The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
I feel sometimes like the kid from The Sixth Sense. That reference probably dates me to an extent, it’s from 1999 which feels like practically yesterday. It’s pretty recent as my references go: I know who Kojak was, and remember M*A*S*H.
I feel like that kid because when I look over the internet, sometimes I see ghosts. The shades of dead games. When something disappears from the web, it’s really gone, there is no corpse and its server leaves practically no trace of its existence. But sometimes signs can be found, like archived client uploads, broken hyperlinks, site snapshots on the Internet Archive, or still-active fansites.
One of those ghosts that flickers into my hazy vision sometimes is the original Neverwinter Nights. Not the Bioware game by that name, which really has very little to do with it. The first Neverwinter Nights was a SSI-produced MMORPG on America On-Line, that lasted from 1991 to 1997, a contemporary of Island of Kesmai, and of WorldsAway,which I’ve brought up here before.
NWN might have been a MMORPG, but it was also a MS-DOS game, and it ran on a modified version of SSI’s Gold Box engine, and (I presume) used the 2nd Edition D&D ruleset. That may have been what doomed it in the long run, for the license expired, and AOL, TSR and SSI couldn’t reach an agreement that would allow the game to continue. It is worthy of note that of those three companies, two don’t exist now, and the remaining one is nowadays nearly a ghost itself. I’m not going to say it happened because they couldn’t reach an agreement on continuing NWN, in fact it probably wasn’t, but it’s a little comforting to think it might have contributed. Two things that are equally disposable, it seems, are old MMORPGs and the hide-bound corporations that ran them.
There is a fansite devoted to the AOL Neverwinter Nights, apparently continuous in existence from the days the game was live. It hosts a fan recreation called Neverwinter Nights Offline, which is not an exact recreation of the original but recreates a large portion. Of course, without other human players inhabiting the game’s world, it’s nowhere near the same. It runs in DOS, so Dosbox might be of some use to you.
There is also ForgottenWorld (no relation to Capcom’s arcade game), a fan-made recreation of Neverwinter Nights. The note on the fansite dates to 2004, but ForgottenWorld still survives, and even has a Discord. I haven’t tried it myself yet, nor the offline version of NWN linked above. That’s because I see ghosts like these all the time, and I cannot devote the time or energy to any of them that they truly deserve. But maybe, you can.
On Neverwinter Nights Offline, there is a series of Youtube videos where aulddragon plays it for four hours. The first video in the sequence follows. Check out that Gold Box combat style!
Ultima Online is a wonder. World of Warcraft debuted in 2004; Ultima Online started in 1997. And it’s still going!
When it was new podcasts were not yet a thing! Podcasts arose from the fusion of periodic MP3 audio content and RSS feeds, in October 2000. Yet when UO was new there was an audio show called Battle Vortex that covered it. So we can’t call it an Ultima Online podcast, because those didn’t exist then, but it was a whole lot like one.
Battle Vortex had been gone from the internet for awhile, but now the whole show, 156 episodes, has been uploaded to the Internet Archive! It is a priceless snapshot of the early days of MMORPGs, and it’s heartening to see it housed someplace that will preserve it.
Between those two worthy video conflagrations they produced a video that is rather in our backyard, a one hour, 24 minute vid-essay on who World of Warcraft became a place where playing sub-optimally isn’t just frowned upon, but came to be seen as anti-social. If you’re interested in the social aspects of MMORPGs, It’s worth devoting an eleventh of a day’s waking hours to!
What’s really interesting here is something I’ve been worried about with older video and computer games for a while. Games that manage to still be popular over a lot period get focused on, dissected, sometimes disassembled, and laid out so that they have no secrets. Their audience both focuses on them, and both seeks out ways to play them better, and reasons to play them better.
That’s where speedrunning comes from, and that’s the thing-what’s happening in WoW is just what’s happening to classic gaming in general. It’s become a degraded form of play, almost, to come to a game completely new. I’ve bought into this too, occasionally leaving a message on a Youtube video of someone playing sub-optimally giving a couple of helpful tips. Really though there’s no need. If they wanted to do that, the avenues are available to them. There’s already plenty of people trying to play, say, Castlevania III in the best possible way.
World of Warcraft is 19 years old now, and even has an entire official alternate version that duplicates the game experience from launch. During that time the expert-level strategies that were discovered by players after long observation and practice have become ubiquitous lore. Even if you’ve never read a FAQ or watched a tutorial video, just from hearing other players talk about the game and watching them, a lot of it will seep in.
As a result, not only can’t a long-time player go back to how they experienced the game at launch, because they know too much, but even new players can’t, because the community around them is filled by those players who know that much.
There’s lots to think about here. Especially if you’ve played World of Warcraft before, but also if you haven’t. (I haven’t!) Also note that the video is consciously patterned after Jon Bois’s videos for SBNation and Secret Base. Here in 2023, that’s a comforting reference.
It’s December 31st and our offices are empty for the end of the year. We’re kind of slacking off, so let me link to something out intrepid and gelatinous news reporter linked before. It’s a really great longform article from PC Gamer and is worth a look if you didn’t see it then.
Someone’s looking grumpy!
In summary:
For a long long while, there have been ultrarare mounts in World of Warcraft. Most items, a 1% drop rate is as rare as they go, but a few mounts are generated much more rarely than that. People have spent years grinding for a specific mount and never gotten it. It was dropped by a world boss called “The Sha of Anger.” (Hey, I didn’t name it.)
One such ultrarare item is The Reins of the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent, which allows the very lucky acquirer to summon a nifty glowing black-and-white flying dragon to ride. So popular, and rare, are these items that when they go up on auction they regularly go for the maximum supported price: 9,999,999 Gold.
Players had long rued the immensely high odds of acquiring this item, and others, but had put up with it because Blizzard was the kind of company to justrule things like that to happen, and what you gonna do? Go to City of Heroes?
Early in the item’s existence, however, players noticed that the item wasn’t just generating hardly ever, but in fact, entirely never. A bug in the game meant no one had gotten it. It was just so rare that everyone assumed they just hadn’t seen it yet. Oops!
Much more recently, however, due to another bug, the item became much more common to players of a certain race. The players who had discovered this faced conundrum: be responsible and report the bug to Blizzard, or hoard the knowledge to prevent Blizzard from knowing about it, keeping it off of forums as long as they could, which resulted in the greater player base not realizing it was possible, in order to allow the precious loophole to persist for as long as possible.
If this kind of thing is fascinating to you, and if it isn’t then I wonder why you’re reading this blog, it’s one of the best pieces of game reporting I’ve seen lately.
It’s an unusually chill thing to play. To get a sense of the game, here is a promotional Youtube video from 2011, which looks a little different from how the game evolved, but conveys Glitch’s great sense of whimsy:
Now, there are lots of forgotten, abandoned, or failed games that are worthy of a second look, or would be if anyone knew of them. They are an invisible ocean around us, most games that have been made, by far, will disappear unknown and unloved. While many of them perhaps aren’t worth knowing about, some of them definitely are. Just because Stewart Butterfield backed this one doesn’t mean it was any good. But, some people liked it, and remember it fondly, and I’m one of them. We like old and forgotten pastimes here at Set Side B, and want to tell as many people about them as we can, as long as we are able.
Glitch was a Flash-based web MMORPG platformer. You played as a glitch, plural glitchen, a humanoid creature living in the land of Ur, which existed within the thoughts of eleven godlike Giants. (Eleven is kind of a sacred number in Glitch and Ur.)
Glitch was created in Flash, and it was already in the outs back then, preventing iOS players from entering. Since Flash is unusable in browsers any more (without alternate runtimes like Ruffle), Odd Giants is implemented in Unity, which means you can’t just jump into the game by browsing to a site, and that you have to download a 1.2 gigabyte client to play. And you’ll have to download a new one when there’s a major update. But on the other hand it means all of the game’s graphics are stored on your computer, greatly speeding load and transition times. I think I prefer to play it this way.
As I said, Glitch was created by Stewart Butterfield, the creator of Flickr and, later, Slack. (In fact, Slack’s communication code has its basis in the chat system from Glitch.) In a move atypical of many rich tech bizzes, when Glitch shut down, its production studio Tiny Speck donated nearly all of the game’s assets to the public domain, which is what makes Odd Giants, and other Glitch remake projects like Children of Ur and Eleven, legal. (Tiny Speck renamed themselves to Slack, but it’s the same company. They just make business communications software now instead of a laid back exploratory MMORPG platformer.)
Glitch, and thus its revival/remake Odd Giants, is a platformer, but it eschews many of the basic principles of platformers. There are no enemies, you never die from falling off the screen, and dangers are few. Platforming, running and jumping, is mostly just a way of getting around and collecting “quoins,” little objects floating around the games many areas. If you never lost that basic joy of running Mario around terrain without having to stomp on things or dodge hammers, you’ll have fun in Odd Giants.
Since the world of Ur is in the Giants’ thoughts you don’t actually encounter them directly as creatures in the game, but their presence is felt in many ways. Particularly, there are shrines to them all over, where you can donate objects for their favor, and eventually earn Emblems and Icons devoted to them.
The world of Ur is divided into a number of regions, each divided into a hash of streets, which are shown on the region map as lines. Here’s a map of Groddle Forest, the starting area:
Each street’s left-right scroll corresponds to its in-game area. If you’re standing at the left edge of a street in the game, you’ll also be at its left edge on the map. Where the streets connect on the map, there are signposts in the game that allow you to transfer to connecting streets. It’s not a completely frictionless way of navigating the game’s regions, but it’s easy to get used to.
If there are no enemies, then what do you do in Ur? Mostly you just run around and collect Quoins, and also water trees, harvest fruit, mine rocks, squeeze chickens, milk butterflies, nibble on piggies, and other miscellaneous activities. These actions are initiated by clicking on an object and selecting the action from a menu. When you do, a progress meter appears, which fills quickly. Most actions just take two or three seconds. As you advance, you become able to more things like make meals or transmute metals, that build off of the things you did at the start.
There is no solid final goal. It’s just a world to explore and have fun in. Without enemies to fight, some people will find this pointless. That’s okay. It was always something that some people would find unappealing. But if you like the idea of a non-violent game where you can talk with friends and do silly things in, then you may enjoy playing Odd Giants.
Aiding in this is a great sense of whimsy and fun that suffuses almost everything aspect of the play. The graphics are charming throughout, with well-animated creatures and many scenic vistas to explore. Almost every text sentence in the game has a joke or two in it. Just playing to see whatever funny thing to see or read next can be entertaining, for a little while at least. The music, especially, is worth checking the game out for a little while. I don’t think I’ve heard a single track that isn’t great.
As you do things, you use up your Glitch’s Energy. If you run out of energy, your little person “croaks” and ends up in Hell! But Hell is a region of streets, just like the others. It’s not hard to get out of Hell. You just run around squishing grapes lying on the ground. Squash enough and you’ll be returned right where you were, although without much energy. You could even spend a Get Out Of Hell Free card, if you’ve found one, and bypass that whole process. A lot of the negative things in Glitch/Odd Giants are pretty light like this. No punishment ever really feels punishing, although it may interrupt what you were doing for a bit.
In addition to Energy, glitches have Mood, which slowly depletes and decreases rewards if it dips too low, and “iMG,” or Imagination, a general advancement currency used to pay for Upgrades and other features, like expanding your house. There’s also experience points, or “XP,” which contributes to a glitch’s experience Level, but Level doesn’t affect the game much at all. It just seems to gate being able to use a few high-end items that you probably won’t even see for a while.
Instead of level, most of your character’s advancement comes from buying Upgrades and learning Skills. Some Upgrades are things like being able to walk faster and getting a triple jump, but most are things like increasing your maximum Energy, increasing the bonuses you get for Quoins, or getting bonus items randomly while doing things, or other things of that nature. Upgrades are bought with iMG, and are offered from a “deck” three at a time. You can buy any that are offered, but to get new options you’ll have to “reshuffle.” This will put the unbought upgrades back into the deck and deal you three new ones. As you buy Upgrades and remove them from play, the deck is seeded with more powerful, and much more expensive, replacements. Every game day (which last for four hours of real time) you’re allowed two free reshuffles, with them growing in price after that. There are also some other special upgrades that can be bought repeatedly, like Get Out Of Hell Free cards, extra Reshuffles, and access to special bonus areas (that, unfortunately, mostly don’t work yet in Odd Giants).
Most Upgrades are nice extras. The need to have Skills, on the other hand, blocks access to more major game features. There’s a complex array of Skills, many requiring other Skills, or particular accomplishments, under your belt before you can learn them in a kind of skill tree. Each skill takes real time to learn, which pass whether you’re in-game or not. Some skills take hours, or even days, to learn.
You start out with the capacity to know ten Skills. Back in Glitch, you could still learn skills if you were over capacity, but they took even longer. In Odd Giants, at least for now, your capacity is a hard limit, but you can raise it with Upgrades.
Some Skills are really basic things, like access to the Info command on objects, or access to the map. Most of them give you new powers, like being able to teleport places, or allow you to use items like the Meditation Orb. Many things are blocked until you learn the requisite skill, so it’s good to always make sure you have one learning, if you have excess capacity, when you log off from the game.
It cannot be denied, though, that sometimes the game feels like a gussied-up skeleton of progression systems with a visual veneer. You can make some cool items later on, like “Essence of Purple” or “No-No Powder,” but you’ll have to master many skills to get to that point. Glitch had a number of mini-games to discover that you could play at low levels by finding Game Show Tickets, and bonus levels you could buy at the Upgrade shop, but none of those things work currently. It makes the early going a bit of a slog, but the players in the game tend to be very friendly and helpful, and willing to give new players advanced items just for asking.
Details to get you started
It’s fun to collect quoins, those little floating powerup items that are scattered in many streets, but truthfully they don’t earn you much. Once in a while a quoin will give you a larger-than-usual bonus, but it’s infrequent, and rarely enough to bother going out of your way to collect them. Still, they’re fun to pick up, so I usually do it anyway.
Your Energy cap is a major limiter of your activity. Food items usually restore Energy, so it’s good to stock up on those. Learning the skill Meditation I lets you use a Meditation Orb, which allows you to regenerate a random amount of Energy or Mood when you want, with only a 30 second timeout to using it repeatedly. I would try to get that as soon as possible.
You’ll want to earn lots of iMG to unlock Upgrades and expand your yard and home. Most things you do will earn you at least a tiny bit of iMG. When you get the Skills to use machines to make stuff, you can usually convert several items at once, which can get you more for less work. A lot of your iMG will come from Achievements, which the game tracks in the background for you, and Quests, which are usually randomly assigned.
There is a bug in the current version (0.14.1), as I write this, that allows you to get all the rewards for most Quests without having to do them. Just cancel the Quest from the quest screen, then exit the game and reenter. You’ll have to wait 30 seconds before coming back in, but when you do you’ll get the full reward! One of the Quests, the one that asks you to construct an Icon, is extremely time-consuming to complete, but has high rewards. This can be used to help fund some of the most expensive Upgrades.
You can gain a lot of iMG every game day by using Emblems and Icons. There are shrines to the 11 Giants around many areas. You can click on one to donate items to it, which awards you an amount of iMG, and well as favor with that Giant, depending on the value (in the game’s money, called Currants) of the item. If you built up 1,000 points of favor with a Giant, you can exchange it for an Emblem for that Giant. (In 0.14.1, the first time you do this with each Giant you’ll receive two Emblems, which is good since you can immediately spend one to unlock an important skill!) Using an Emblem’s Contemplate command can be worth 30 iMG per Emblem of that Giant you’re holding. That takes up a lot of inventory space, so you’ll want to invest in bags, which you can buy from vendors to carry more. It takes a significant number of Currants to outfit yourself with full Bigger Bags, but it’s ultimately worth it because you can carry so many more Emblems, and all kinds of other things too.
If you collect 11 Emblems, you can combine them into an Icon, which can be set on the ground and be Reflected upon, for even more iMG. In the Groddle Heights region, at the moment, there are a number of Icons set up on the ground for people to use, although sometimes they require a small Currant payment. If you can find your way to Xalanga, the region Zealous Rd NE currently has all 11 kinds of Icons set up for easy use.
Some features are not yet coded. Some of these are in the game as Upgrades or Skills that don’t work once acquired. There is no indication which these are, which sucks, but what can I say the game’s under heavy development. One of these as of this writing are the ability to unlearn skills to make room for others, and most of the bonus levels you can buy as Upgrade cards.
At the moment lots of areas have terrain but not much of interest to find in them. Many of the special areas don’t yet work. One that does, at least, are the Savannah areas, among them Choru, Xalanga, Zhambu, Baqala, and some others. Try navigating there if you want to find a lot of valuable items quickly.
There are some other things to do if you explore a bit, but many things that were in Glitch are not yet implemented. It’s a bit wild and woolly in that regard, but presumably that kind of stuff will be implemented eventually. As it is, it’s still fun to log in, customize your character (click on their portrait in the bottom-left corner of the window), and run around and explore.
Some years ago there was Glitch, an innovative MMORPG whose client ran in the web browser, and offered non-violent and whimsical play. The land of Ur in that game was overseen by eleven sleeping Giants, and players could create customized characters to roam around, explore, collect things, complete quests, earn achievements, and generally have fun. While there were still dangers (in the form of The Rook, a horde of malicious crows that occasionally attacked) it was mostly pretty chill. It was essentially a platforming world, but there were fun twists on the formula.
Glitch had some beautiful locations to find and explore
They hired on Keita Takahashi, the creator of Katamari Damacy, Noby Noby Boy, and later on Wattam, and although they closed before many of his ideas could be implemented they did manage to release the area Shim Shiri, which was kind of a shortcut hub for the game’s world. Scattered throughout the world were the mouths of gigantic creatures, you see, which you could dive into, zip down their digestive systems, and be pooped out the other end in Shim Shiri. Then you could go to another creature’s butt, jump right up it, and emerge elsewhere! His ideas were recorded on the Glitchipedia on the Glitch game’s website, which is still up.
BEHOLD THE MAJESTY
Glitch was never very popular, but it gathered a passionate fanbase. I started playing Glitch, as often happens with me, right after it was announced that it was closing permanently. I could see, even in the limited time that I was there, that it was special.
Glitch was run by Tiny Speck and created by Stewart Butterfield, who founded Flickr, and afterward went on to create Slack. It’s rumored that Slack’s humble beginnings were in Glitch’s communications code.
All of these locations are still listed, pictured, and mapped-out on the Glitch website, just as if the original game were still operational
If you get the feeling that you missed out on something cool, well, you did. But not forever! Metafilter user fiercecupcake recently informed us of a couple of Glitch revival projects. Tiny Speck thoughtfully contributed all of Glitch’s assets to the public domain soon after they shut the game down to aid in others who wish to revive the game. One of these, Odd Giants, is currently in alpha and playable! It’s implemented as a Unity stand-alone application instead of running in a web browser, and it is a fairly substantial download at around 1.3 GB, so keep that in mind. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
It tends only to have a small number of people online at any given time, but perhaps there lies the seeds of something great? Well, likely not, it is a fan recreation of a dead MMORPG, but perhaps, just perhaps….
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
It’s been a slow day at the news desk, blobs and blobbies. Just three items-
Mollie Taylor at PC Gamer tells us that Atlus is suing fans for reviving an old MMORPG of theirs, Shin Megami Tenshin Imagine Online. A particularly galling part of the article: “The suit claims the fan server has ’caused and will continue to cause irreparable damage to Atlus unless restrained by this Court,’ despite the servers being dead for over six years.” Not cool, Atlus! Of course, the law is complex, and very often on the internet the law being violated is not the one you think it is at first, be this seems particularly egregious.
Nintendo Life has an article by Gavin Lane on which Zelda title players should try first, and of course you just know I’d have to link it as an excuse to get in my two gelatinous cents! I really think people should try the original Legend of Zelda first! It’s hard, oooooh yes it is drebnar, and you’ll die a lot, but that’s what makes it fun! It’s not like you lose much when you die either. The article’s own argument (which you’ll have to read to get Gavin’s reasoning) is: Ocarina of Time, Link to the Past, Breath of the Wild, and Wind Waker.
Finally, if I might talk about a non-gaming issue that affects all of us on the web… the U.S. Fifth Appeals Court has made a horrendous, head-scratching decision that could easily turn social media into a hailstorm of spam and misinformation, at best. The Atlantic has an article up called Is This The Beginning of the End of the Internet, and from what I’ve seen so far it’s possible? It all has to do with a Texas law that forbids social media from “censoring” people’s feeds, saying if they have 50 million users they no longer have First Amendment rights. Of course the law is complex (as I mentioned above), and the effects of this decision, if it isn’t overturned or outright nullified by an eventual law, will spill out in several directions. But those of us remembering the era leading up to the election of the Terrible Orange Man will remember the kinds of things that floated around Facebook at that time. This looks like it might open the already-leaky floodgates, and, at the very least, turn social media sites into unusable hellholes. For more, you probably should read the article-provided The Atlantic doesn’t ward it from your sight with a paywall. It’s nearly the end of the month, if you’re out of free articles they should reset soon. That’s the way it works, right?
(EDIT: Fixed link. The Windows clipboard continues to cause me problems, argh.)
And Marc Normandin for Paste Magazine has an article suggesting 10 retro games that should be revived, and you know what, it’s actually a pretty great list! It’s got For The Frog The Bell Tolls, Dragon Slayer, and Terranigma on it, so it’s definitely got JRPG cred!
