Black Gate

You can never go home again, or at least I believe that’s the saying. I tend to agree, as my home town in NowhereVille Indiana stands as a shining example of the power that ‘getting out’ has on a person’s life. Still, when I do make it ‘home’ — and yes, although I’ve lived in four other states and half a dozen apartments, condos, and houses longer than the days where I spent my youth, my mother’s house on the Tippecanoe is still my home — I can breathe easy like nowhere else in the world. [On a sad note, someone recently related to me that maturity is achieved the day you lose your last parent because you are truly on your own. I’ve luckily not reached that level of independence, and certainly that is why my mother’s house still holds such warmth, because there I’m still the child, and who doesn’t like being the child once in a while?]

Honestly, I could shed tears as I write such profound revelations, as I think about home, three thousand miles from the City of Angels and all the chaos that goes with it, but I won’t. Instead, I want to try to translate that same feeling to another venue, that being the art of the quickly disappearing MMORPG.

Before I can truly begin to talk about the vanishing, however, I suppose I should first discuss life. On the 16th of March, 1999, Sony’s 989 Studios released Everquest and the world of online gaming was never the same. Sure, Ultima Online had been around since 1997, but it never stole gamers’ attention and basked in the world spotlight like Everquest, or ‘Evercrack’ as it was called by many because of its addictive qualities.

This game, eventually wrapped into the Sony Online Entertainment bundle, had hundreds of thousands of registered players by 2004. Somewhat unbelievably, thirteen years later, another expansion for the game appeared this November [2012], but like most games of its kind, the death throes can be a long and lonely road.

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Since 2000, I’d regularly played 3rd Edition in some form or other, either in 3.5 or Pathfinder, and found the boundless customizations, prestige classes, skills, and feats an addictive agent as my gaming world grew. Still, at some point, all the calculations begin to wear on you and you long for the ‘good old days’ when leveling up a character meant rolling for hit points, checking every third level to see if your saving throws went down, or adding a spell or two.

This feeling of being overburdened came to a head in 2011 as I decided I’d take down my long unused and dusty 1E AD&D tomes from the shelf where they looked longingly at me day after day. There, amid the wonder of my youth, I rediscovered the simplicity of the original Gygax and Arneson texts.

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Back in the mid-80s, I would go out to my dad’s house in Las Vegas and spend a few weeks of every summer seeing how he lived his life in the city of sin. It always had its ups and downs, but certainly even twenty-five years later I’ve got some lasting memories that bring a smile to my face.

One such memory is that of going to my first Toys “R” Us, at age 14, with my father to look for a game to bring to his cabin in Utah. Even to this day I can see a ‘wall of games’ in my head, so much bigger than life and beyond what I’d ever thought possible for a kid from the small town cornfields of Indiana.

The game my father and I chose was a huge one, the box seemingly larger than a board game had the right to be. It was called Axis & Allies and it had the most brilliant painted cover you could imagine.

It was produced by Milton Bradley, part of their GameMaster Series, something that took a step beyond what any other company in those days dared to do, make a mass market adult game. To this point, games were almost exclusively for children, and the graphics of such games were similarly geared.

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