Nerd Deep Housecleaning Update, Part 2

Once so amazing. Now landfill fodder.

I was using a Zip disk as a coaster, but then the disk made a clicking noise and all of my coffee evaporated.

We recently completed a nerd deep cleaning, in which we uncovered many technological artifacts from our long career. And then threw them in the trash. (Part 1 is here.)

(Our Kickstarter for Geneforge 3 - Detonation has a few days left, in case you want to get in on it. It’s been going great, and we’re really excited about the game to come.)

The Zip Drives

Way back in the 90s, hard drive storage was expensive. CDs couldn't be rewritten. Floppy disks were TINY. It was a real problem.

Then geniuses invented the Zip Drive. Like a floppy disk, but it could fit a magesterial 100 MB. Everyone adapted to them instantly. We stored everything on them.

A perfect system. Except that, occasionally, your zip drive would make a small 'click' noise and the disk would be completely ruined.

Anyhoo, hard drive space became cheaper and the zip disk was obsoleted.

We still had a ton of them. We use them as drink coasters now. I have a latte on one (containing an ancient backup of the original Nethergate code) as I type this.

(When I posted this on Twitter, it was deluged with comments by ancient nerds who quibbled with me about micropoints of the history of the Zip disk to distract themselves from how their hair is gone and their knees and hips hurt all the time. If you want to get in on this, comment below, just bear in mind that I am 100% factually accurate with everything I say about Zip disks or Monopoly. Have fun!)

Die! DIE! Diediediediedie!!!!!

Our Fax Machine

At long, blissful last. Our final fax machine off to Goodwill, so that it can hopefully torment someone else.

It's weird how long I needed to send faxes. I kept having to deal with various accountants, legal depts., etc, and you are always at the risk of encountering some stubborn fossil who insisted on a fax.

But that finally faded away. Now even the most stubborn bridge troll must accept a decent quality cell phone picture of a signed document. So at last this once-amazing technology can be returned to the earth.

Also note the pile of unused ink cartridges, those vile little extortion nodules.

(We also got rid of our last land phone line. I feel so light. So radiant.)

Game developers my age are supposed to have a mountain of boxed old PC games from the 90s. My office is full of boxed Atari 2600 games from the 1970s. Everquest is the lone exception.

I still have my original v1.0 Everquest disk. I hardcore raided that game, and I got to see firsthand the future of massive online games be designed, bit by bit, in real time. Everquest was the first MMO that actually functioned well as a game. (Sit down, Ultima Online people.)

World of Warcraft was the giant phenomenon in the genre, but much of the potential pitfalls in MMOs had been stumbled into by Everquest. Everquest pioneered the town/quest hub structure. Instanced raids and dungeons. How to make giant raids (72 characters at one point!) work at all. How to do and not do progression through expansions. How to balance the game at higher levels (including a long, regrettable health sponge period).

Everquest came at a time when you could really make your players suffer. Death cost you experience. You could lose your corpse and thus all your gear. Advancement was sloooooow. It was cool and exciting at the time, but it's not worth being nostalgic over.

There were so many bits of weird experimentation in this game. Like the super difficult to enter Plane of Mischief that was just full of jokes and weirdness, but you could only enter it at the back of the raid zone. Or the Velious expansion, which ended with an unkillable boss that could only be activated once per server but had so much health that it couldn't be killed. (But then on a new server a bunch of guilds got together and spent a ton of time preparing and actually killed the thing, only to find no loot.)

There were so many weird, incomprehensible things about OG Everquest. For example, when resting to regain your spell energy (at a GLACIAL place), you had to look at your spellbook, which covered with entire screen. When you rested, you weren’t even allowed to see the janky PS1-tier poly art.

My favorite bit of old trivia: The endgame zone of the first expansion was called Veeshan's Peak. You had to do a big long quest to get the key to get in. The developers wanted this to be the ultimate scary mega-hardcore dungeon. When you entered, you couldn't walk or teleport out. You had to fight to the end, or use weird tricks with corpses to escape. (This got changed eventually.) This was so wild!

Veeshan's Peak (almost with three other crazy hard places) was also declared a "Customer Service Limited Zone" where Customer Service would only help you in the case of the most gruesome bugs.

I love the idea of a "Customer Service Limited Zone" in an amusing and sadistic way, but I'm not nostalgic for it. Honestly, an analysis of the evolving design of Everquest and how its designers discovered and fixed every possible MMO problem would make a truly fascinating book for, like, 8 people.

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Spiderweb Software has been creating turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games since 1994. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good stories and fun. And they’re all cheap on Steam right now!

This newsletter is free, but paying me to subscribe guilts me into writing more. If you would like to support us, you could also support our new Geneforge 3 - Detonation Kickstarter. Either way, thank you for your attention!