This is our story.
Neurosis
posted Feb 26, 2000 10:05 CT (US) Profile Email Edit Post
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Yep, this is post 10k according to my profile. Is it accurate? Not entirely. Quite a while back I had to reset BH. When I did I wiped everyone's post counts. Except mine. I kinda guesstimated. Several people informed me that my guess was off severely, so this is probably really only post 9000-something, but I don't really care.
A list of the people important to myself and the game would be impossible to create. I could include 10,000 names and still miss as many or more. So, given the futility of such a task, I think I'll just wax nostalgic instead...
[Some of the vets are sick to death of hearing about NWN, but the story begins there, so bear with me.]
In July of 1997 AOL closed down an online AD&D game called Neverwinter Nights (NWN). It was one of (if not the) first fully graphical multiplayer games. It had a very long-standing and tight-knit community. The core group was small (under 1000) but very active and very very vocal.
Well, three or four months before the game closed I was in a guild called KAAOS. It was pretty much a guild devoted to flame wars and was really rather pathetic, but because of a few key members it had a well established reputation.
Well anyways, at the time, we'd grown bored with beating around the other established guilds and instead started a brief war with a somewhat younger guild called SATAN. They'd been around for some time but because of some bad apples had never really gained any respect.
After a few flames and some deathmatch controversy (yes I was responsible for both: I lost a PVP and didn't follow through on the terms), things started to settle into the same old rut. Recycled flames, stale catchphrases, the same people posting the same shit, over and over and over... I got bored. I started a RP. At the time "Neurosis" was banned (I'd composed and recited a few nasty limericks about the game staff), so I was posting under the name Murder (or was it Father? I forget). I went looking for any SATAN member to join in my RP.
After scouring their boards, the only one I saw who wasn't writing tavern-chat or cybersex was a one-eyed demon/leper named Decae. I tracked him down in the game and harassed him into making a one-shot appearance in my RP.
Well, couple months passed and NWN closed down. I'd quit KAAOS and re-opened my guild: Evernight Citadel (ENC). We were checking out other games, looking for a replacement for NWN. We settled on a game called Lords of Empyria. Decae was the GM of SATAN, and was there, along with several other NWN guilds.
LoE, in a word, sucked. It was run by a Nazi-esque freak who once proclaimed that the 1st Amendment was a coward's shield. This guy's idea of player input was "Tell me how great I am or take a hike."
Well, there's Dustin and I, each leading relatively young guilds, filled with overeager players bored to death, heading into a game that had been "a week from open beta" for three months. Our members are tired of waiting and a few start to wander off. I get the brilliant idea that a flame war/rivalry between ENC and SATAN would be a good way to keep interests up, at least for a little while. I pitched the idea to Decae and he agreed.
Things went to hell, and fast. The SATAN "elders" didn't like what was happening. They went behind Decae's back and started complaining to the staff for every ENC post on their public guild boards.
Well, it was around that time that Dustin and I met for the first time in real life. I was living in Tampa with some other players of NWN (MECH Jewel, WhiteAngl, and KaaosDeath). He drove down from Valdosta, GA and spent the weekend partying with us. The last day, I somehow managed to convince him to give me admin access over the SATAN guild boards. Needless to say, things got quite colorful when I made their boards the homepage for the Mongoloid Gay Olympic Games.
SATAN whined and bitched and whined some more. Dustin got pissed and quit as GM to join ENC. Staff cracked down and all hell broke loose. My entire guild was banned and LoE's creator uttered those famous words:
"If you don't like it, make your own game!"
=smirk=
Two months pass. I tried finding another home for the Evernight Citadel but failed. There simply wasn't any good games on the Net. This was the Quake era, RPGs were dead. I tried a game called Solaria at the urging of some friends but couldn't convince any of ENC to follow me.
My personal life went to hell. I was fighting with all my friends and in severe financial trouble. I had a relationship end badly and lost my job. I got evicted. I had only left Missouri six months before and did not want to return home in defeat. Add to that the fact that I'd been seeing Pious for about a month and things were already serious between us. I really didn't want to leave the FL/GA area.
In stepped Dustin. He was a jet mechanic in the air force, living in an unheated trailer with his pregnant wife and a coworker. He offered me a place to stay that was within driving distance of Macon (where Kat was going to school). I moved in around October 97.
That fall was rough. We were 15 miles from town and with only one car (we spent so much time fixing that car that Dustin and I joked about becoming Honda mechanics). Both of us were pretty low on self-esteem. We were drinking heavily. Coke & vodka. We both felt trapped.
Dustin was doing some web page construction for a dumb ass bitch he knew off AOL. He enlisted my help and we struggled to produce a mess of pages to this woman's hideous requirements (mint green background with orange and yellow text... in other words: puke).
Well, like I said, we felt trapped and were looking for a means of escape. We saw the web as an opportunity to make some extra cash. We produced one of the very first DHTML pages for our new company: Evernight Design. Collapsing buttons, flying layered pages, and Aztec pyramids. Friends loved the page, but even with our bargain-bin prices we didn't get a single customer.
Around that time I gave Solaria/Earth another shot and convinced Dustin to play with me. Back then the game was pathetically simple: 4 buildings, 4 units, spies, and not much else. We each ran multiple countries and managed to worm our way into the top 10. After doing so we quickly became bored. It was impossible to win without cheating, and not worth the time it took to play that many accounts.
We decided to make our own game. It was late December, we were both pursuing careers as alcoholics, and we figured that making a simple game wouldn't be too hard. (At the time our knowledge of HTML was intermediate at best and our knowledge of PERL was non-existent.)
Christmas arrived and we wasted time playing with numbers. "At 10 cents per banner click with 1000 players each clicking once a day we'd make $3000 a month!" "Well, with 3000 players..." We repeated such nonsense enough times until we actually began to believe it. We had visions of fast cash and a hunger for success. We also had a 500 count box of Blow Pops, bulk bags of tortilla chips, and a steady supply of coke and vodka.
December 26, 1997, work on Monarchy began. Our initial design was skimpy to say the least: a half-page of notes and some scribbles on a stolen dry-erase board. We didn't even have a name for the game yet (we called it "Medieval Solaria" amongst ourselves).
The plot: three religions at war. That was it. I took the names Barnabas and Angelique from a 60s horror/soap called Dark Shadows but neither of us had a good idea for the 3rd god. Finally I decided to use the name Leto (based on Duke Leto Atredis from Dune).
We had two things going for us. First, we'd both been involved with long-running online gaming communities. This let us avoid some of the hurdles that plagued other games. For example, we knew better than to make it a battle of Good vs. Evil. Such a game would grow stale quickly as all the experienced players would flock to the Evil religion, simply because it let them behave more outrageously. Instead we created an atmosphere in which none of the three were exactly virtuous and at least one was a cold-blooded murderer.
Our second strength was simple stubbornness. Both Dustin and I are arrogant and competitive. A week into the design, we both pretty much stepped away from the computers and said "Fuck this. This game is going to suck." Within the next two hours we filled about 10 pages of hand written notes. Ideas were flying back and forth. Training, fortresses, ambush, multiple treaty levels, and a whole host of ideas that didn't make the cut (customizable units, prisons to hold enemy captives, healers, and more).
Re-armed we went back to the computers and started chugging out code. I think we both knew then that the next time we backed down would be the last, so we decided we needed to go public soon. Once our reputations were at stake, backing down was not an option. We redid the Evernight Design page, threw up a message board (a very primitive Braggarts Hall), and then proceeded to spam other game's message boards to get some traffic.
We had Main, Fortify, and part of Township. None complete. We blatantly lied about the game's readiness. We threw together bits and pieces so that when we let the first few testers play, they could at least see what we had planned. Instead of standard errors we littered the game with snide comments and attitude. We tried making it personal as much as possible: "Welcome to your kingdom, Lord Whoever."
We let the first batch of testers in (pre-Alpha, like 10 people). Mostly they were our friends. Either they managed to see the game's potential or they didn't want to hurt our feelings, but the initial reactions were 90% positive. Braggarts became active as more and more people waited to get in. I can still remember us grinning and boasting over seeing 50 posts in one day.
Slightly worried that the public would grow bored of waiting, and also in a rush to get at that fantasy cash, we released a "closed" Alpha. In truth, it was open: we let in everyone who applied. Some 300 players rushed in and we sat back giggling, watching as the game actually ran on its own. We sat there till dawn that first night, just watching it go. We had one spell and one form of attack (which didn't work right half the time). Scum was functionless. Tithe a joke.
It didn't last long. We were leasing space from a massively overcrowded web server (there were something like 2000 other web sites on the server). Even in its infantile form, Monarchy was too heavy a load for that. Lag was a bitch. Players were saying it took 3 minutes to load a page. The server would shut us down almost daily.
February 98: We'd switched hosts three times. My Pentium 150 died, we had to share Dustin's old 486/66. We'd moved, we were in town now. Broke as hell, we'd been booted by several advertising companies for fraudulous click throughs. I was writing code 10-16 hours a day, with occasional marathon sessions going over 24. Dustin would come home from working 10 hour shifts for the Air Force (Saddam was acting up again then) and pound out code for 8-10 hours before collapsing from exhaustion.
We were living off coffee and cans of Castleberry Chili. We'd made maybe $50 off advertising. We pushed each other until we snapped. Violent shouting arguments became common. We'd scream and fight, only to find out 10 minutes later that we'd actually been in agreement all along, only been too tired to coherently express our ideas.
One day in particular became something of a Monarchy legend. I had accidentally wiped half the game the day before (did I mention we did 99% of our development live?). Well, Dustin decided we needed an away-from-computer project. He decided he wanted to build a fish pond in the front yard.
We hit Home Depot, bought some cement, wire mesh, and some assorted rocks (for decoration). Think we may have hit a bar on the way home, cause I know it wasn't until around Midnight that we actually started working. Picture if you will, two white guys digging a massive hole in their front yard at Midnight on a Friday in the middle of an all Black neighborhood. We're out there with pick and shovel while cars drive by really really slow.
Well, after digging the hole we spent about an hour mixing concrete in a bucket. We then quickly discovered that we really didn't know what the fuck we were doing. Too thin, too thick, not enough rocks... long story short, we ended up with a giant 2 foot deep mud puddle in the front yard every time it rained.
I can't really remember when we opened the Beta. We had over 1000 players almost immediately and kept growing and growing. Monarchy was constantly hopping from server to server to try to keep up with the load. General opinion among the players was that the game kicked ass but was still a couple months from being complete.
We got suckered by some idiot in Chicago who promised us some contract work for custom CGI scripts. Nothing he wanted was complicated, but the money he was promising us never appeared. I only wrote one program for him, but all the phone calls, emails, chats, and negotiations took way too much time away from Monarchy.
Which reminds me of something else: ICQ. We were the first game out there to actually have an ICQ account. This was before we had Saints, so the ICQ was staffed exclusively by Dustin or myself. We prided ourselves on keeping it available at least 8 hours a day. Player suggestions frequently found their way into the game and our ICQ list grew to mammoth size (over 5000 names, easily).
Monitoring EMail and BH soon became such a chore that some days we'd spend 4-6 hours doing nothing but replying to email (we were big on the idea of replying to every single email) and reading the boards. The load quickly became too much however, so we started turning more and more of it over to Saints. Pious stepped in and helped when she could.
By the summer, news of our financial woes was common knowledge. I'd been working full time on Monarchy for six months now. Dustin's check was going straight to rent and server hosting, with only a trickle left over for living. Things started looking really bleak. We sought out investors and even buyers, but none were willing to commit any money on such an untested company and product.
What happened next was amazing. The members of BH actually organized a collection plate of sorts. They mailed us cash and checks, $5, $10, $20... whatever they had. Paying for a free game. All told I think we received around 40 donations from all over the world, just under $300. We wrote down all the names and amounts. I'll bet Dustin still has that list stuffed away somewhere. Wish I had it now, I'd love to post it.
The game went gold before it was ready, but no one really seemed to mind. I think it was obvious by then that we would always be tweaking at it somehow. Think that must have been June. After that Monarchy settled down a little. Life on the other hand, did not. Dustin's daughter was born: Alaura Majestic (the middle name had to be an M-word). Dustin got approved for base housing and that helped a lot financially. I got a job working as an overnight cashier at the local convenience store.
We were being strung along by an advertising agent. We were generating $600-$1500 a month but the checks were always over the horizon. For those of you that have ever considered making a site like this, think again. We'd run the banner for 1-3 months. It would then be another 2-4 months before the advertiser paid our rep (if ever), and then another 1-2 months before he actually got around to mailing us our check. Thats 4-9 months turnover time. We were in the red before we even started. Think we only ever got two checks from him, and neither was over $200. Still, it was not always a bad time. Re-discovered the art of frisbee.
Enter Shareplay. You know, I can't remember how we got in contact with them. I think it was just some ICQ thing. They had recently announced a new game called Space Merchant, and had another, Panumbra, that had been in development for over a year. The owner, Jon, was doing financial consulting in Atlanta to pay for the business which was actually located in Illinois. They were interested in buying Monarchy, and by that point we were so in debt that we were ready to give it away.
We arranged a face-to-face meeting with Jon and his wife and arranged the sale of Monarchy. That was August, I believe. We each got computers and some office equipment. Shareplay hired us part-time on a $500 monththly salary. I used the money from the sale of Monarchy to get an apartment, an engagement ring, and to take a trip back home for the holidays.
After that Evernight Design dissolved. Lasted less than a year. I've moved twice since then. Three different jobs. New relationship. New friends come and gone. Done all kinds of new crazy shit, but doubt there'll ever be a year as insane as that one.
In closing, I would just like to say thank you, to every Saint, poster, and player. What we have built here is something that Dustin and I cannot honestly take full credit for. So many of you have left your fingerprints on the game, the community, and even its creators.
Dan
Neu is gone. Decae is gone. Fuck. We broke two admins. We really ARE assholes.
