Hard Copy

Given that I've been doing almost nothing else for the last few days, I guess it's time I posted something about the new toy I've cryptically and irritatingly referred to a couple of times in recent posts. I really wanted to get a bit further in my experiments before committing to print but it's either this or some more speculation about Stars Reach and I'm pretty sure no-one wants that.

So, first up, just what is this new toy? Didn't I say it had something to do with AI? Not that again! I thought we'd all agreed it wasn't fun any more and not to bang on about it.

Ah, yes, but that was when the LLMs and their pals had mostly gotten their act together. They'd stopped behaving like surreal toddlers or like science fiction pets who could almost talk but not quite. They'd nearly reached the competent-but-boring stage and the novelty had worn off, yet they still hadn't ascended to genuine reliability. 

Instead, they'd managed to plateau into being not much fun any more but also not quite reliable enough to be genuinely useful, while at the same time achieving a level of cultural ubiquity that made them obnoxious. It was probably time to leave them to cook a little longer in the hope they'd eventually either start working properly or go away, neither of which seemed all that likely to happen any time soon.

So that's what I did, mostly. I stopped playing around with the newer versions of the AIs I already knew about and didn't bother looking for any new ones. I kept a vague eye on developments via the Theoretically Media YouTube channel but that was about all. 

My thoughts moved on to other things, one of which was a project I've been fiddling about with for years, something much more old-school than all this new-fangled artificial intelligence nonsense. 

For around a decade, from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, I was somewhat actively involved in making music. I played guitar and sang in various bands - or would-be bands, not al of which ever left the rehearsal rooms. 

It wasn't much of a musical career. There was a lot more practicing than performing and much of the time the songs I was singing were written by other band-members, not by me. God knows why they thought I'd do a better job of it it than they could but that's how it was.

Even though I didn't get many of them onto the set-lists, I did still write quite a few songs of my own and I occasionally used to record myself singing them. I didn't have anything even as sophisticated as those old four-track Tascam machines everyone had back then, although I thought often enough about buying one. I never did, though, so I just recorded myself through the inbuilt mic of my cheap boombox or ghetto blaster or whatever we called those things before it wasn't cool to call them that any more.

You can imagine what the sound quality was like. Also I mostly got the urge to do it when I came home after a night out, so some of the results weren't even listenable the next day, let alone forty years later. I also liked to buy those big packs of very cheap blank tapes, the ones that stretch and break. It's not hard to guess how any that survive are likely to sound after four and a half decades.

There were other recordings, too. One band I was in got as far as making a demo in a professional studio and I have a copy of that. There are live tapes of at least two gigs, different bands, one recorded through the mixing desk so at least at the time, it sounded pretty good. There are quite a few rehearsals, one of which goes all the way back to the first band I was in, before we ever played a gig. I think I would have been about eighteen.

Because I'm a pack-rat and I never throw anything away, I still have almost every tape I made. Almost. One or two seem to have gone missing and of course one of those I remember being of particular interest. I persuaded my ex to sing a couple of songs on it. I always imagined most of my songs to be sung with a female voice but none of the bands I ever played in had girl singers. Probably just as well or I would have been out.

That one seems to have vanished. It's hardly surprising. They have not been carefully archived, just dumped into boxes and shoved under the bed. Some have lost their cases. It's a wonder there's as many left as there are. I also have nearly all the lyrics, handwritten originals, in a battered, yellow binder. 

At various times over the last fifteen years or so I've made half-hearted attempts to "do something" with them. I once got so far as to listen to the whole lot and scribble the odd note about what was on them but I only ever listened to the minimum necessary to add labels like "1970s" or "horrible". Nothing useful like a track list.

I would quite like to know what's on them before it's too late. I'm aware how fragile and ephemeral magnetic tape, especially the cheap stuff used in 1970s and '80s compact cassettes, can be, which is why I've had the idea of digitizing my "archive" just about since I learned it was possible. I've actually tried to do it a few times but never with much success.

For a long time there were always tape players of different sizes and qualities lying about the house. I've connected most of them up to different computers over the years but largely failed to get anything that seemed worth the considerable effort it took to get them to talk to each other. I've bought devices, cables and contraptions that were supposed to make transferring recordings from tape to digital files easy but none of them did a very good job and all of them were more trouble than it felt the output was worth.

Last year, I tried once again, only to find that none of the old tape players I had worked any more and the various devices I'd bought were no longer compatible with modern operating systems. I had several very frustrating sessions, trying to get anything to speak to anything else, entirely without success.

And then, when I was looking at something else, I just happened to come across an updated version of one of the Walkman-like devices I already owned. Even when it used to work, which it doesn't any more, my one needed to be connected to a computer to function but the new version doesn't. You stick a USB drive into it and it digitizes the tape as it plays, simple as that.

Allegedly. Sounded too good to be true. I was highly suspicious. But there were lots of reviews praising it and some of them might not even have been by bots. Plus it was only about £25. Seemed worth a try.

It was. It works. Exactly as described. 

It's not perfect. The controls are a bit fiddly, just as several people complained in the reviews. Sometimes you have to press the buttons a few times to get them to respond. The build is cheap and the sound quality, were you to want to listen to the tape through the speaker or headphones, is poor. But it works.

Play a tape, press record and a digital file is created on the USB drive supplied. Or any USB drive. Take the USB out and plug it into a PC and presto! There's the contents of the tape, all dressed up as an MP3. Granted, sometimes it's an MP3 that Audacity doesn't recognize but a quick pass through VLC's converter and it's all good.

Ah, yes. Audacity. I've installed a copy on every PC I've used for as long as I can remember but I've rarely found much use for it until now, when I'm starting to discover just how versatile and useful it is. As you might expect, some of these tapes are not in the greatest of shape after nearly half a century. They vary from tinny but clear to something that sounds like faint whisperings from a far-off star.

Audacity can fix all of that. At least, it can fix everything well enough for the purposes I require, which are twofold:

• I want to know what's on every tape
• I want to turn anything that's worth keeping into something that's also worth listening to.

The first is easy. I just have to be able to listen to them without having to actually listen to them. No-one wants to hear a drunken twenty-something caterwauling over the tuneless strumming of an out-of-tune guitar. That it's my caterwauling and strumming makes it no more appealing.

Having the files in digital form means I can skip through the running order in a few seconds instead of having to wait for the excruciatingly slow transport of a cheap cassette deck to trundle the tape back wards or forwards, while I constantly stop and start the machine to see if there's anything worth hearing. I also only have to listen to a few seconds to know if it's worth carrying on.

Once I find a take of a song I think might be worthy of further attention, I can excise it, name it and store it separately. There is a function on the device itself that supposedly separates the individual songs on the tape into discrete MP3s as it goes but, while I imagine that works perfectly well for pre-recorded tapes with definite gaps between tracks, it doesn't do much for the kind of stop-start home recordings I'm dealing with. I tried it but it turned out to be easier to just scan through the digital file visually and identify the breaks that way.

So much for finding the songs that have potential. That's the easy part. The hard part is turning them into something anyone would want to hear. 

I'll be honest. Even with the full force of nostalgia in play and even given these are my songs and it's me singing them, there's precious little I'd want to hear twice and hardly anything I'd be willing to play to anyone else. I was never a very good singer or a very good guitar player and these primitive recordings, many made when I was under the influence of something or other, do not make me sound any better than I was. 

For that, I always needed the help of others, preferably people who knew how to play. In my mid-sixties and with forty years between now and the last time I knew anyone who fancied pretending to be in a band, where am I going to find help like that?

And that, as I'm sure you've guessed, is where AI enters the story. But that's a story that will only be told when I'm good and ready. It shouldn't be too long, not with all the time I'm spending on it. 

When it comes, there will be examples.

Consider yourself warned.

There Is No Mystery Left: EverQuest

Pete from Dragonchasers posted yesterday about his preferences when playing various kinds of video games on console or PCs. Among the differences he mentioned that shiboleth of gaming, immersion:

"I find that playing on console ... There are fewer distractions and I tend to play for longer sessions which also helps with immersion...

On the PC I’m constantly distracting myself with FOMO around Twitter or Discord. I run with 2 monitors and always have social media up on monitor two and constantly scan it. Because of this I just don’t “sink in” to a game quite as much; my attention is always divided."

This triggered me. I got a flash memory of playing EverQuest in the distant past. Shivers.

For many, EQ was the very definition of "immersion", a true virtual world, where people set up home, lived their lives. That scared people.

These days we hear very little about the supposed addictive nature of the hobby but back then MMORPGs were frequently cited as potential mental health nightmares. In the early 2000s, one of EverQuest's most widely-used nicknames was EverCrack, a reference to the infamously addictive and soul-destroying cocaine variant that was by far the most demonized drug of its day.

I have no extant screenshots of EQ before about 2004. This looks likes a very early version of the moveable, windowed UI.

The mere fact that I felt I might need to gloss "crack" when mentioning it 2019 is an indication how quickly these things change. I listened to a very interesting item on BBC Radio Four last week that asked the question "why is crack cocaine rarely mentioned in the news these days?" to which the answer appeared to be "because the crack epidemic went away".

And why did the drug that the media spent so much time and energy warning us about not turn out to be the apocalyptic scourge they predicted? Luckily the program had an answer: apparently all that endless, hyperbolic publicity gave the drug such a bad name it actually did terrify people to the point that the curious wouldn't touch it, demand dropped, tastes moved on (or back, in many cases, to regular cocaine). The juicy crack stories dried up and, by and large, everyone forgot about it.

For a while. As anyone who's been around for longer than a couple of decades soon begins to realize, these things are cyclical. If you google "trends in crack cocaine news stories" you'll find that, as reported, ironically by the BBC, crack is back.

As in drugs, so in music, movies and gaming. What was old is new again. What goes around comes around and like that.

Fortnite, of course, is the new EverCrack. Or it was last year. Are people still worried about Fortnite or are we on to some new demon already? The roundabout keeps spinning faster and faster. It's hard to keep up.

And this appears to be a slightly later, cleaner version. Actually, this is better than the UI I use now...

Getting back to EverQuest, what Pete's comments made me think of wasn't so much the addictive rush of early EQ as its sheer purity. He's absolutely right about the modern approach to MMORPG gaming on PC. Compared to the original experience, what we enjoy today is adulterated, fractured, incomplete.

One of the reasons frequently cited for the decline of the genre is the contemperaneous rise of social media. It's become a truism to assert that turn-of-the-century MMORPGs were the social media of their day. For many hundreds of thousands - millions - of people, playing an online game provided their first and for a while their only experience of talking in real time to friends and strangers around the world.

This is entirely true. What's less well-reported, I think, is the focus the primitive technology of the late 20th and very early 21st centuries brought to the mix. In those increasingly difficult to remember days we tended to do one thing at a time. Well, perhaps not one. Fewer, though. Certainly fewer.

If you played EverQuest you had to concentrate on that. There were consequences if you let your attention slide. Corpse runs. Experience loss. Misery and despair.

More than that, the game itself resisted distraction. You could not tab out to look something up on Allakhazam let alone check your email. EverQuest could not be windowed. It used all your screen space and all your processing power. You played it until you'd had enough then you closed the program and did something else.

There are surprisingly few images of the original UI online and I strongly suspect that those there are come from P1999.

Unless you were bad. If you were, you might download a piece of third party software called Win-EQ which, among other things, allowed you to play EverQuest in a window. Illegally. Against the terms of the EULA. Risking a ban should you be caught.

I'd been playing EQ for several years before I even heard of Win-EQ. When I found out what it was I wanted nothing to do with it. It was cheating. No-one I knew (and at that time I knew scores of people in game) admitted to using it. It was for bad people.

We goodies sat and medded with our spellbooks open, filling the entire screen. I played for years with no distractions or media other than the official EverQuest display, a nine-inch square inside a UI that filled the rest of my 14" CRT monitor, my only contact with the outside world the chat box at the bottom center of the screen. That was immersion for you.

I did sometimes hear of people who had two PCs running at once. I occasionally grouped with someone who had Netscape upon on a second monitor so they could check things on Caster's Realm or EQ Atlas. We did in fact have two PCs in our house from early 2000, with Mrs Bhagpuss playing EverQuest in one room and me playing EverQuest in another. I don't think it ever occured to either of us that you could have two in the same place...

As for internet access via a handheld device, well that was the stuff of science fiction. Imagine it - something the size of a paperbook book or even a pack of cigarettes that you could tap with your fingertips to look up what spells a Level 27 Druid got or where to go for the Level 24 Mage pet. Fantasy!

I envy even this level of simplicity. Although why I have Group and Target on the right I cannot imagine...

What I had, in point of fact, were three ring-binders with sheafs of paper printed out from the various essential online resources. And a book to read during long med breaks. After a couple of years I also started to listen to the radio while I played, if I was soloing. An actual radio, in the room with me, not some online app.

Perhaps, looking back, the experience wasn't entirely pristine but it was undeniably less diluted by distractions and diversions than it has been these last dozen years. I never tabbed out at a loading screen and found myself twenty minutes later, watching Rilo Kiley on YouTube with no memory of how I got there.

As Pete says, consoles don't generally dicker with such dilletantism but they can't stop you from having your laptop open beside you on the couch, your phone on the armrest, your tablet on the side-table. Nothing any games designer can do can prevent you from spoiling every surprise or taking a wrecking ball to your sense of immersion if that's what you want, or if that's what you can't help yourself from doing.

Genies can't be put back in bottles even though that's a quest we've most likely all done, successfully, many times. The wave of faux-retro MMORPGs still in development hell - Pantheon, Lucimia, Camelot Unchained et al - all rely to some extent on reviving and recreating that sense of immersion and community. Holly Longdale, in the numerous interviews she's given for EQ's 20th, has been hammering home the rediscovered belief at Daybreak Games that "social dependency is who we are".

It may be who they are. But is it who we are, any more?

It'll Be Like Before You Were Gone

On Friday, ArenaNet announced a "Welcome Back" month for Guild Wars 2. More than a month, in fact; five weeks, starting Monday March 25.

It was a very low-key announcement, nothing more than a forum post. Surprise was expressed. Shouldn't there be some kind of awareness campaign? Rubi Bayer, who appears to have drawn the short straw after Gail Gray's unceremonious dumping, clarified:

"There will be livestreams, guides, and some more surprises that I won't spoil now, but there will be a full outline and schedule on our site Monday morning. Today's post is just a heads-up on various channels to get the word out a little bit in advance, so those who are interested but don't remember their login info can work with our CS team to get that taken care of. It's so frustrating when you want to participate in something that has already started and can't remember your password, so we thought a head start for those people would be less stressful."

Does that make sense? Are people who can't remember the password for a game they no longer play likely to be on the forums in the first place? Or following Twitter or Facebook or whatever those "various channels" might be?

Maybe they sent out emails as well. I get a lot of emails from MMORPGs I haven't logged into for years, telling me about their promotions and events. Of course, since I tend to use unique adresses for registering games, adresses I never visit and don't link to my main account, I only see those offers on the very rare occasions I log back in to check something. Usually years too late.

Still, it's a well-established route for marketing departments. A back channel to the past. As Holly Windstalker Longdale openly acknowledged in that recent PC Gamer interview, for an aging MMORPG, luring former players back into the fold is a higher priority than attracting people who've never played before.

It really does make sense. After all, as a six-year old game, let alone one twice or even three times that age, you'd have to assume that just about anyone who was ever going to give you a run would have gotten around to it by now.

No need to feel blue. We're still here. Waiting.

The first few years post-launch offer a handful of well-known opportunities for new account acquisition. You can bring your game to a different platform - console conversions must be expensive to produce but they do open a door to an entirely fresh market. Less spectacular but worth a shot is a Steam launch. Steam isn't really a famous breeding ground for MMOs but it's not nothing.

If you were canny enough to start off with some kind of entry barrier, a box or digital download with an up-front fee, say, or maybe even an actual, honest-to-god subscription, always assuming that decision didn't sink your entire operation, there's a major PR opportunity available when you announce your game is going Free to Play. That's a one-time deal, though, and it can smack of desperation.

Last and very definitely not least, you can run some kind of permanent free trial, allowing the curious and uncommitted to try before they buy. That became pretty much industry standard log ago.

Whatever you do, even if you eventually try all the options, in the end you run up against the same buffer: your game is old and getting older. Potential customers have either heard of it and already rejected it or they are just now discovering it only to find out it's been running for years and everyone playing is way, way ahead.

Your elderly MMORPG already starts with the major disadvantage that, from the perspective of a new player, the graphics look sub-par. Possibly stone age. For those who can get past that, the staggering amount of legacy content, all of which comes before you even get near to the part of the game everyone else is playing, is more than enough to bring the shutters down.

Did I mention we have sitting in chairs now? Tempted?

In recent years companies have tried all kinds of bootstrapping to get new players over the hump  - super-fast leveling, instant max-level characters, flat-leveling the entire gameworld. They all come with issues of their own. You can accelerate or remove the leveling process but there's no way to instantly install all the necessary knowledge of systems and mechanics your end-game players take for granted. It's not much more fun floundering at the top than at the bottom.

That's why people who used to play but don't any more are seen as a more realistic commercial prospect. There's the currently-hot nostalgia ticket to sell them for starters. Re-working your game so it looks a lot more like the one returning players remember seems to be well worth the expense, if you get it right.

Your game probably needs to have been around for quite a while before you play that card. The current Live game needs to have diverged so far from the original conception that bitter veterans hate it and all it stands for. If you alienate them just enough you can bring them back on board as advocates when you appear to bow to their conviction that things really were better back in their day.

Rift probably failed mainly on that count. Once the new server reached the first expansion, Storm Legion, there just wasn't enough difference between Prime and Live. The game never had enough periodic content to run a true Progression server. It might have done better with a straight Classic server, maybe even one with an expiry date, which would wipe and re-start every so often, allowing transfers to Live first, of course.

Starting over clean can be a big draw. Sometimes a Fresh Start server is all that's needed to re-kindle interest. You don't even have to play the nostalgia card with a retro-revamp. A level playing field is enough. Maybe a few tweaks, perks and inducements along the way. A slight variant ruleset. Some titles. A leaderboard. The big risk there is fracking your existing playerbase into smaller shards but with luck you'll give everyone a jolt of excitement and when it all settles down you'll have a few new customers on the back of that buzz.

There's no need to worry. You won't feel silly. We all feel silly.

Brand-new servers have one immense advantage when it comes to persuading former players to return. Everyone starts in the same place. It's almost the same as a new game except for one thing: when confused and lost players plaintively ask questions in general chat, instead of crickets chirping or, worse, sarcastic trolls suggesting a swift return to WoW, they'll get help and even encouragement.

I'm seeing this every day on EverQuest II's Kaladim server. The population is a good mix of current, active players on vacation from Live, lapsed members of the flock re-discovering their religion and a sprinkling of    "I wish I''d tried this game years ago". Questions don't just get answered, they spark amiable discussions and often lead to reminiscence and general bonhomie.

It's a well-trodden path by now. Any marketing department worth its red suspenders should be able to slot in several pre-fabricated options, tested and found successful in other games. At worst it's a burst of publicity for cheap. At best it's a shot in the arm for sales and retention.

For a few MMORPGs, though, there's a roadblock standing in the way of those easy wins. Classic, Progression, New Start: all those options come with a suffix. Server. What if your game evolved to the new normal of a few years back and did away with the entire concept of separate shards?

When you threw that bathwater out the possibility of farming the nostalgia market went down the drain with it. So did any chance of starting over on a clean page. You put all your eggs in one megabasket and your chickens hatched and came home to roost.

There are things you can get on top of that you never got on top of before. This isn't one of them but trust me.

All MMORPG hobbyists know what a hurdle re-starting on a Live server presents. All the new systems you don't understand. All your old assumptions that don't follow any more. The drops and rewards that mean nothing to you. The jargon in chat you can't unpick. All that stuff in your bags and banks you don't know whether to destroy or broker or sell or salvage. The understanding that you know less than everyone around you and they probably don't care, just that you stay out of their way.

If you run a campaign to get former players to log in again but all you can offer them when they do is a world that looks familiar but feels alien, what are the chances they'll hang around long enough to acclimatize?

The good news from ANet's perspective is that GW2 hasn't really changed all that much. You can still fight centaurs and Sons of Svanir until the dolyaks come home. You can do the same events on the same maps that you did in 2012. You can join the World Boss train and knock over a giant loot pinata every fifteen minutes with thirty new best friends you'll never have to talk to.

The races haven't changed, the Personal Story is the same and if you haven't bought either of the expansions there aren't even any new classes and hardly any new maps. Other than a bunch of giant gerbils and lizards running everywhere with player characters clinging to their backs it all looks - and plays - pretty much the same.

If you like it enough to pay some money and buy the expansions or the Living Story packs, well you'll be on exactly the same terms as the rest of us were two or three or four years ago. All the maps are still active for the group stuff  when you need it, although most of it was single-player content anyway and, while Anet's claim that they have the best community in MMOs may be somewhat overblown, by and large it is pretty welcoming. If you have questions you'll get answers, provided you ask nicely.

When you get right down to it, though, nothing much has changed.

So what's the point of this five week long "Welcome Back" event? Better than not having one, I suppose. And it co-incides with the annual rerun of the ever-popular Super Adventure Box, something I'm sure is no co-incidence. There will be plenty of drop-ins for that so why not see if some of them can be persuaded to hang around?

I'd be very surprised to see this result in any significant, lasting uptick in activity, all the same. GW2 has just about the lowest barrier to re-entry of any MMORPG I've ever played. People drop in and out literally all the time. I see names every day that I haven't seen for years. My friends list flickers and sparkles like witchfire and always has.

I wonder how many how many genuine ex-GW2 players there can be, anyway? People who really did stop playing a long time ago and never came back. And of that demographic, how many ever would? It can't be that they wanted to but it was too expensive or too awkward, surely? It's free and simple and always has been. It's the Hotel California of MMOs.

If anyone did leave for good, most likely it was because they never enjoyed the game much anyway or didn't like what it turned into once the short trip to the cap was done. Has any of that changed? Not really. Endless fractals. Dead dungeons. Gutted WvW. Grind, without end, for everything, everywhere, always.

Same as it ever was.

Raiding, I guess, but if you'd left because no raids wouldn't you have come back when raids? And if you left because raids, well, we still have them. Worse luck. No, it all seems much the same to me. Except I'd take a Launch State Classic server in a heartbeat so I guess I may have been boiled in my tank.

Tomorrow we'll find out if ANet have anything more up their sleeves to entice former players to give the game another shot. There's some speculation about things like rentable gliders or mounts in Core Tyria open world to tempt returners into ponying up for the expansions but they'd still have to pay for the real thing. Maybe a sale on Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire? Or the two as a bundle?

If there's no financial or in-game incentive it's hard to see the value of a promotional push that comes down to just some streamers saying how much fun the old game can be. You probably know that if you ever played. Or you disagree, in which case I don't see much to convince you otherwise.

And even if a promotion succeeds in getting players invested it's hard to keep them feeling the love. The huge boost in numbers World vs World saw as a result of the recent, super-hyped introduction of the Warclaw mount (plus a double WvW XP week) has already dissipated, leaving nothing more behind than bad feeling and disgruntlement to show it ever happened.

Still, better to try than not try, I guess. We'll find out tomorrow if there's anything to get excited about. I'm not holding my breath.

Easy Pieces

On Sunday I researched and wrote a massive post on Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and his recent investment in Daybreak Games. It took me several hours and naturally only one person commented (thanks, Mailvaltar!).

I knew that would happen. It's one of the unwritten rules of blogging: the more time and effort you put into a post, the less attention it will receive. If you want feedback, post a single paragraph, preferably one that makes some kind of off-the-cuff, smart alec point that popped into your head thirty seconds before you sat down at the keyboard. Even better if it doesn't take much longer than that to type it up.

Lenny Bruce had a routine based on the Lone Ranger. For anyone not old enough to remember either of them (actually, I don't, since they both reached the peak of their fame in the 1950s), Lenny Bruce was a vitriolic and highly controversial stand-up comedian. The Lone Ranger was a television series about a masked cowboy, famous for righting wrongs then riding into the sunset before anyone had time to thank him.

I first heard the routine on a vinyl double-album I had when I was a teenager. Those of us growing up in what Lana del Rey perceptively and evocatively called "the freedom land of the 70s" often felt surprisingly less free than we imagined teenagers of the 1960s or even the fifties must have been.

We also felt we'd been short-changed by the culture. The 1950s had the beat poets, Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. The sixties had... well, the 60s had everything. We had Marc Bolan and The Bay City Rollers. It didn't seem quite fair.

So, I spent a good deal of time burrowing about in what then seemed to me like the deep past - ten or even twenty years before. Much the way adolescents right now are mining the nineties and beyond for what seem to them to be lost, forgotten gems.

The near past was an inexhaustible treasure-house and in those days it had the added frisson of being barely accessible, too. With no worldwide web and everything analogue you took what you could find in the bargain bins and junk stores and counted yourself lucky if you found anything at all.

I have Woolworth's tenpenny bins to thank for my cut-out copy of William Burroughs Jr's "Speed", probably the title I'd quote if asked for a book that changed my life, although it did nothing of the kind. No book ever has. It did set me up for a lifetime of vicarious self-indulgence, though, for which I'm grateful.

As the sixties' dream died, a few astute businessmen must have noticed the interest youth was showing in age. There were some re-issues. Lenny Bruce's notorious autobiography, "How to talk Dirty and Influence People" was one. The first two Velvet Underground albums were another. I bought those.

There seemed to be a trend towards repackaging once-dangerous material to make it look and feel as innocuous as possible. The VU double retrospective (known as the Coke Bottle album) collected the songs from the first two albums and replayed them in a different order, diluting some of the impact.

Still, that was almost archival reverence compared to what was done to Lenny on the heavily bowdlerized collection of some of his most famous routines, ironically titled "The Real Lenny Bruce", which came out on vinyl in 1975. To my memory there's not a single swear-word on it, which is a bit like producing postcards of the Mona Lisa with the smile tippexed out. I bought it anyway.

Getting back to the point, assuming I ever had one, the message the adolescent me took from Bruce's Lone Ranger bit was that there's no point doing anything in the hope you'll get thanked for doing it. Or appreciated. Or even noticed. You should do it for your own satisfaction or not at all.

It's an understanding that's served me very well for almost half a century, which makes it deliciously ironic to find out, as I just did when I listened to the unexpurgated routine for the first time (not having heard any version in over thirty years), that I may have misunderstood the entire thing. Hearing it now I'm not entirely sure I know what Lenny thought he was going on about. Maybe he wasn't, either.

Nevertheless, the life lesson he taught me, intentionally or otherwise, stands. It really is a very bad idea to do something in the anticipation of getting a particular and specific reaction. People are people and people aren't you. They'll take from what you say just exactly what they want to, which most likely will be nothing at all.

Blaugust is long over so I don't know why I'm here giving blogging tips, if that's even what I'm doing. I meant to post a short response to Syp's post on Feature Bloat. That didn't happen, obviously...

I particularly didn't want to write another long post that required research because not only did I do that on Sunday but this morning I spent three hours writing two thousand words and recording myself talking about one of my old characters for an academic project. That will make a post in itself one day, when the project completes, or I hope it will.

No, I just wanted to sit down and bash something out, but this is what happens when I freestyle. The result is a little like what I imagine noodling must feel like, if you can actually play a musical instrument.

If anyone thought this was going anywhere, it's not. It came, it was here and now it's gone. And so am I. Toodle-pip!

Ring Out The Old, Ring In... On Second Thoughts, Don't Bother!

Something changed this year. Okay, outside our firmly barred and bolted thick oak fantasy doors, a lot of things changed but the less said about most of that the better.

No, I'm referring to my own decreasing interest and desire for novelty in gaming. While various wise and respected commentators stroke their beards over the paucity of new MMORPGs in production and the supposed moribundity of the genre, I find myself surprisingly sanguine over the admittedly thin, not to say threadbare, coat the New Year's wearing.

In the last few months I have spent almost all of my leisure time playing just two MMORPGs: Guild Wars 2 and EverQuest 2. Not only are those games five and thirteen years old respectively but they are each sequels to older games- games that are both still up and running.

Guild Wars may be in mothball mode but it's still there and people still play it. I played it in preparation for Path of Flames and I ran into a few others while I was there. I even saw tickers scrolling across the screen announcing the results of PvP matches so I guess someone still cares.

EverQuest, a good few years GW's senior, is far from entering maintenance mode. As Wilhelm observed with satisfaction, the old game got yet another expansion this year. Moreover, as he says, "Somebody must be buying the $140 versions of those expansions if they keep offering them."

But then, "maintenance mode" is itself becoming both a viable business model and playstyle. Someone recently wondered whether Funcom has any MMOs that aren't in maintenance mode. It does seem the company fortunes have improved since they stopped even pretending to produce new content and began concentrating on simply polishing up and repackaging the old.

Case in  point. I'm pretty sure I was meant to know who he was. Maybe if I'd raided in the first PoP...

Square Enix restarted FFXIV after it failed and that seems to have worked well for them. But then, as a company, they seem to have only the vaguest understanding of the concept of "stopping": FFXIV's predecessor, FFXI, is famously more active in supposed maintenance than many triple-A MMOs were at the peak of their success.

It goes on. Until NCSoft discovered the mountain of money that is Mobile gaming, its biggest earner was the near-two-decade old Lineage. That corner was finally turned not by Lineage's successor, the inevitable Lineage2, itself still bringing in the dollars, but by yet another Lineage, or rather two of them - LineageM and Lineage Revolution.

If it's not sequels or revamps it's versions. Blizzard's biggest reveal of the year wasn't the next WoW expansion. It was the news that they'd thrown in the towel and started work on bringing back Vanilla. They were probably swayed not only by the continuing interest in illegal time-travel via the Emu scene but also by Jagex's joyous capering under the the money-hose that is Old School Runescape.

Two decades and counting since the beginning of the MMORPG revolution and the huge majority of all the MMORPGs ever made are still running. It's news when one closes because it's so unusual.

When Brad McQuaid, John Smedley et al cooked up EQ they were hoping it might last three years. Modern developers think bigger. And longer. GW2 was designed with a ten-year lifecycle in mind and ArenaNet have said they have no plans to make any other new games. That will change, eventually, but when it does, what do you think the new game might be called?

I have actually finished the PoP Signature questline, I just haven't had the time to post about it. It was a lot better than the Path of Fire Story, that's for sure.

Indeed, once you have a successful MMO up and running, the need to come up with new ideas becomes significantly less pressing. Production of The Elder Scrolls series has effectively gone on hiatus with the success of TESO, for example.

CCP, the one major development team that really relishes the maverick tag, marked the exception to the rule with their advertisement for people to work on "a new and highly ambitious MMO" but then they've said that before, haven't they. And did it happen? Did it heck as like!

Mostly, for developers and players alike, the launch (or Early Access or Open Beta or Give Us Some Money And We'll Describe It For You) of an MMORPG is the beginning of a brave new world of updates, expansions and occasional graphical overhauls. The ship keeps on sailing, the scenery passes by, we dock at the occasional port, the band keeps on playing and we all keep on dancing.

And I like it. It suits me. I'm happy here in the happy house.

Oh, it's partly the season, I'll admit. The season and the weather. Short days, dark nights, rain, snow, warm socks and a comfy jumper. A night in with a mug of hot something and the familiar sights and sounds of 2012  - or 2007 or 2004 even 1999 - all bigger, brighter and less trouble than I remember.

Come the spring I may be yearning again for something fresh and new. As the leaves green and the sun brightens I could be back here, pounding out a thousand words wondering where all the new worlds have gone. I'll deal with that when it happens.

For now I'm quite content. Let this year roll over into next. I'll stay where I am, which is pretty much the same place I was last year. And the year before that.

Happy New MMORPG Year and let's have another one just like it. Please and thank you.

Let's Go Round Again : EverQuest, EQ2

Stargrace's recent post on starting over in EverQuest for the umpteenth time very nearly lured me into doing the same. Just reading it sent waves of nostalgic desire rippling through the backwaters of my mind.

I haven't been keeping up with progress on Phinagel, the latest of EQ's many "progression" servers. As far as I can tell there are three currently up and running - Phinagel, Ragefire and Lockjaw. I think I have a character on Ragefire but an All Access subscription is required to play there so it's a moot point right now.

I definitely had characters on the first Progression server, which was called The Combine and launched all the way back in 2006, at least according to this thread on the forums. Apparently The Combine eventually merged with Druzzil Ro, which itself was later merged into Xegony so I guess I have a level ten on Xegony now. Go me!

The history of EQ server merges is fascinating - or it is if you lived through it. The list in this thread, itself from 2012 and now archived, so presumably already out of date, tells a story all by itself.

The first server I ever played on was Prexus, which I picked because it had a name I found easy to remember. Mrs Bhagpuss joined me there and, as far as I recall, stayed while I wandered, first trying Brell Serilis (supposedly the unofficial RP server) and Test (just prior to The Great Wipe) before settling down for a long spell on Luclin, where I still mostly play - when I play.

For the first four years EverQuest was in a state of continual and rapid growth - not just geographically, with the annual and bi-annual expansions, but in its ever-increasing population. Server capacity back then was a lot less than it would be later on and new servers seemed to open every few months.

There's little in the hobby to beat the first few days of a brand new server for sheer, often near-hysterical, excitement, so I developed the habit of making a character on every server as it arrived. I remember making characters on Tholuxe Paells, Maelin Starpyre, Morell-Thule, Stromm, Morden Rasp, The Seventh Hammer, and Lanys T'Vyl on the first day they appeared. Probably there are more that I've forgotten.

Some of those characters got played a lot, even if they never leveled very far. Morell-Thule was where I made my Iksar SK at the launch of EQ's first expansion, Ruins of Kunark. He was possibly the hardest and slowest EQ character to level I ever had, what with the Iksar XP penalty and the unforgiving Kunark starting zones. I spent more time getting lost in Cabilis than I did killing things. I still get him out and do a bit on him now and again. He's in South Ro these days, somewhere in the high teens, I think.

I made a female halfling Warrior on Tholuxe Paells specifically to play with someone whose name I've long forgotten. They promised to start over there and duo with me and I made a warrior specifically for that - then they promptly left after the first week, never to be seen again. Right after that happened I got into an argument with someone else, which I resolved by logging out and not coming back for six months. That was my Tholuxe Paells experience in a nutshell, although I went on logging  that warrior in, on and off, for years. Don't think she ever made double figures.

Lanys T'Vyl and Luclin started on the same day and I made characters on both - a Druid on Luclin and a Wizard on Lanys. Like the warrior, the wizard had the occasional run out, often on a weekend morning for some reason, for the best part of a decade, without ever really making any progress. It was the druid that stuck. She became my most played and highest level character, eventually making it to 60 when sixty was the cap.

Her career pretty much crashed and burned with the launch of the first European server, Antonius Bayle. For reasons that I no longer remember, Mrs Bhagpuss and I both began playing there, although not immediately. It was the first time we really played together, by which I mean in being in the same guild (and more importantly the same custom chat channel that operated as a supra-guild entity).

For the first time we were sharing the same friends list, rather than duoing or joining ad hoc groups together, which we'd done on and off all along and Ant Bayle became our home for what seems to me, only in retrospect like my first, real, core run through Norrath. It was there that I finally had characters at the cap for two or three expansion cycles and when I mainly played in groups, in dungeons, rather than solo, above ground. It was there that I learned to play the game and not just to live in the world.

A combination of Guild drama and the EQ2 beta eventually put paid to that run but we came back for an encore less than a year later, when EQ2 turned out to be a dud (until Scott Hartsman rode in on his
charger). We had moved our characters from Ant Bayle to Saryrn on a free transfer before we left. Why was there a free transfer? I  can't remember. Something must have merged with something or maybe it was when SOE and UbiSoft parted company. Anyway, we declined to pick them up again, choosing instead to go back to Stromm, where we'd both played at  server launch, made friends, joined guilds and had good memories.

We had another good run there, possibly two. I think we came back yet again after Vanguard. It gets very hard to reconstruct the sequence as time passes. The past fractures into a series of vignettes and incidents which, as I retell them, polish up like semi-precious stones into anecdotes, all the grit and edge smoothed down to a comfortable glow. It's also surprisingly hard to dig out simple facts like the launch dates of individual servers. Not impossible - it's all somewhere in the official patch notes, all of which are still available online. It's just more trouble than I feel like taking for a rambling, nostalgia-inspired blog post.

Going back to Stargrace, it's astonishing how powerful certain triggers remain despite the drift and shadow of the passing years. She talks about her troll shaman making her way to North Karana to take the Spires to The Nexus on Luclin (the moon, not the server) so as to bind in that advantageous location, only to be killed in one hit by a passing guard as she waited for the twenty minute teleportation cycle to turn.

That one tale combines a wealth of experiences for me. I walked a troll shaman to the gates of Qeynos to get him bound there out of range of the guards so as to have a better place to hunt than the swamps of Innothule. One of the scariest in-game things I ever did and one of the most satisfying when it turned out successfully.

I hung back out of range of the guards at the North Karana portal as an Ogre Shadowknight, praying I was far enough back to stay out of aggro range. Several of my characters made more or less dangerous journeys to The Nexus to bind in what was the premier travel hub of Norrath until the Plane of Knowledge rendered it redundant overnight.

When Stargrace goes on to talk about finding a heavy iron ulak in the Bazaar I can see the same icon in my mind's eye as if it had popped up on a vendor in front of me. She doesn't need to explain that the "PC" where everyone had been getting xp stands for "Paludal Caverns" - I can hear the screams and laughter echoing through that hideous place as though I'd spent all last night there - again!

In layers of irony spread thick and deep, I was pondering the feasibility of fitting in yet another return to Norrath, this time to one of my very favorite times and places, the Luclin Era, while working through a series of crafting quests in Butcherblock on Stormhold, the EQ2 Time Limited Expansion server. Living in the past while living in the past.

It's not as though I'd even planned to be on Stormhold. Playtime for EQ2 is limited already and there's a new expansion on the boil. I don't have time to stir the nostalgia pot and yet of course I do. I always do. Frostfell on Stormhold, how could I resist? I didn't even try. And then it was four hours later and I realized I hadn't even made a coffee and my legs were cramped and just one more quest...

So Luclin will have to wait. Probably. This time. We'll see. Never say never again and home is where if you have to go there they have to take you in and all that. And Norrath is home. All of it. Always was, always will be.

Why I'm Not Playing Pokemon Go (Like I Have To Have A Reason...)

Ravanel has a post up this morning about how much she wants to be playing Pokemon Go right now. At the end of the post she asks a couple of questions that started me thinking:

Did you grow up with Pokémon? And are you playing Pokémon Go?

Well, no I didn't. No, I'm not. Just like I'm neither interested in nor excited by news of yet another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Transformers movie, the mere invocation of the Pokemon brand presses none of my buttons. Well, none of the appropriate ones.

You might assume that was an age thing, what with the fairly imminent approach of my sixtieth birthday, and to some extent it is. I was, after all, nearing forty years old when the first Pokemon appeared in 1995. There's more to it than that, though.

Not only does the franchise form no part of my personal lexicon of childhood or adolescent experiences but I can honestly say I barely even noticed it at the time. Yet it's not as though I wasn't culturally exposed, open even, to such things as they were happening.

Not a Pokemon

During the 1990s I was living day-to-day alongside three children, who were aged somewhere between five and thirteen when the game first appeared. I knew who Mario was. I actually saw the movie at the cinema. There was a SNES in the living room. I bought and played FFVII. Still, I have no memory of anyone I knew ever playing, wanting to play or even mentioning Pokemon.

For a long time I had it filed away in the back of my mind as something associated with Tamagochis, which were a big thing in our house for a while. And Furbys. We had both of those and I played with them and understood them. Pokemon - nothing.

I would have pretty much forgotten Pokemon even existed if it hadn't been for Wilhelm. Over the last few years reading TAGN has told me more about about Pokemon than I ever imagined I'd know. In the same way that reading countless reports on Minecraft has left me feeling I must have played the game in some other life, I have a ghostly, vestigial pseudo-memory of catching brightly colored cartoon creatures and setting them against others in fights that come freighted with queasily uncomfortable socio-historic subtext.

Mulling this over it seems to me that, while age has something to do with the extent and the specifics of involvement, which cultural phenomenon gets to sink its hooks into which person depends a lot more on personal experience than the number of candles on a birthday cake. My childhood was mainly in the 1960s and my adolescence in the 1970s but for some reason, although many of the cultural shibboleths and touchstones of those decades resonate strongly still, in my late fifties the decade whose cultural artifacts affect me most sentimentally in recall is probably the 1980s, the time when I became an independent adult.

I say "probably" because these things drift. In the mid-90s, when Pokemon was new, my call-backs were all to the seventies. In that I was dead in tune with the zeitgeist. Pokemon arrived in the white-heat of Britpop, that final spin of the thirteen-year cycle, which sought to magpie the best from the '60s and '70s and mosaic something bright and new out of the scraps. Now, a couple of decades on, the '90s themselves are beginning to acquire a soft, rose-hued glow.

Looks a bit more like one but still not a Pokemon.

Perhaps the nodal point of nostalgia always trails a generation behind. Maybe it takes twenty years to acquire the distance needed for flaws to fade and warmth to grow. maybe it's not so much how old you were then as how many years have passed.

But to trigger a wave of nostalgia or even simple recognition you have to have been paying attention the first time round and Pokemon passed me by. Instead of warm fuzzies I have cool, hard intellectual curiosity. Pokemon Go does look like an enjoyable game. More importantly it appears to be developing into a fascinating and potentially influential cultural phenomena.

There's a chance it could mark a fork in the cultural road the way Twitter or Facebook did. In a year or two Augmented Reality gaming could be as much a part of everyday life as tweeting or updating your profile (two things that once again I know only from hearsay). Or it could be languishing wherever fads like Farmville go to die.

Obviously not the latter. The immense strength of the Pokemon brand will sustain when the fickle attention of the global horde moves on. Pokemon will be with us forever, like every other cultural phenomenon that passes a certain, hard to define, watershed. If the name of Pikachu (still the only Pokemon I can recall with certainty) isn't up there with Dracula and Sherlock Holmes quite yet, it  soon will be.

Okay, these could be Pokemon...

I probably would be playing Pokemon Go along with everyone else right now, just to be part of the buzz, if it wasn't for one other thing: I don't own a mobile phone. Not just not a smart one, like Wilhelm. I don't even own a dumb one.

I have a blind spot about phones. I am fully and happily digitized. I have a houseful of PCs. I have old gaming systems from the 1980s tucked away in cupboards. I have an iPod and half a dozen tablets and use several of them daily but I have never owned a phone. I've never even had a landline in my own name.

And even if I did have a smartphone - and sooner or later I will almost certainly have to get one  because in five or ten years it's going to be next to impossible to function as an adult without one - I would not allow it to track my whereabouts, which as far as I can tell would pretty much drop a rock on the chances of chasing down Pokemons.

I don't have a valid argument for that - it just feels completely wrong so I'm not going to do it. Not until I do, naturally. Consistency, hobgoblin, you know the drill.

So there it is. Another cultural milestone missed. Can't hit 'em all.



All images borrowed from The Internet. Any rights holders unhappy about that just let me know and they're gone.

The Great Vanilla Shortage or What WoW Could Learn From RuneScape

It's been hard to avoid the the whole Nostalrius saga these past couple of weeks. The story made it out of the blogs onto the regular gaming news sites and even as far as the fringes of the mainstream media.

Like the ongoing war in New Eden, where thousands of ships and tens of thousands of players battle over virtual assets measured in trillions, much of the widening interest comes from the numbers. No-one much notices when something happens in a game played by a few thousand people but when the tally runs into six or seven figures we all feel a disturbance in the force.

There were, reportedly, a hundred and fifty thousand active players on the illegal Nostalrius server. They came from an even larger pool of people, eight hundred thousand in all, who were sufficiently enamored with the idea of stepping back in time to the halcyon days of Vanilla WoW to take the trouble to register their interest with the organizers.

Blizzard's much-discussed decision to train their legal artillery on the perpetrators of this incursion into their proprietorial territory most likely relates as much to the sheer size, success and concomitant media profile of Nostalrius as it does to any ethical or aesthetic objection to the misuse of intellectual property. To have so many people prefer a copy of your product, and a copy of your old product at that, to your current commercial offering has to be a difficult pill for prideful producers to swallow.

Fortunately for players of MMOs not curated by Blizzard, other developers are less sensitive and show more foresight. Daybreak Games (née SOE) have made a business model out of giving customers what they used to want. That seems to have worked well for them and there have been plenty of press releases and interviews where the commercial success of the various progression and TLE servers has been confirmed and puffed.

Always, though, without hard numbers, which is why the revelation that a single, illegal vanilla WoW server was able to hold a population that would by no means disgrace a middle-ranking MMO has aroused so much interest. How much more significant, then, should we see the astonishingly open and revealing account from Jagex concerning the retro Runescape server they opened three years ago?

It's one of the most intriguing and thought-provoking documents I've read on the subject of MMORPGs for a very long time, not least for the hard numbers it reveals:

• 500,000 positive responses to an in-game poll on whether to undertake the project
• 7,000,000 log-ins to the old-school servers over a three-year period
• 2,500,000 of those log-ins converted to subscription-paying customers

I've posted before about how, with our relatively narrow focus as on a sliver of the MMO market and with companies so obsessively secretive about population figures, this quadrant of the blogosphere may not have any real idea of which are the real successes in the genre. RuneScape is and always has been a big player in the Western MMO market but you'd never know that from my Feedly or blog roll.

Even so, these are bigger numbers than I would have guessed. If Jagex have two and a half million subscribers just for their old-school offer, how many do they have for their main game? And they are different numbers. The suspicion has long been that retro-servers merely split a game's existing customer base but, for RuneScape at least, this is apparently not so.

After about six months we started to see player numbers settle and we could see that very few players migrated between Old School RuneScape and RuneScape. What we were not seeing was one game cannibalising the other

Another argument often produced against the idea of retro-servers is the cost of creating and maintaining them. It's a lot of work and that effort could better be directed at current content, or so the line goes.

When Azuriel was considering why Blizzard would be foolish to enter the WoW nostalgia market with an offer of their own he suggested a ball-park figure of forty-four developers to set up and maintain the project. I thought that sounded a tad high and queried it in the comments and Azuriel confirmed it was a figure he'd pulled out of his hat.

Even though I thought that was more than any company, even Blizzard, would need for the job it would never have occurred to me for a moment that the actual number of developers required to get such a project up and running could be counted on the fingers of Mickey Mouse's gloved hand.

a small team of three people was put together to manage the servers and community until the initial interest had died down

Three people. A team that was later expanded to five times that when the success, and more importantly the longevity of the success, became evident. So, that's fifteen people to cater for an extension to the business that has attracted new customers numbering in millions.

With these new data points it's easier to calibrate the size of the pile of money Blizzard must be leaving on the table by not moving into the nostalgia market on their own account. That has to be one big pile.

It's not just the initial windfall as a potentially immense flock of curiosity-seekers and nostalgists from WoW's vast hinterland of ex-millions sub up out of curiosity and sentiment, although that's a potential one-off profit of a lifetime all by itself. Going on Jagex's experience, the spike in revenue has great potential to be ongoing and sustainable.

Although the initial impact of legacy servers on RuneScape was expected to be short and sweet, it has grown into a major part of Jagex’s business...This made it very easy to position Old School RuneScape as complementarily to RuneScape

So, with some actual facts at our fingertips, it seems we can say that nostalgia servers for MMORPGs can, when well-handled, be both profitable for the producers and popular with the players. Moreover, having an old-school offer complements rather than competes with the existing Live offer and creates synergies that push the entire business forward.

So why wouldn't you? Don't you like money?

Sixteen Candles: Everquest, Neverwinter

Everquest is sixteen years old today. I wish I could say I'd been there from the very beginning but I didn't step out into Norrath until six months later, just after Bloody Kithicor and the opening of the Plane of Hate.

Of course I knew nothing of that. It would be years before any of my characters took a portal to the Planes. For a long while my experience of life on Norrath was very down to earth - literally so in many cases.

There was the first, forgotten half-elf who, just minutes after being born, fell to his death from Kelethin, that health and safety inspector's nightmare the wood elves call a city. Then there was his successor, a dwarven cleric some halfwit with the 1999 equivalent of a blog suggested as an ideal solo class. He fell in the river in Nektulos Forest and was eaten by piranhas before he could even drown. His attempts to recover the meager possessions from his sodden corpse, all dismal failures, introduced me to the concept of the Unrecoverable Corpse and gave me an unforgettable lesson in the Law of Diminishing Returns.

This looks uncannily familiar...

That was about the last we saw of him, at least as an adventurer. He hung around in the background, eventually becoming one of Mrs Bhagpuss's Bazaar traders, following one of the many account swaps that have left our Norrathian dynasties in a state that could only, charitably, be described as confused. Why he was rootling around on the wrong continent near the home of the Dark Elves in the first place I scarcely remember. I think he may have been trying to farm Wisps for Greater Lightstones. He was probably running from a bad pull when he fell in.

Or maybe he just went exploring in Butcherblock mountains, got on the boat, ended up in Freeport and then got lost. Things like that used to happen a lot back then.

He was replaced by another half-elf ranger, who wisely started in Surefall Glade instead of Kelethin, then promptly discarded all that wisdom by falling to another unrecoverable death down the hollow tree-stump in Blackburrow. After that one I rage-quit for almost three whole days.

Falling down things was something of a trope in old EQ. The only player from those far away days we're still in contact with made it something like his signature move, along with /hug and the handing out of muffins. I'm not sure but I think the first time I ever had to go rescue someone from the Well in Befallen, that was him.

It was touch and go which was the more celebrated death-trap: Blackburrow's hollow tree or Befallen's Well. Death at the bottom of the well was certainly faster and more certain. The undead that waited there were plentiful, aggressive, disturbingly powerful and hard to avoid. A fall in Blackburrow, on the other hand, usually left you alive and uneaten with time to contemplate your dire situation.

A caster with the Gate spell, of course, could port out in a hurry with nothing worse than a few bruises and an embarrassing anecdote. A melee character, sans the magic get out of jail free card, would be faced with a very long walk of shame back up to the surface past a few dozen angry gnolls. It was a walk few survived and even fewer survived the train that followed those that did.

In either case a sensible low-level might huddle in a corner out of agro range and hope for rescue. In Befallen that was not an unreasonable hope. Befallen had Nameds, rather a lot of them, and several had drops that were in demand. If you kept your head and didn't agro anything it might not be too long before a Bigger Boy arrived to clear the way. Failing that you could start on a /who trawl for druids or wizards, who might, out of the goodness of their hearts (or, more likely, for a substantial tip) drop down the well, open a portal and whisk you away to safety.

The lower levels of Blackburrow had nothing anyone important was likely to want. The chance of anyone passing by were minimal. A fall down the Well had something of the romantic about it; the headstrong, young explorer testing the limits of his nerve and daring in a tomb of ancient evil. Falling down the hollow tree just inside the entrance of a den of gnolls was generally considered comedy gold by everyone except the hapless victim. In Befallen there was always a fair chance of a rescue, paid or otherwise. In Blackburrow you were generally on your own.

College isn't forever, kid.

These days no-one needs to languish in the depths of either. The teeth of those traps were drawn long ago. From the ease of acquisition, even at the lowest levels, of items that cast Gate, to the "Home" button at Character Select, anyone at any level can rescue themselves. Even if the worst were to happen the days of lost corpses are long gone. Nowadays you respawn with all your possessions and for a small donation a handy NPC in the Guild Lobby will summon your corpse for your Mercenary to rez for the lost xp.

No, to experience the real Befallen today you have to go outside of Norrath altogether.

A number of bloggers I follow remember Everquest vividly and with great affection. Some of those bloggers still play EQ and have high level characters. Others can be tempted back by nostalgia for limited runs. Mostly, though, they stand on the sidelines and kibitz, complaining that things aren't like they were in their day.

Of them all, the only one that I know of, who has actually taken the trouble to create her own version, is Tipa of West Karana. She has lovingly re-created Befallen using the player-made dungeon facility in Neverwinter, The Foundry. Syp plugged it at Massively OP and now it's a Featured Foundry, eligible for the Daily. Last night I patched up Neverwinter and ran Tipa's The Crypt of Befallen v2.

I like Neverwinter although I don't often make time to go there. The setting and the content are attractive and appealing but what keeps me from playing more are the ActionRPG controls and combat, which, like all such systems, make the whole thing feel far more awkward and artificial than I'd prefer. Still, I have a level 13 Devoted Cleric who's had a few adventures and who I have a vague idea how to play. Very vague. I woke her up and after the usual kerfuffle trying to find the Noticeboard off to Befallen she went.

Tipa's introductory blurb suggests the mission can be knocked off in twenty minutes and most of the combat can be avoided. The average play-time posted on the board from almost 800 play-throughs is 37 minutes. It took me about an hour and a half and I died something like six or seven times. I lost count.

It was great! At the end, when you get the chance to review and rate the Foundry you've just completed, I gave it five stars. For an old-time EQ player the nostalgia factor is through the roof. The physical reconstruction of Befallen is exemplary. Everything is in the right place and everything looks just right. From the checkerboard tiled floors to the piles of rubble it feels like you could lift the map from one game and place it down on the other with flawless precision. About the only difference is in the decor, which is lusher and more detailed than the older game was able to allow.

That painting's new.

The original lore is neatly referenced and highlighted: from the succession of powerful megalomaniacs who sought to control Befallen's hidden evil for their own ends, to the grim story of Opalla and her much sought after and fought over Paw, it's all there. In addition there's a strong, original plot that comes to a satisfying conclusion (well, it would have been satisfying if I'd made better choices right at the end).

Best of all there's the detailed and lovingly-crafted metastructure, under which Tipa resurrects the very essence of what it felt like to play Everquest back in its glory days. I've seen the humorous asides and references to camping spawns and kill-stealing done elsewhere (there were some examples in EQ2's dungeon-maker for a start - quite possibly also by Tipa) but I have never seen anything quite like the group of adventurers I met, who invited me to join them and for whom I ended up pulling, in what has to be the most convincing evocation of that lost art I've had the delight of experiencing for many years.

That's me in the middle, standing there, doing nothing. Puller's prerogative.

In the end I never did jump down the Well. Even though I found the potion of Invisibility to Undead I decided to heed the warnings and play it safe. I wonder, though. If I had thrown caution to the wind, would there have been any High Levels passing by to rez me and clear a path back to the top? I may just have to go back and find out.

When I finally re-emerged I found I'd made almost two levels. Unbeknownst to me there was a double-xp weekend running and I reaped the benefit. My cleric hit 15 which means I'm now eligible to make Foundries of my own; having seen the standard Tipa sets I don't think I'm about to start on that any time soon.

Happy sixteenth birthday Everquest and thanks, Tipa, for adding yet another layer to the palimpsest. The lore and the legend live on.