www.legendmud.org/raph is gone
Or rather, it now redirects to here. A bit of an end of an era.
Right now, most of the buried internal links will return a 404, but if you put in .shtml instead of .html for the URL, you’ll end up on the version on this site. Over time, we’ll be fixing those too, and then all the jillions of citations for the Laws and whatnot will just redirect quietly to here.
It’s actually a decent moment to stop and reflect on this website and its history.
I started it back in August of 1998; I suspect there was a horrible-looking blue version that was around in 1997, though. The earliest version of LegendMUD’s website on the Wayback Machine shows a version in November of 1996, and that’s nowhere near being the earliest version there was.
I started out by just posting some of the artwork, snippets of MUD-Dev posts, that sort of thing. It was in October ’98 that the site took off, with the addition of The Laws of Online World Design. In early 1999 I added the guestbook; I wish I had saved that, because there were actually some nice comments on it, but eventually it was overtaken by spammers and by people who wished that myself and my family had died in our house fire. (!)
On May 8th, 1999, I posted that
Sometimes having a website can be a bit disturbing.
To wit, recently I was asked permission by someone affiliated with a UO fan site to have images and material from this site used in Windows wallpaper. About me. For public distribution.
Scary. Not sure I have much more to say about that, other than it made me rather uncomfortable and I asked that the wallpaper not be distributed…
Back in 1998, I was in closer touch with the gamer community than I am now, in a lot of ways. I was working on a live game (UO), and I spent hours every day talking with the players of that game, discussing things with them, and so on. It essentially cost me my community membership in LegendMUD, because it was impossible to pay enough attention to more than one live game. I started drifting from Legend back in 1997-98…
I tried to replace that with “the UO essays” — which were all written in the space of one week in May 1998, after the second-ever UO player luncheon. First came “A Story About a Tree”, which was based on what was then a very recent incident in the Legend community. Googling for it now pulls up over a hundred references scattered around the Net, including of course the much more recent debunking that landed on Salon.com.
The very next day, as the roleplayers were celebrating me for confirming the value of community in online games, I presented “What Rough Beast?” and massively pissed them off by arguing that playerkillers had an important role to play in the UO ecology.
Ever since, I think, the commentary I have written has been divisive, the relationship argumentative. I seem to polarize people. In the space of that week, it got bad enough that I ended up writing the last of the UO essays, “A Community Cookbook” specifically as something non-controversial, just to try to get things to calm down. Instead, I stopped writing those essays. It’s hard to believe, these days, that those things were actually posted on a commercial game’s website, like speeches from the mayor or something. The culture has changed somewhat, because that sort of content on a game website seems unimaginable to me now.
It was in August of ’99 that the fire happened. I was in Seattle at the Microsoft Hardware Lab at the time. The humans in the family escaped unscathed; the dogs, however, did not:
I was going to write a long and eloquent essay about this, kind of a way of clearing it all out — “My God, what if it had been during the night when we were home” “What must it have been like for the dogs trapped in the house as the air slowly went bad and it got hotter and hotter” “Look at what we invest with value and what we care about losing” “Boy, I really feel guilty over terribly missing my dog Mika, and not terribly missing the other dogs” “Aren’t the connections you make with people you never met amazing” — this latter after getting an anonymous letter written in a childish scrawl, from “An Ultima Online player,” with three dollars cash enclosed…
But in the end, I never did write it, and doubt I ever will.
I still have the three dollars, still in the envelope.
At this point, my association with UO had led me to meet Bruce Sterling. This young kid walked up to me at a UO player lunch, and invited me to dinner at his house. It freaked me out a little bit. But then his dad walked up and said, “I know this must seem weird, but we’ve got a friend, and I think you two should meet.” Little did I know that the kid was also Warren Spector’s godson, and would go on to do sound work and design on Deus Ex and SWG — before he even graduated high school. Warren and Bruce and I ended up playing Junta with the Wallaces… and could the Eric Goldberg I later met actually have been the guy who helped design that?
There are so many anecdotes, really, from a time when the whole thing just seemed… smaller. Perhaps more inviting, and certainly a bit more human. It was the days when we just invited Richard Bartle to come chat on LegendMUD, and were impressed when he showed up. Trivia nights in the Out Of Character Lounge, which we haphazardly tried to migrate to the new global chat channels we put into UO: Second Age. House of Commons chats where we didn’t need layers of moderators, because the devs could handle talking to the players directly.
It may be that all that helps put a context on the stuff you see on here today, the discussions of how the intimacy of performance might return, or of how blockbuster games are mostly passive movie experiences, and so on. I imagine some of you reading here maybe have been hitting some form of the site since back then, or earlier; I imagine most of you weren’t. Time moves on, and the communities, the clumps and clusters of people and connections, change as if they were pushed by invisible currents of habit, hobby, and happenstance.
I’ve resisted being cast as one of the establishment, even though I am sure many see me that way; to me, I’m still tilting at windmills, a young turk. But seeing a start date for the website that was around 7 years ago makes me wonder if that’s just my self-delusion. It makes me ask, Were any of you around for that? What’s your memory of it? Or am I suddenly becoming an old fogey overnight, nattering on about the golden days?
9 Responses to “www.legendmud.org/raph is gone”
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We’ve redirected everything from .html to .shtml except the index page which attempts to hit an index.shtml. Y’all know how to fix that though… That *should* be the only 404 you get redirecting from Legend’s site.
This sort of post turns me into Edith Bunker at the piano.
It seems so strange to me that back in 1998, I should think, “Hey, this guy seems smart. I’d like to play his game. Maybe I should email him some insightful something-or-other!” So I did, which I’d never do these days… and you actually wrote me back, which nobody ever does any more. If you hadn’t seemed like you cared (writing the “UO Essays” being the biggest symptom), I almost certainly wouldn’t have been as big of a UONGer. These sorts of things were — are? — important.
I remember the fire, and I remember the three dollars. It is good that you still have them.
Yeah, I should acknowledge the kind offices of the folks at LegendMUD, who actually did the work of redirecting everything. Go play LegendMUD!
Actually, I should add a button for it on here somewhere. Hmm.
All verklempt, huh Janey? And you’re all grown up and married now and thinking about kids! I almost posted saying “enjoy your youth!!! Go dancing more!!!” when I saw that post, but the next post was that you went dancing anyway, so, well, never mind. 🙂 Once you get the kids, there’s no more dancing for a while…!
Yeah, I remember those days too. It’s interesting hearing a developer’s side of things, and how closely it mirrors the player’s. I remember sitting in iChat waiting for this new Ultima to come out, an Ultima where you could play on the Internet. Everybody knew such a thing would happen, it was already happening on a smaller scale, and it just needed a little extra umph to grow.
Once or twice a week, Chris McCubbin would come on and just hang out, people would ask him questions which he couldn’t possibly answer because he just wrote the documentation. But one day, you logged onto that iChat, and you just expounded something fierce on the nature of virtual communities and how you were taking things in such extraordinary directions….
And now it’s all big business, looking for a million subscribers, in-fighting and competition, exploring revenue models, and…it’s times like these that I start up the old Telnet and hit the MUDs and go back to where it all started.
I don’t have anything too insightful to say, and I unfortunately was not following your site back in the LegendMUD days, but I can certainly relate to..
Specifically from a UO player’s point of view, I’d say that MMOGs were indeed grand back in the day. It’s humbling to see large numbered success from games like WoW and think about how, IMO, the best MMOGs are at this point behind us. I haven’t played any one MMOG for longer than a few months in a while now, but I played UO for ~6 years (can’t remember how long it’s been since it started), and it feels incredibly strange that such a short time equates to a whole generation’s difference in game design.
You’re definitely not an old fogey, because I sometimes feel the same way about this stuff, and I’m only 20. 🙂
Bleh every time someone wants to talk about the ‘old days’ I start feeling the weather in my bones. I figure by virutal years (kin to dog years but even faster ageing) I’m around 200ish. Best mudding I had was from 93-96 though honestly I didn’t play the LegendMud. Started actually messing around with them a year or so before but had intermittant access as I hadn’t started college yet.
Coding off and on kept me in that scene until hm 2002ish I think was last I did anything. It was a different universe and developing into yet another to say the least. Didn’t really like the direction my old hangs were going. Its ok, I warned them, and today they’re still slowly fading away after ignoring me. My solutions might not have been the fix either but their’s defintely haven’t been.
While I have good memories not sure I’d go back or do it again… even if it could be the same as it was, which it can’t, all things happen based off choices made in a point in time and then they move on and my time as a infamous killer and crack mud coder is long since over.
Back in those days there really wasn’t much difference between dev and player. In fact most were both at the same time as least the muds I worked on were volunteers, though they volunteered for a variety of reasons from desire for power over others to desire to build the ultimate widget. I could go on and on about it but I’ve made a vow to myself to never get into long discussions about my mudding days without a Long Island Ice Tea in my hand sitting round in a bar and since its before noon and my computer table decidedly is not in a bar I’ll pass.
We’re beyond old fogey and into the realm of ancient artefact nowadays. The joke however is on the youngsters. We’ve already seen the cycle and it will probably come around again, possibly several times, due to the accelerated nature of the internet development. We already know where its been, and where its going even if we can’t tell you exactly what billboards you’ll see along the way. Its like fashions. Whats new to the kids today was what I was wearing a decade before any of them were even born.
I just wanted to pop in and say hi… so… Hi!