Then came EverQuest from Sony Online Entertainment in 1999, the first 3D game to explode into the MMORPG space. Origin Systems’ Ultima Online broke open the market for the graphical online role-playing game in 1997, Koster says. There’s no way to know how many of those game-based couples got together in real life, but Whatley acknowledges that the game has sparked real love and marriages (“and divorces,” he adds). “They knew these people, and they cared about people at their party and their wedding, just as much as they would care about someone who they had met in real life and hung out with on a daily basis.”Īnd players could reunite in person at conventions, such as SimuCon in St. “A lot of the lure of it was just having a really great party with their friends,” Hill says. Players would pay Simutronics up to $1,000 for the privilege of specific descriptions and interactions made for the celebration, from custom dresses and rings to text-based food tastings. Simutronics had developed it for an online service that ended up folding, so they brought it to GEnie and AOL too. He also never considered that people might want to get married in his games until requests started rolling in for elegant receptions.Īs a GM, Heather Hill customized about 500 weddings in DragonRealms, the sister game of GemStone, that takes place in the same world but in a different time. Some customers had never used a web browser before Dunin set up a 24/7 service line to help with the transition.Īt the outset, Whatley had no idea the game would be successful. Gemstone III moved to the open web in 1997, shifting the paradigm to having the same interactive multiplayer world accessible no matter your internet service provider.
But AOL’s subsequent move from pay-per-hour to monthly subscription forced Simutronics to rethink its strategy. In 1996, the game had more than 2,000 simultaneous users on AOL-a big hit in those days. The “de-ICE” mission worked GemStone III opened on AOL, and brought in thousands of new players, including me. Rather than attempt to change everything at once and confuse players, the designers made everything in the world look frozen for a few weeks and then “thawed” the world to reveal the new names. And so there were egg rolls and wontons on the table,” Dunin says. “We’d been working all night off of Chinese food. But when the team had nearly finished their effort, they realized that particular creature still did not have a name. There was one sheeplike creature that Dunin delayed renaming-it deserved a special name, she thought, because players could both attack it and get meat from it for making sandwiches. The team had a short amount of time-Dunin remembers it as about a week-to use whatever tools they had to solve a big problem. “We had to scramble and rebuild the entire fictional motif of the game,” Whatley says.įor Elonka Dunin, former general manager and executive producer at Simutronics, this moment felt like Apollo 13. That meant the Simutronics team had to go through the game and overwrite every aspect that Iron Crown Enterprises owned.
Simutronics could not release the game with Iron Crown’s intellectual property-and it was everywhere in GemStone III. But just before GemStone III was about to launch on AOL in the fall of 1995, Iron Crown pulled out of the deal.
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