I looked to see if Maid Marian’s shockwave browser mmos are still around and while the website is still up, it doesn’t seem to do anything besides demand the use of Internet Explorer
that said,
Sherwood Dungeon, the standalone extension of one of them is still up and looking to see if people still play on Facebook I saw this comment
“I log onto this game every Saturday at work and it’s the same 5 people pretending they’re vampires and fighting beside a pillar.”
so, might work
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Not sure I’d necessarily call The Palace a game, but I sure did spend a lot of time roleplaying on people’s private worlds where they ripped and linked all the background images from Monkey Island and Leisure Suit Larry into places you could just wander around at will.
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I always thought I heard about this through some AOL chatroom and downloaded/played it at hourly dialup rates, but I’m not sure if the timeline actually aligns with that perhaps myth; but I am convinced of the memory of the realization that there was like a King’s Quest Final Fantasy world thing that was like persistently online and not like some weird dos text game trick like all the others was like someone delivering proof that god was real and his love eternal, etc. but also i think I might have only played it a couple times tops and then who knows.
saga of ryzom is still online i think
You have no idea how much I wanted to play this when I (as a small kid) saw an article in a PC Magazine. Being rural and on dial-up would have made it a terrible experience, much less being able to afford the subscription rate on my allowance. But numbers go up plus Sierra style artwork (playing Space Quest and King’s Quest repeatedly prior to all this)? It sounded perfect at the time!
i was thinking about what would be recordable and you can at least talk about how at simucon (the annual play.net convention) they have little joke shrines to martin shrekeli everywhere because he paid 5k for a super powerful character in dragonrealms, play.net’s other text mmo. he did it so he coule trap another character on a boat and give them head. he got banned and the character he bought got returned
ive been scrolling through gemstone text, and last time I played a million silver was going for $4.50 and it looks liek its 4 dollars per million now. PEOPLE DROP A LOT OF MONEY ON STRINGS OF TEXT
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I’m trying to get DigitalSpace Traveler (the newer version of OnLive Traveler) to work, but it keeps giving me an error because it can’t access my sound resources. I know they had it working on Windows 7 at one point, but maybe it never made it in tact to 10. Could also be a server error. The most recent discussion of the game that I’ve been able to find so far was a YouTube comment from 2 years ago about the servers being “burnt”.
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I’m considering doing an episode on ZZT. It may not be an online virtual world, but it did have a robust online community creating and sharing worlds. It might be cool to interview the person who recently reverse-engineered the source code, but if that doesn’t work out, does anyone have any tips on other ZZT creators or experts who’d be interesting to interview?
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Asie, the reverse engineer, would def be great. The manager of the Worlds of ZZT/Museum of ZZT project Dr. Dos would be a great interview, too, I’m sure. He’s one of the few who I know who has been continually involved since the late 90s/early 2000s. There are a few other folks with deep ZZT knowledge including some that were oldbies and have come back to it recently and developed really sophisticated technical knowledge about the thing, but I don’t know of anyone else who has been so deeply involved so consistently in the community.
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Dr. Dos does sound like a great person to talk with, thank you for the tip!
This is extremely interesting, and There.com is actually back online now, but I feel like it’d be really difficult to find someone to interview about it.
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OK so this project I’m working on is definitely a go! I’m currently researching games and contacting potential interviewees.
If anyone knows anyone who fits any one or more of the following descriptions, please let me know!
- Has a deep connection to an aged but still running online game or 3D chat environment.
- Has an interesting perspective on online games or chat environments, especially aged ones.
- Has expertise in the preservation of video games, especially online ones.
- Has an interesting philosophical / academic perspective on online communities, especially ones that exist in 3D software environments.
- Has a leftist perspective on anything mentioned above.
I’ve also noted a few great suggestions from this thread and I’ll be sending a few messages out soon!
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Congratulations!
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Thank you! Oh yeah, also, if anyone READING THIS THREAD fits any of those descriptions then also please message me, I’d love to interview a fellow SelectButt.
Raph Koster’s classic postmortem series on Star Wars Galaxies would make him great for this, if you can get him
I have my old WoW vs. SWG (aka EQ vs. UO) rant but I am not unique nor particularly insightful or articulate about it
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hold my beer
oh just kidding i already did it. OSB dm me your contact info so i can pass it on!
he wants to know how old the games you’re looking at are he can hook you up with ppl from the 70s and 80s
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Woah, wild! Thanks for reaching out to him! We’re structuring the series this way:
Each episode will focus on a different game/virtual world that is on the older side, but still online. In terms of age, the older the game, the better, as long as it’s still online (or can be temporarily resurrected) and its visual side works reasonably well for the medium of film (for this reason, unfortunately, we can’t really cover text-only games like MUDs).
We’ll be conducting interviews within the game worlds themselves, while connected on a separate voice call which we will record and use as our interview audio for the film. We will ask our interviewees to give us a tour of some of their favorite places within the game world while we talk with them about their experiences and thoughts on the game and its community.
The series is going to focus on archival preservation of these virtual worlds so that people in 50 years or more can look back at them and understand what they meant to people today and what it was like to play them. It will also focus on the communities that exist in these game worlds and what happens to them over a long span of time. We are also interested in what it’s like to run one of these communities as a game creator, and we’re interested in the different ways that creators and companies steward (or don’t) these games and communities as they age out of marketability.
Here’s an excerpt from the original short that we’re using as our “pilot” episode. Privately, I can share the full episode to give potential interviewees a very good idea of what the series will look like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asss-gxfENI
We currently have guests locked in for Myst Online: Uru Live, and (as seen above), we have already covered WorldsChat.
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i’ve mentioned it a lot but i played a shitload of Graalonline
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Guess what, friends?
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Looking forward to the ZZT episode for sure.
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