I recall another over-ambitious project from way back, when USENET was the place to discuss everything and spam had not been invented. This was a time when email typically took anything from minutes to days to reach someone, depending on how well-connected both sender and recipient were, and USENET posts likewise. And there was nothing faster.
Unfortunately, I’ve never found any archive of USENET that goes back far enough to find this again, so the following is from memories that must be over 30 years old. I would be interested to know if anyone else remembers.
Someone had the idea of what we nowadays call an MMORPG: a massively multi-player online game of galactic exploration and conquest. Of course, this would not happen in real time. Nothing did in those days except your interaction with the machine directly in front of you, and not always then. No, this would be roughly turn-based. You would submit your moves, and a few days later you would see the outcome. Imagine Eve Online played by postal mail.
The global state of the whole game would be maintained using the same protocols that USENET itself used to distribute articles. (USENET had no centralised store, like a bulletin board would: every message was copied to every participating machine, each machine communicating with a few neighbours on the net to share new messages.) To save on memory, all of the assets would be pseudo-randomly generated, so the whole geography of a planet could be represented by its random seed, as would the distribution of stars across the galaxy. A huge discussion sprang up across several USENET newsgroups, and ran for months, with people posting idea after idea of what to put in the game and how things would work. It was awesome.
To the best of my knowledge, no code for this game was ever written.
I took from this a warning against continually raising one’s sights and never firing through them, dreaming ever greater dreams but never rising from the opium couch, all exploration and no exploitation.
It is possible that some of the people involved might have been inspired by it to make their own games that did see the light of day, although I’ve never heard anyone say so.
Sounds a little like StarWeb? Recently read a lovely article about a similar but different game, Monster Island, which was a thing from 1989 to 2017.
But yes, my default assumption would be that the particular conversation you’re referring to never resulted in a game that saw the light of day; I’ve seen many detailed game design discussions among people I’ve known meet the same fate.
I recall another over-ambitious project from way back, when USENET was the place to discuss everything and spam had not been invented. This was a time when email typically took anything from minutes to days to reach someone, depending on how well-connected both sender and recipient were, and USENET posts likewise. And there was nothing faster.
Unfortunately, I’ve never found any archive of USENET that goes back far enough to find this again, so the following is from memories that must be over 30 years old. I would be interested to know if anyone else remembers.
Someone had the idea of what we nowadays call an MMORPG: a massively multi-player online game of galactic exploration and conquest. Of course, this would not happen in real time. Nothing did in those days except your interaction with the machine directly in front of you, and not always then. No, this would be roughly turn-based. You would submit your moves, and a few days later you would see the outcome. Imagine Eve Online played by postal mail.
The global state of the whole game would be maintained using the same protocols that USENET itself used to distribute articles. (USENET had no centralised store, like a bulletin board would: every message was copied to every participating machine, each machine communicating with a few neighbours on the net to share new messages.) To save on memory, all of the assets would be pseudo-randomly generated, so the whole geography of a planet could be represented by its random seed, as would the distribution of stars across the galaxy. A huge discussion sprang up across several USENET newsgroups, and ran for months, with people posting idea after idea of what to put in the game and how things would work. It was awesome.
To the best of my knowledge, no code for this game was ever written.
I took from this a warning against continually raising one’s sights and never firing through them, dreaming ever greater dreams but never rising from the opium couch, all exploration and no exploitation.
It is possible that some of the people involved might have been inspired by it to make their own games that did see the light of day, although I’ve never heard anyone say so.
Sounds a little like StarWeb? Recently read a lovely article about a similar but different game, Monster Island, which was a thing from 1989 to 2017.
But yes, my default assumption would be that the particular conversation you’re referring to never resulted in a game that saw the light of day; I’ve seen many detailed game design discussions among people I’ve known meet the same fate.