For awhile now, I’ve gone back and forth on whether to start a blog or not. On the one hand, I find it a bit presumptuous to essentially claim, by setting one up, that I have something so important to say that I just had to put it out there for all to read. On the other, I believe I’ve accumulated a certain set of experiences that isn’t duplicated very often in the games industry. I’ve had nine years of consecutive growth as an indie developer, and pioneered a business model along the way.

As many won’t know me, I founded and am the CEO of Iron Realms Entertainment and damn it, I love virtual worlds. I’ve been playing MUDs (text or graphical…I see no fundamental difference) since 1991. My first serious habit was the world of Batmud, where I was an volunteer content creator, twice, after playing for a year or so.

In 1996, I started Achaea LLC, a company to produce Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands, which went out of beta in September, 1997, the same month that Ultima Online was released. People told me I was crazy to start a text MUD company when it was clear that graphical MUDs were going to garner far, far more players, but I didn’t have the resources to produce graphical MUDs, so it was a moot point to some extent. Besides that, I just find text MUDs more satsifying to work on. They allow for much more creative freedom than graphical projects, although there is certainly a sacrifice in terms of usability. There’s a reason command line interfaces gave way to graphical interfaces in operating systems, after all.

In 1998, we pioneered the virtual asset sales business model and have realized relatively (for the text MUD industry) enormous success with it. We’re still small, with only 11 full-time people and less than ten thousand players, but I really believe we continue to innovate. Our games contain feature-sets like player city-states with full bureaucratic structures, multiple types of government from dictatorships to triumvirates to full republics, incredibly complicated combat with literally thousands of abilities, PvP with rules that are admin-moderated to allow for a more fluid, common-sense approach to PvP (as opposed to arbitrary geographic-restriction PvP systems or PvP flag systems), roleplaying way beyond anything to be found in graphical games, etc etc. That’s not to suggest, by the way, that I or the rest of the company are better designers than those working on graphical MUDs or that complicated = necessarily good. We’re relatively obscure, compared to the games like Everquest or, god forbid, World of Warcraft, and I’m not naive enough to believe that obscurity is the equivalent of relevancy or merit.

What we are is a group capable of taking advantage of the fact that producing content and systems in text MUDs is very cheap compared to doing so in a graphical MUD. I can only imagine what guys like Raph Koster would do these days if they were still working in text, and there are certainly a raft of other text MUDs that do excellent stuff as well, particularly in the roleplaying arena.
The challenge going forward for Iron Realms and myself is to continue to enable our producers (all of whom I think just rock) in their continuing quest to develop our games into deeper and broader products. I’m personally spending most of my time these days working on designing and producing an unannounced graphical *gasp* product that we’re self-funding.

In any case, welcome to my blog. As they say in Kazakhstan, “To tame the bear, one must first grasp the salmon.” I intend to grasp that salmon, make it my bitch, and then grill it up for you, my bear-loving friends. Enjoy!