Hesperia MUD - [telnet hesperia-mud.org:7000]

It was on September the 28th in 1996, that Randall and I were discussing muds on the birthday party of a mutual friend. At that point of time, I was a heavily addicted player of AvatarMUD and Randall did not actively mud. As with most games I play enthusiastically, I had my own distinct ideas on how to implement and run a mud. However since I lacked the coding skills myself, I had never given the idea much thought.

On this evening however, Randall at some point suggested to start a mud of our own. This most certainly was an attractive idea. Randall and I had then already been real life friends for 6 years and were both well versed in fantasy games, such as Warhammer and Vampire: The Masquerade. Actually Randall had been a player in my Warhammer role-playing group ever since I started out as a GamesMaster. Also, we had experience in the past with working together on games. Already we had once tried to create a game based on Stephen King's 'The Long Run'. We also had been working on a computer version of the boardgame Axis & Allies. Both of the projects however died an easy death at some point and were never finished. Still the potential was there. So we agreed on starting the Hesperia project. The roles were simple. Randall would do the coding and I would do most of the creative writings.

In the weeks that followed, Randall researched a number of source codes and I wrote my first outline of Hesperia. We started working from an early version of ENVY, but soon switched to ENVY 2.0. We also decided on creating a real, worthwhile game first, which would really stand out once we got it running smoothly, before worrying about a site. In our opinion it was a matter of unprofessional behaviour to first look for a site and players and then worry about whether the game would really be different from the standard mud. The site would come automatically, we figured, once we had something to offer. December and January of 1996 and 1997 respectively were quiet months and it was a bit vague whether or not we were going to carry on. I had already written a large file on transportation in November and was surprised by Randall in the beginning of February, as he reported to have implemented most of it.

That was the signal for a massive effort from both sides as we handled our knives to carve Hesperia into shape. In a creative frenzy which lasted till the end of May 1997, I wrote over 150 pages of text on a wild diversity of topics. Besides the already written outline and transportation file, I wrote detailed files on our levelling system, how to handle deaths, our religious system, races and a separate file on each of our classes. The latter files contained information for each spell and skill, consisting of both the help file text and the way how I suggested it to implemented, a revised slist, a help file for the class and so on. Randall was struggling to keep up with my speed of writing and managed to complete a hard core necessary for area writing by the time of June. To this area writing package I added a map of the world along with 50 brief area ideas which would fit into Hesperia.

By that time Duckie had set up a small mailing list on Hesperia for a small group of interested people, to discuss our ideas and offer suggestions, as well as to stay in touch with players and hear their opinion on our ideas.

So in the beginning of the summer of 1997, Randall was facing the terrible Mage class, which actually consisted of 4 classes, since from level 30 onwards players would be given a choice out of four Paths of Magick. The description of the entire class alone was over 60 pages, filled with a large amount of new things. It costed Randall over three months to get through it, during which I recruited a number of fresh area writers and started area writing myself as well. That summer I produced my first five areas. It was fun. I found out writing a good, medium-sized area costed 75 hours on average. It also became clear that we could not rely too much on other people's promises to help building areas. Randall and I decided to continue to work like hell and get the job done with just us two, unless we would run into someone willing to join in the effort.

Autumn 1997 was very fertile. Randall rapidly finished all the remaining classes and we were ahead on schedule once more. After having written a few more normal areas, I almost found my own Waterloo in the huge area of Harhaken. It was to become the central area of Hesperia and vast in size. A City of Splendour. It costed me 10 weeks to write and in the end I swore it would be done before 1998. Well, I kept word to myself, as on December 31, 10.30 pm, I finished Harhaken and glanced at the area of 25000 lines. I decided never to write such a large area again and went off to celebrate the New Year.

But that's not all there is to 1997. For in November-December 1997, my mud wife Juno showed a friend of hers, Saibot, a DOS version of our mud. Saibot was enthusiastic and at some point we met and got talking about Hesperia. He wanted to participate and we reacted positively, all help was welcome after all. At that time we of course had no idea if it would only be words. In the beginning of 1998, we noticed he meant what he said, as he turned in a few areas. We met in real life then as well and invited him to join our Staff as we shared the same vision as to what makes a great game. During this same meeting we also set a final time schedule: we would launch a test version of Hesperia around July 1st and test for two months, then go public. We thus had a few more months to complete all the basic features of Hesperia and write a number of areas to cover a range broad enough for players to play the game.

So we did. We worked like hell and took care of our jobs. Randall did the necessary code, Saibot turned in a few more areas and I wrote both areas and a couple of files with additional descriptions on a few topics. At this time, Randall was generously offered a site by the PaNiC Staff, to run Hesperia on. They had followed Randall's work on Hesperia for some time. We of course seized the opportunity gratefully. We got Hesperia up and running without much trouble and tested some superficial things. On Monday 29th of June, we opened the mud to playtesters. We had given over 80 mudding friends of us a special character with some Immortal commands as well as detailed information, to start testing Hesperia. Many people of course just logged in a few times, then stayed away. It was after all summer holiday and to test a mud is rather boring work.

In the 9 weeks that followed, we tested Hesperia thoroughly. Randall was fully occupied with fixing bugs. There were days I was the only person on for hours, which was rather good for my speed of testing things. Now I continued to work on areas as well, and wrote the hideous Black Fortress and Marshes of Dread, to please the Dark Lord Randall. At the end of the 9 weeks of holiday, it became clear we needed another month to get the last known bugs fixed. So we decided to postpone our ambitious opening date and set it to the beginning of October. A very busy month followed. A month in which the Staff decided to invite a few people to join the Immortal ranks and help us build up a fair player base for Hesperia. Thus Arminius, Atreana and Thandor joined our ranks. They had a few weeks at most to prepare for the opening, but did a great job.

Thursday 1st of October 1998 was the day. In a lavish party thrown by the Immortals, Hesperia officially opened at 7 pm CET. About 35-40 people were on-line during the opening and throughout the evening we kept high counts like that. Of course the counts normalized in the two weeks after that to about 15-25 characters, which is very good for a starting mud. Right now players are struggling to explore the new world and endure a number of small bugs and rough edges of Hesperia. All Immortals are trying hard to either fix these things or soften the pain. Luckily they are but temporary distorsions and do not seem to unbalance or ruin the game. We appear to be on the right track.

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