His book describes a complex community on an island, in which people share a common culture and way of life (“16th Century Dreams: Thomas More”). Sir Thomas More was the first person to use the term “utopia,” describing an ideal, imaginary world in his most famous work of fiction. Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.“Thomas More’s Island of Utopia.” 1518. I'm sure that's a lot of why I play it too." "That makes me feel important and dependable. "I know how to play it and people want to play with me," she said. Ehrheart said the community is the real reason she keeps returning to the game, no matter how obsolete it might seem. Another hosts a YouTube show about the game. One has a website devoted to archiving what happened in each age of Utopia. Utopia's community of 3,300 users is small, but it's dedicated. So to come in and just overhaul all of that would be a terrible, terrible thing to do." "They play because of what brought them in to begin with, and that is the text-based game that you see in front of you. "A lot of the people who play now have played for a long time," Cannata said. Since they bought the game they've worked to bring back former players with an email campaign and have begun speaking with developers about possibly putting out an app.īut they admit that's tricky, because if they change Utopia too much, it will lose the magic that drew them into it in the first place. If it's up to Cannata and Mahan, Utopia will be around well into the future. "I am a little shocked that it's still alive today. He'd designed the game for dial-up internet and thought the advent of broadband would be the end of Utopia. I didn't even know if it would last a year or two at that point," Patel said. He didn't even know if the game was still active when I reached out to him. Patel now owns an escape room in Austin, and says he hasn't checked on Utopia in years. Patel gradually lost interest and sold the game in 2008 to Jolt Online Gaming, which in turn sold it to Blanchfield and McDonnell. It's a system since popularized by mobile games like Clash of Clans, in which players manage clans and invade one another.Īt its peak during the early 2000s, according to Patel, the game had around 100,000 active users. What set Utopia apart was its real-time gameplay, rather than the turn-based nature of the era's browser games, a feature Patel remains proud of. "I liked the idea of empire building, building economies, building relationships, building a social-type game," said Patel in a phone interview from Austin. He was just 22 years old when Utopia launched. It was designed by Mehul Patel, who started programming games for bulletin board systems that predated the internet and worked on Utopia while he was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. Then everything resets and the game starts over again. The largest kingdom at the end of an age, a period of time that lasts roughly 10-12 weeks, wins. Each kingdom, which can have up to 25 provinces, goes to war with one another. Players control a province that's part of a kingdom. Utopia may not be much to look at, but its gameplay is timeless. "It was disappointing to look at the last five or six years of the game's history as it changed owners and entered a maintenance mode where all they were doing was making small tweaks every age and letting the game slowly die rather than trying to rebuild it and help the community out," Mahan told me. (They declined to say how much they paid for it.) Two of those believers, David Cannata, a facilities manager in Boston, and Jeff Mahan, who heads up a product group for a health network in Washington, DC, bought Utopia from Scale Front Limited owners Sean Blanchfield and Brian McDonnell in February with the intention of reviving a game that is free to play, features no graphics or microtransactions, and only has about 3,300 active users. They refuse to let a relic of the internet's past fade away. Yet the fantasy game, in which players work together online to expand their territory and defeat other groups over the course of 'ages,' time periods within the game that last 10-12 weeks in real time, is still active and being played by people like Ehrheart. With its black background, framed layout, and lack of images, it looks slightly better than something a high school student might design in a coding class. The game, which first launched in January 1999, has barely changed since it was designed to be used on the browsers of yore, like Netscape.
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