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On September 9, 1997, Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands, the first game from what would become Iron Realms Entertainment was launched (same month as Ultima Online!). We weren’t ready by any means but I opened it to the public because I was tired of working without player feedback.
People at the time told me I was crazy for opening a commercial MUD just as the first major graphical MMO was due to launch, but 10 years down the road I feel like I can convincingly say that those who felt text MUDs were going to fall over and die just because someone created a game with a graphical UI were very wrong. We’ve managed 10 consecutive years of double-digit growth in a medium that so many people were convinced was an absolute commercial dead-end.
A friend opined to me the other day that one of his big problems in his approach was that he wouldn’t let go of an idea. He felt it was in his nature to keep at an idea well past the point where other people might call it quits. I can see where he’s coming from, I suppose, but I’ve always viewed tenacity as a net positive. It may be cliche but the willingness to simply push on is what got me, at least, through the early and very lean years.
The teams running each of our text MUDs have been running events for the previous month, ramping up to tons of events this weekend. I logged onto Achaea tonight to be part of the festivities as the hour approached midnight GMT and was taken aback by the outpouring of more-than-just-friendly communication from players whom hadn’t seen me in the two years since I passed over direct control of Achaea to others.
It’s hard to describe what I feel about Achaea at this point. It’s a creative endeavor I worked on full-time from 1995 to 2005 and poured my soul into. It was difficult to pass on and it is a little painful to log in now and realize that the game-world has passed me by. I don’t know the details of the intricate plots going on any more and I don’t have my finger so directly on the pulse of the community, but I still feel incredibly connected to it. I essentially lived in Achaea for 8 or 9 years.
I’m extraordinarily grateful to a huge number of people at this point. All the players over the last ten years, the volunteers, and all the formal members of Iron Realms. Thank you. Let’s make the next 10 years as great as the last ten.
Incidentally, it is pronounced ah-KAY-ah. ‘Achaeans’ was the generic term for the Greeks that fought against Troy in the Trojan War, and there was an ‘Achaean League’ in real/more established ancient Grecian history as well. The Aetolian League defeated the Achaean League at one point.
People often ask me what my job is. The pat answer is that I’m the CEO and Creative Director of a small online games company. Most people kind of look at me and then ask, “Yes, but what is it you do?” I’m going to try to give an answer to that in this post, having been inspired by a post Brian Green wrote recently entitled, “What is a game designer?” In it, Brian runs down what a game designer should expect to do day-to-day (organize, communicate, champion ideas, etc) and what a game designer should not expect to do (actually designing the high-level game concept). I thought I’d take a similar approach to describing my job.
One of the ways in which Iron Realms manages to thrive in the face of competition from Eve Online to World of Warcraft is by providing an environment that feels palpably different from that which a player can get elsewhere. Part of this drive is instantiated in our game mechanics and part is instantiated in the admin-assisted roleplaying we do. Unlike most MMOs, many of our admins also play fictional roles, usually as Gods (in the polytheistic sense), and directly interact with players in-role. Our admins, most of whom are volunteers, do a superb job at a very difficult task, both by direct in-role interaction and by ‘backstage’ work on admin-assisted roleplaying events, but there’s a general feeling in Achaea, our biggest MUD/MMO, that the roleplaying has suffered as compared to Aetolia, Imperian, and Lusternia, largely due to the fact that Achaea is quite a big bigger than the other three.
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