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The Game Archaeologist and the veteran of Kesmai
Aaand we're back! Did you miss me? No? Not even a little bit? Aww, you know how to make me feel all kinds of appreciated! Even though it's been quite some time since we finished up our two-part series on the Kesmai company and its incredible (and little-remembered) role in powering up the MMO genre, I wanted to return to take the topic for one last spin. A fellow blogger, Wilhelm "The Ancient Gaming Noob" Arcturus, backs his nickname up by providing memories and stories from gaming eras well before many Massively readers' time. Since he actually played several Kesmai titles back in the day and lived to tell the tale, I wanted to pick his brain before we moved on to other titles. So join me in welcoming Wilhelm and his magical clockwork nostalgia retrieval system!
The Game Archaeologist and the Kesmai legacy
Most studios would be overjoyed to have pioneered one significant advancement in video game history, but then again, most studios aren't Kesmai. While it's not a household name today, it's reasonable to say that without the heavy lifting and backbreaking coding that this company shouldered in the '80s and '90s, the MMO genre would've turned out very different indeed. Last week we met two enterprising designers, Kelton Flinn and John Taylor, who recognized that multiplayer was the name of the future and put their careers on the line to see an idea through to completion. That idea was Island of Kesmai, an ancestor of the modern MMO that used crude ASCII graphics and CompuServe's network to provide an interactive, cooperative online roleplaying experience. It wasn't the first MMO, but it was the first one published commercially, and sometimes that makes all the difference. Flinn and Taylor's Kesmai didn't stop with being the first to bring MMOs to the big time, however. Flush with cash and success, Kesmai turned its attention to the next big multiplayer challenge: 3-D graphics and real-time combat. Unlike the fantasy land of Island of Kesmai, this title would take to the skies in aerial dogfighting and prove even more popular than the team's previous project.
The Game Archaeologist discovers the Island of Kesmai
It was the mid-'80s, and I was just a kid in love with his family's IBM PC. Not having a wealth of capital at the time, I relied on hand-me-down copies of software that rolled in from friends and family and probably the Cyber-Mafia. Practically none of the disks came with instructions (or even labels, sometimes), and as such I felt like an explorer uncovering hidden gems as I shoved in 5 1/4" floppy after 5 1/4" floppy. Some titles were great fun, some were so obtuse I couldn't get into them, and some were obviously meant for those older and wiser than I. One game that fell into the latter category was a brutally difficult RPG that smelt of Dungeons & Dragons -- a forbidden experience for me at the time. It was just a field of ASCII characters, jumbled statistics, and instant death awaiting me around every corner. I gave it a few tries but could never progress past the first level, especially when I'd keep running out of arrows, so I gave up. Unbeknownst to me, I had my first brush with Rogue, an enormously popular dungeon crawler that straddled the line between the description-heavy RPGs and arcade titles like Gauntlet. Rogue defined the genre when it came out in 1980, spawning dozens of "Roguelikes" that sought to cash in on the craze. Not five years after its release, Rogue got a worthy successor that decided it could bring this addicting style of gameplay to the larva form of the Internet. It was called Island of Kesmai, but you may call it "Sir, yes sir!"
The Game Archaeologist and the Quest for Camelot: A talk with Mark Jacobs
Life is full of serendipitous moments. For example, the other day I found the Holy Grail at a garage sale while looking through a box of half-broken Transformers. Who would have thought? If only the Knights Templar took a few Saturdays off from their epic quest to do a bit of bargain shopping. Consider also that this month we've been reminiscing about Dark Age of Camelot in this column -- looking at the history, the devs, and the players -- and then, out of nowhere (well, technically Virginia) one of the key figures of this title returned from a year-long sabbatical. Mark Jacobs, who was let go from EA last June, recently popped back up on his personal blog to talk about everything under the sun. Hey -- isn't DAoC under the sun? Why yes, yes it is. So I threw on my hiking boots, strapped a machete to my thigh, hired a Sherpa, and then composed a quick message to see if Mr. Jacobs would be willing to be interviewed by the eccentric media. He agreed, as long as we stuck to the topic at hand and didn't veer into his plans for world domination. Whoops... I've said too much. Hit the jump before I get into hot water. My Sherpa hates hot water.
