Rogue Leaders
Habitat title screen
Gamasutra is running an excerpt from Rogue Leaders, a new book on the history of LucasArts. The excerpt in question is about Habitat, which is of course one of the seminal virtual worlds. It’s short and worth a read, especially just to marvel at the reason givn for the project’s shelving: fear of success.
Essentially, if 500 users were so committed to playing Habitat that they remained online long enough to eat up 1 percent of the network’s entire system bandwidth, a full-run production that could attract Rabbit Jack’s Casino numbers could boost that bandwidth number to 30 percent. “The way the system was built, the server software wasn’t capable of hosting that population while still being successful,” recalls Arnold.
Ultimately, these business challenges caused Habitat to be cancelled after the launch party, but before it had gone into full production and reached retail shelves. It would simply be too popular, and the necessary server fix would be too expensive to make the project viable. And so this massively original, inventive, and cutting-edge project was shelved for U.S. release.
9 Responses to “‘Rogue Leaders’ excerpt on Habitat”
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This book sits proudly in our company library at Untold Entertainment. It would have been better if they’d stopped at Grim Fandango, scrapped everything afterward, and threw in more anecdotes and trivia from the glory days of the graphic adventures. Let’s face it: no one’s buying this book to read about the gory details of Masters of Teräs Käsi.
I’m waiting for my copy of this book in the next week or so – when it comes there will be a full post over at Habitat Chronicles.
From the excerpt about Habitat that I read over at Gamasutra, there are several factual errors in this otherwise wonderful piece. 😛 Too bad, since there is a wealth of information available witha simple Google search and the principle designers/implementers are all readily avaialble but were not interviewed. Ahem.
Here’s something related to recent issues you’ve written about, Raph: I’ve had to back out changes in the Habitat wikipedia page the were put in as a direct result of the errors in this book. :: sigh :: Yes, the policy of Paper-Published == Truth bites wikipedia in the a$$ once again.
That sounds like a bulls**t excuse no? What happened to supply and demand? If it was too expensive to manage the servers for this torrent of popularity; dial the price up, pay for the servers will dialing down the demand.
Too popular to be viable? Smells funny to me.
The bit on Habitat is by far the most fascinating part of the book so far. If your corrections never make it to Wikipedia, could you share them here? Or email me? i’m very interested …
Kim, scale becomes an issue. If costs are exponential rather than linear you can easily end up with situations like that. It becomes a difficult situation; if you price yourself out of your market, you have no market, if you’re popular, you can’t afford costs. Either state is a losing state, and finding the equilibrium between the two would be hard and not a sure bet even then.
The problem was that no one had heard of “shards” yet.
Hah! That’s what happened to Second Life, too. Once it became popular it couldn’t maintain the service that made it so good, and it gradually transmutated into something completely different from what it started out as.
Or put them on the MUD Wikia…
If the scale issue on servers seems fishy to you – Remember folks this was 1986.
No $2000 8 core/16gig pizza box 1U servers.
“A Sun 2/170 server with 4Mb of memory, no display, two Fujitu Eagle 380 Mb disk drive, one Xylogics 450 SMD disk controller, a 6250 bpi 1/2 inch tape drive and a 72″ rack cost $79,500 (1986 US price list).” and thats the stripped base model
You would have to have some amazing user/server ratios to justify $80,000 – minimum server costs 🙂