Classic MMOG Raised From the Dead by Past Players

Chromain writes "Back in 1996, the Seattle-based company Starwave created one of the first graphical MMOGs: Castle Infinity. Though it was well received by all who tried it, it quickly sank under bad marketing, extended downtime, and sloppy leadership. Now, nearly 8 years since disappearing off the map, the game has been (quite literally) rescued from a dumpster by a group of past players. It's available for free at their new website."

Comments

Sadly, trash is where most MMOG's belong

[zhevek]

...that is, if you want any part of your life back ;)

Re:Sadly, trash is where most MMOG's belong

[Trigun]

Because a level one character sucks to do anything. You can perish under the attack of a garden slug. You have to build up your character to at least level 8 before you can venture outside of your little safety bubble.

If you could just hop in and have fun, then you might not come back. MMORPG's are like work, you have to show up every day and punch in, clock your hours, and punch out. Your innate ability means nothing. For instance, I fire up Enemy Territory, hop on a server, and proceed to wipe out the guys with 1000+ experience. Why? I'm good (The fact that I can afford a decent rig doesn't hurt either, but we won't coun t that right now). Now I fire up EQ, hop on as a level 1 ranger or something, and proceed to get my ass handed to me because I haven't put the necessary hours into levelling my character up. I can't just walk up to a level 50 fighter or whatever and try to duel him, no matter how good I am. I am limited by the game, and the rules of said game. That's why rpg's can put 60+hours of gameplay on the box, because there's no way in hell you can beat the game using a level 8 character. You have to get up to level 75 or some crazy shit.

And that's why there are few (if any) MMORPGs that you can just hop on and have fun. You can try the non-graphical versions that you can go and just talk to people without fear of garden slugs. It's called IRC.

Classic games that you can never find again

[AEton]

Twelve years ago the landscape of the Internet was totally different. We had Clevnet, and that could get us anywhere!

BBS games were before my time (or I just missed out on the craze), but I was a big fan of single-person text adventures before they were Interactive Fiction. I was especially fond of a couple of adventure games on some pay-per-minute service, Compuserve or Prodigy maybe. One in particular stands out because it involved a vampire (Dracula?) and it was designed to be incrementally solvable. It's where I learned the maze mapping skills that came so handy in Adventure later (even though it came out earlier).

Does anyone else remember this vampire-themed adventure game that was available on some early ISP? Even a name would be a start...

Re:What is this?

[Chromain]

Indeed - it is largely a childs game at heart, though the actual fan base seems to be older than originally intended. Too "old" for this type of game? No worries! Show your kids - they'll love it.

To the CI architect

[unkokue]

Since you guys are about the game experience rather than money, does this mean some kind of meaningful PvP is in store for downloaders of your game?

Illegal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't .. er, removing items from peoples trash stealing?

And on that note, do they have the 'right' to use the game code?

Re:Illegal?

[eclectro]

Actually not. Once you throw it away, you're throwing it to the birds.

The problem is more how it was thrown away. If the dumpster was located on private property, then that's tresspassing. Public property - that's a different matter entirely. Laws vary from state to state on this. But you do not see much enforcement anyway, as it's trash.

I imagine that there are different laws for each state that prohibit people from climbing into dumpsters for safety reasons..

So much as the code goes, I searched and could not find information about the status of code ownership/trademarks or current license. I do note that a non-profit was started for the sake of preserving the game.

As an aside, I think this exemplifies why current copyright law is too long, and favors those who have deep pockets for lobbyists to protect a "few" things, while literally everything else goes to the trash.

Re:Well.

[jred]

You'd be surprised by how many ppl don't have any clue, or think it'd be too hard to do. I emailed the guys who did the Star Wars Chopper video and recommended BT. There were half a dozen mentions on their site that they kept blowing up all of their donated bandwidth. He wrote back with a bunch of questions, and I sent him a brief explanation & a couple of URLs.

And remember, these guys are stuck on a game that's 10 years old. They aren't necessarily keeping up with the times :)

since the article is still unavailable...

[bnitsua]

I think this raises interesting questions about abandonware...
what's the legality of taking over a project that was aborted? even though the company who owned it literally trashed the project, don't they still own some sort of rights to it?
if it became popular, could they do anything, since they bought the rights from Starwave... or does throwing it in the trash forfeit those rights?

Re:since the article is still unavailable...

[The Famous Brett Wat]

To the extent that physical artefacts were recovered from the trash, there's no question of theft here. I recall reading about a case a while back in which the police obtained evidence without a warrant by taking it from someone's trash, and the court ruled that as non-infringing. Some reporters retaliated by raiding the trash of some high-profile public servants associated with the area, and reporting on it. Sauce for the goose... gotta love it.

Anyhow, what you're asking about is the copyright, no doubt. We've had some succinct answers offered in this thread already, and I'll have to back the "maybe" on this. If it went to court, the arguments would be pretty interesting! Can you throw a copyright in the trash? I don't think the law specifies, and I don't think the courts have ever ruled on it. Interesting concept, though. If I were the lawyering type, I'd want to argue that the copyright was trashed, unless there is some evidence to suggest that the work was retained, or the copyright sold. My argument would be that the material entered the public domain due to abandonment -- although I'd find out what the accepted Latin phrase for that is, to underscore my lawyerhood.

How about, "if a copyright owner abandons all physical embodiments of the work, and has not entrusted the preservation of that work to another party, then, ceterus paribus, the copyright has also been abandoned." (Latin included only for show.)

Re:since the article is still unavailable...

[KillerBob]

Not strictly speaking true. Reputable AW sites (such as HOTU and Abandonia) will post a title, and inform the vendor that it's up. If the vendor complains, the title is taken down. If the vendor doesn't complain, then the product can be considered abandonware, and freely distributable.

Also, when a company no longer exists, and nobody bought the copyrights, their product becomes public domain. An awful lot of abandonware titles actually come from studios that went belly-up. In these cases, since there's no longer anybody who can make a claim to the copyright, the product in question becomes public domain.

The difference between Abandonware and Warez comes in whether the product is still within its natural saleable life. Only the vendor can make that decision, and when the vendor comes to that conclusion, there's two things they can do: they can either abandon the title, or they can release it for free download (like Rockstar Games has done with some of their material). As long as they think they can still sell it, it's not abandonware.

A similar fate

[hobotron]

Was one of Redmoon. (http://www.redmoon.co.kr/ Korean version) An english server lasted for at least 5 years, but due to mismanagement, ingame and secuirty, the server software was "obtained", and now countless old players can download it and set up their own, or play on one of the many private servers, I have first hand knowledge of these events because I was a Redmoon player for a long time, I've followed it from the US version, to the Singapore company that bought it, to its home right now as a player created/tinkered operation.

Sure some of the things done to obtain the software were ethically questionable, but when you really love a game a lot, its hard to see it completely given up on. A lot of this love comes across with the development team that ressurected castleinfinity. It wasnt the first MMORPG that was resurected, and it wont be the last, as long as you have a deep emotional tie with a game (bordering on adiction, believe me, I know) you cant just let it go.

Thanks for bringing back some memories that were close to me with this story.

Re:A note from one of the Architects.

[kdq]

I am the Keeper of the Keys to Infinity - that is, I officially run the joint. First, let me apologize for the down server - Apache stays up for about 45 seconds at a burst, and sometimes won't even start. We're working on it. Second, the old servers are dual P6-200's with 128MB of ECC RAM. They are 10 year-old HP machines, and if you want to pay for shipping or come pick them up, there are three of them. I've been spending the money for the last seven years to keep C8 alive because I believe it deserves a chance to be exposed to the public. Total donations from other sources just barely make four figures. I don't mind, as long as people are playing. Again I apologize for the inconvenience, but the dinosaurs thought they were under major attack from the monsters and panicked.

Re:I don't supppose...

[fries]

If you are permitting the download to go for free, would you ever consider permitting the source to go for free (as in Free Software)?

Doom went this route, and, well, it is runable on any os because volunteers have made it work on just about anything. Same could happen to your project!

Re:Recommended minimum hardware requirement.

[Timberwolf0122]

Has anyone considered writing a P2P webserver? The pages are stored on multiple boxes and are fetched via a bit-torrent-esk protocal.
Admittedly dymanic content such as ASP/perl would be tricky however it would reduce server load.

Re:Anyone Remember Faazuul from Galacticomm?

[Gondola]

Playable versions of the original "MUD" were available as early as 1979, mainframes only. Multiplayer mainframe Zork was created even earlier. I remember playing multiplayer Zork on a Dartmouth university mainframe back in the early 80's.

In 1980, MUD1 was online on the internet.

Compuserve was first able to put Islands of Kesmai up as a commercial offering in 1984.

In 1985, Galacticomm's MajorBBS and Compuserve's British Legends were both available.

The BBS software that Galacticomm wrote was called MajorBBS, and I used to help run a BBS, and customize some of the programming and configuration for it. (Borland C with DOS Extender on a 286!)

What made Galacticomm unique was their invention the Galactibox, which was a large computer case with 16 ISA slots that connected to a PC via an interface card -- of which you could have multiple. This allowed BBS operators to put together the hardware to run 16-64 modem lines much cheaper than, say, Compuserve.

I used to help run a MajorBBS in Michigan called SOLARIS until the con-man that owned it skipped town and left all of the hardware, so my then girlfriend and I decided to run it out of our home. We were always in the red over the phone bill, so we eventually closed it down.

Here's an interesting timeline to check out if you're interested: http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/mudtimeline.h tml

Habitat closer to first.

[Spazmania]

First off, good for them. That was a remarkable rescue.

I do have a small bone to pick, though. Castle Infinity is not "one of the first" by a decade or so.

The first graphical MMOG I know of was Habitat from 1987. Yes, that's 1987 not 1997. Habitat was built by a partnership between Lucasfilm Games Division (now LucasArts) and Quantum Computer Corp (now America Online). It ran on a Commodore 64. Though usable at 300 bps, you really needed 1200 bps to do more than poke around.

Habitat didn't make it out of the beta test in the US because it used an indecent amount of server hardware. Quantum needed the hardware for the beta version of AOL. Habitat's bastard stepchild did make it to release, though: Club Caribe. In 1988 it had tens of thousands of players and supported upwards of 1000 at once.

Lucas later released a standalone game using the Habitat engine. You may have played it: Maniac Mansion.

Re:Quick Question (offtopic)

[ndwyer]

Yeah...the original servers were high-end (for the time) P6-200s. On which we estimated about 5000 players would comfortably run.

The server side software is complicated. Rick Lambright, who is honestly one of the smartest people I've ever met, built a system that did all the stuff you'd expect from an MMOG, but he did it before there were any examples to learn from. Unfortunately, our goals never explicitly included making the software run for anyone else, so I'm not surprised it has taken some work to port it.

I was one of the original client-side programmers at Starwave. We put an awful lot of ourselves into Castle Infinity and it was heartbreaking to see how badly Starwave managed/marketed it. It's really nice to see new people taking the system over and keeping it running.

Congratulations on keeping the game online and bringing it back to people's attention.

nathan