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The Game Archaeologist: A brief history of roguelikes
As with adventure games, it appears as though the mobile market has triggered a resurgence in the popularity of roguelikes with both developers and players. I've been stumbling over them left and right for a while now (I'm quite fond of FTL, which takes the roguelike into space), and every time I can't help but think of how this genre is almost the antithesis of an MMO. Instead of persistent worlds rich in lore, roguelikes favor randomized dungeon crawls with little or no story. Instead of immortal characters that grow with a player over months and years, roguelikes feature permadeath around every corner. Yet there's love for both in many gamers' hearts and perhaps even a few similarities that help to transcend differences. I find roguelikes fascinating because they are so hardcore, they yank me out of my comfy little leveling bubble, and they force me to use my brains for something more than figuring out whether it's time to use the "2" key once more. So what the heck, let's take a quick trip through roguelikes this week and see where -- if at all -- they connect with MMOs.
The Game Archaeologist: Four efforts to preserve dead MMOs
As I type this, we are now living in a post-Warhammer Online world. You can probably tell by all of the rampant looting, devastating earthquakes, and heart-rending sobs coming from your neighbors' homes. For me, it's a strange thought that this game simply isn't there at all any more -- and there's no way to go back and play it, ever. Or is there? When it comes to MMO sunsets, there are varying degrees of death. Sometimes a closure isn't as final and complete as we might assume, and between the passion of developers and those of fans, we're able to revisit these games long after their expiration date. For a writer who is keenly interested in preserving MMO history, these efforts are of great interest. So today we're going to look at four ways that people are trying their hardest to preserve dead MMOs -- and even let you play them once more. And I'm going to write about this without using the forbidden "E" word, too!
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!"
