelot. Id dallied with both Ultima
Online and EverQuest and,
while I had a wonderful fling with them both, it was DAoC (my little
pet name) that stole my heart. Maybe it was the delicate balance of
three factions that had to coordinate against and with each other
without being able to actually chat cross-realm. Perhaps it was feeling
like an underdog as I put on my Midgard chainmail. It could have even
been the sweet sensation of playing a healer and having those around me
show much affection for my abilities to not only tend to their wounds,
but also mesmerize our enemies. True, DAoC may not have been the
prettiest, or always the most communicative of MMOGs, but there was an
undeniable charm. A pluckiness that kept pulling me in and kept me
around for years.
As with many digital loves, my attentions waned over time. But I look
through Hibbie-blood stained glasses at the fond times we had together.
Ah, Dark Age
you were a ray of gaming light to me!
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Bill Roper
Design Director, Cryptic Studios | Executive Producer,
Champions Online
think
I fell in love with my first MMOG when I died. I was twelve and it was
an intense battle against a rat! My heart was pounding. It was me or
that darned rat. I got him down to about ten percent before I realized
I could no longer heal myself and death was eminent. I decided I had to
run! I ran as fast as I could. As a
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"One of my
many characters. I'm an alta-a-holic, I admit it!" - Margaret Krohn
shaman, I ran faster than most, but
no matter how much running I did, I couldn't stop what was about to
happen. With an epic screech and a flop,
there I was. I didn't even
know what to do, but I was hooked. I had never been so afraid of dying
in a game before.
I quickly learned that I had to sit down to
regenerate before moving on to another mob. Boy, did I spend a lot of
time sitting. Later, I avenged my death; I went back and defeated that
rat! I was so proud of myself. That was the start of a beautiful
relationship which led me to explore more and more of the lands of
Norrath in the world of EverQuest.
The immersion stepping into the game was what amazed me. The world was
beautiful and I felt acutely attached to my avatar. I couldn't believe
that there were real people playing behind each
avatar. This made all
my old pen pals seem super lame. In EQ, I was talking to people from
all over the world and, due to the long respawn timers, this happened
more often than not. I became friends with many of them. To this date,
a lot of us still keep in touch even though we've continued on to
various other games. The community that an MMO can draw is bewildering.
The experiences and memories we all share will never be forgotten. They
are as real to us gamers as any real life encounter.
Frequently, I would forget about time... Ah, summers as a kid. Those
were the days! They made me realize that if I ever had the opportunity
to create a world like this, I would jump on the chance. Of course,
that was more like a dream then. I never thought I'd end up where I am
currently: as a Game Designer at the company whose game I fell in love
with in the first place!
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M. Margaret A. Krohn, Game Designer
Free
Realms
[To learn more about Margaret "Luper" Krohn's journey from gamer to
developer, check out the recent article,
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/80275">Daring to Dev.
- ed.]
