Early game

When I was around 12 or 13, there was a popular game in Argentina making the rounds in every internet cafe. It was free, online, had very low requirements, and best of all, it was made by a local team. The game’s name was Argentum Online.

I remember spending hours going to dinky shops, paying for two or three hours in advance, sitting down on a crusty chair, handling musty, unwashed peripherals, waiting for either DeepFreeze or some admin setup to unlock my station.

There’d be staples on every decent place: Warcraft 3, Counter Strike, Age of Empires, Diablo II, MU Online and then Argentum Online, and some dedicated cafes would have other options as well, if the guys running the daily shifts were into specific genres.

The timer overlay would blink once or twice on the upper rightmost corner, counting down, then fade away. I’d look at the list of available games, find the little icon to click, and then I’d wait for the loader to confirm the client had the latest version and no update was needed (oh, how I hated being in an outdated internet cafe, and wasting time updating the game for it to be returned to “default” by the end of my session).

The music of the initial menu would start, and the hairs on my skin would rise slightly, as if I was about to cross into another universe.

Music available on Youtube:

My first foray into role playing games wasn’t with Argentum, but it was my first MMO.

Probably taking a page from previous DnD games, the character creator would have you rolling for stats, and you could very well spend hours clicking on the dice to hope for a “perfect roll”, to give you the highest achievable values on the stats you wanted.

Maybe two to three days into my first character, I had made my way to one of the main towns, and noticing how expensive everything was (and how broke I was, both in-game and in real life), I traded some possessions in exchange for a fishing rod and an axe. I would risk leaving the safety of the town where players killing players (shorthanded to PvP) was discouraged (by the presence of powerful guards as Non Playing Characters) and venture into the forest following the coastline, to collect lumber and catch fish. If someone showed up, I’d run away and head back into town, having already been killed once or twice in the past.

Someone approached me in-town, just after I sold my daily haul, and asked me if I needed help. My gear clearly indicated I was a complete noob, and their name wasn’t colored red (an indicator of PVP characters, or “outlaws”), so I said “yeah, sure”.

He told me to follow him, and guided me to a rock on the edge of town. There, he stood behind the 2d pixelated image, and told me that there was a secret entrance to some caves with rare materials, where I could mine if I was careful. He disappeared. I stood in awe, then quickly pressed my keyboard to get behind the rock, and pressed down. The screen went black, a new map loaded, and I was suddenly in a cave. He was waiting for me near the entrance.

He showed me how giant spiders (worth several levels, if I was capable of killing one) would roam the tunnels, and what to do to avoid them. I was feeling ecstatic, I could already tell this new way of making cash would net me a ship sooner than expected (it wouldn’t be weeks of cutting wood and getting low level fish!). Then, this guy told me there was another secret he could share with me.

I immediately asked what that was. He replied that I needed to press the attack command while pressing a directional key, and I’d level up my skills way faster. The next couple of events happened very fast:

I tried it, my character attacked, the guy moved his character next to mine and got hit. I was immediately branded an outlaw for attacking another player without being attacked first, my name turned red. The guy used a mid level spell and killed me in one hit, my entire loot dropping to the floor like a pinata. He quickly collected my stuff, while my ghost character (unable to speak with live players until I got resurrected) stood there. He mocked me, calling me a noob and left.

I had been scammed.

After staring at the screen in disbelief (and probably having screamed in rage) I guided my ghostly character back to the surface, into town, and approached the cleric that would revive me. I got resurrected, and the town guards rushed inside the church and killed me again, since I was branded an outlaw. The loss of all of my possessions and the setback of the first 2 days playing was now a minor problem, because I couldn’t figure out a way of resurrecting and escaping fast enough to stay alive.

In the end, I waited for half an hour, while the guards moved in random patterns, their programming nudging them in one direction every 5 to 10 seconds. I took my chance when another outlaw came into town, distracting them. I resurrected and escaped the town. I would now be an outlaw too, and try to get my revenge. I swore then that I wouldn’t be scammed ever again.

To say I was hooked on this game would be an understatement. Cocaine wouldn’t have had such a strong effect on me.

Over the course of months, I begged my dad to let me have the game on our family computer (and eventually on my own computer, with extra layers of regulations to prevent me from being online at all times). I would participate in forums, read tips and guides, follow up on new updates. This was scratching an itch that had been there, festering, for far too long.

While most people had fun competing in the game, fighting one-another or forming shady alliances (or virtuous groups dedicated to killing outlaws), I started to fill in the gaps between my imagination and this 2d world. I wrote short stories. None of them were good, but what they lacked in quality, they made up in enthusiasm. I would post frequently, and ask others if they had stories of their own to share.

Out of that insistence came a group, which we first called “CIDEAR” or CIrculo De Escritores ARgentum (something close to “writers guild of Argentum”). Another kid, of my age, reached out and said he was learning how to code, and he could develop a website for us to host our stories.

Level up

We became online friends quickly, our enthusiasm spreading like an infectious disease. His nickname was hookdump. I would bounce an idea and he would quickly say that it sounded doable, then he’d mention a system or a process he had in mind, and I’d think of ways of implementing it. The website and the short stories weren’t enough. We were talking about fantastic adventures and ways of playing that weren’t doable in Argentum. It was clear for us that we needed to create our own game. How hard could it be? There were plenty of games out there, and we had lots of experience playing them. Surely making them wasn’t complicated.

For the first 3 months, we’d write ideas for a setting, mechanics, design principles, even mounts we’d allow users to acquire (I insisted on having an ostrich in the game). In parallel, I decided to do “research” into how other online games worked, and what made them tick. Whenever I went to an internet cafe now, I would play another game. I tried them all. I would explore the skills system, the way they introduced users to the lore, the controls, you name it.

With a better understanding of what seemed to work and what didn’t, we posted on the same Argentum community where we had met, asking others who’d be interested in joining us. Some people mentioned a website from Rosario, another province in our country, that had a community of game developers. We sent an email asking to join, expressing our intention to develop something using the Online RPG Engine, also called ORE and asking if people there would be able to support us. Unaware of it, we had delivered our first pitch.

Some days went by and we got a response. The guy hosting the website said the idea sounded really good, and the community he had built had people developing passion projects on their own. He’d create a specific channel in the forums for our game, so we could start organizing stuff. His question was “what’s your game called? I need to give the channel a name”.

I had been reading novels set in the Dragonlance universe at the time, and I thought of the name “Imperios Perdidos Online” (a cheap translation of Forgotten Realms). We had a place, and now all we needed were people to help us make it a reality!

Hookdump took over the coding, while I would write tirelessly about ideas on the setting, create a framework for stats and skills, and propose systems to make the world feel alive (We would have players belong to a given empire, and all kills against opponents in a given map would increase the domination counter for that faction, until they would “claim” the area and become rulers of the resources present there). We’d pitch together to other developers, both on the forum and on Teamspeak. People learning how to animate using GIMP would offer to design some frames for an object or a character, and someone else would say they had been learning to compose on FruityLoops and they’d love to make some music for us.

8 months into the project, we had an executable. It was a very simple 2d plane, in which you could move your character from square to square (there were no animations for the movement yet). An inventory system allowed you to pick weapons and armors, equip it, and even use potions. 3 months later we launched our first (and only) live alpha test. Since I had the best connection out of the team, I hosted. Hookdump told me how to run the server, which ports to enable, and I asked my dad to give me a hand. Everyone else downloaded the client and put in the IP and port I shared on a message. Players would appear on the shared world (again, a single mid size map, maybe of 300 x 300 squares) , providing their name on a quick prompt. At it’s highest concurrent player count, there were 28 of us connected. I was beaming ear to ear watching my screen, even as the players experienced horrible lag and rubber-banding, and there was no real cooldown system in place so the players casting the spells the fastest would kill everyone else. It was chaotic as hell, but we had made that chaos.