The Game Archaeologist Discovers the Island of Kesmai (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Game Archaeologist Discovers the Island of Kesmai (2012)

engadget.com

19 pointsbenbreen8 comments

My first MMO experience was Legends of Kesmai, which was a successor to Island of Kesmai. In fact, I think it basically was the same back end that Island of Kesmai used, but with a crude GUI instead of being text based. But I think most of the maps were identical, and I remember all of the text commands still worked.

I remember logging into the game for the first time, creating a character, and getting dumped at the "dock" (the starting point for new characters) with absolutely no idea how to play. It was really a very terrible GUI and I didn't even really know what I was looking at, how to move around, etc. It was all foreign to me.

Fortunately two other players saw me struggling and were kind enough to spend a couple hours with me showing me how to play. Where the dungeon was, how to kill things, how to pick up and sell loot, and even walked me through the "black broadsword" quest. And then a couple days later I ran into them again and they helped me through the first Knight's quest. From that point on, I was hooked.

Looking back on it now, it's really kind of amazing how generous that was of them. I really can't think of any examples from my adult life where someone has been so patient and generous with their time, with absolutely no expectation of reward. Some of those early MMO communities were really special. Do places like that still exist these days?

I'm assuming all involved were children at the time? Then it is not that unusual (although you have to get on the game when it isn't yet/still very popular).

I was in my early teens at the time. Not sure about the people who helped me but I assume they were older, which would have meant late teens or adult.

> The provider charged $6 an hour if you were accessing it from a 300-baud modem or $12 an hour for a 1200-baud modem.…What made it more expensive is that there was a significant time lag between the players and the game. Island of Kesmai processed a user command every 10 seconds, which meant that for every command given, you were paying $0.016 in game time.

Wow, did you recall paying to play?

I played through a service called GameStorm that was founded by the Kesmai corporation in their later years. They offered a very reasonable $10/mo subscription for unlimited to access to their collection of games.

Thanks for this detail. We need a People's History to video games

There are still plenty of muds running, largely unscathed by the contemporary internet. The communities shrunk a bit when wow came out. http://www.topmudsites.com/

Second part of the article here:

https://www.engadget.com/2012-03-13-the-game-archaeologist-a...

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