It's Been A Long Time

Wow, it's been - what - almost two months since my last confess...I mean, since my last post! Things have just been a little chaotic, and somehow I managed not to find the time to come here and post my usual mental meanderings.

Blogging is, for me I think, therapeutic. It's just a way to help empty some of the random clutter that I often find filling my headspace, often to the point of overflowing. That's why, many times, this blog seems to have no specific theme. It does; it's a repository for my mental farts. And you, true believers, are the beneficiaries of those exhalations.

So what brought me back today, besides a desperate need for an excuse to post? Reminiscing. I was thinking back on a game that, unfortunately, never quite got off the launching pad. It was called Ilusia: Quest for the Eternals, and it still manages to hold a near and dear place in my heart.

The game was typical for it's time, back in the early-mid 90s when it began. This was an age when the text-based MUDs (multi-user dungeons), the precursor to today's MMO's, where all the rage. Illusia was going to spearhead a new frontier - the Graphical MUD. The concept was one of a divided realm - human-aligned races against vampire-aligned races. Dark vs. Light, Order vs. Chaos. And I was one of the early player-testers, once the game entered pre-Beta, back in...1994. "Kowh", the Minotaur, started out as a joke character; instead he became my mainstay, a standard. A Minotaur Knight, a member of the order House of Three Moons, eventually the torchbearer, and defacto leader of that group when the founding members left Illusia. Mhauz the Felzur followed, and he was my comic foil to Kowh's stoic resolve.

I believed in the game enough that I became a Charter Member, someone who aided in the development of the game by donating $150 of their cash in exchange for elevated testing status, and a "charter" package when the game finally went gold.

Well, it never did. The developers were scattered across the country, communicating by chat programs and email; all of them were doing this on a volunteer basis, while the head admin and owner of the site - "Randor" - bled money out of his pockets to support it. I eventually joined the ranks of the admin staff as Inktomi the Storyteller, trying to help pull the world's story together and give a solid basis for the "builders" to base their work off...but it was a hopeless task. Illusia's time had come and gone; Ultima Online and, eventually, Everquest, broke the mold on the concept of the graphical MUD and took it into completely new waters. The MUD was dead, the MMO was born.

Illusia finally died a quiet death sometime in the last few months. None of the links to the game sites work anymore, and the forums no longer seem to exist. It's a shame because it had developed, at it's peak around 2000-2001, a strong and loyal fan base who shared in the dream. I would have liked to see it go out with more fanfare...or maybe it did happen, and I just missed it.

Still. I'm thinking of resurrecting it from the ashes, perhaps in another form. The tools are there, and I know the stories behind the world as if I created them myself (well...for a large part...I did!) Do I have the time, the drive, the energy?

We'll just have to wait and see.