Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands

~ the obit ~

This one was never sold as a game. You reached it by being a paying member of Total Entertainment Network, an American dial-up gaming service with its own client and its own billing, and TEN was the only door. Turkey was not on the list of countries TEN sold into, so the question of whether I would have played it never came up in any form I could have noticed at the time.

The origin is a sales pitch. In the summer of 1994 people from AT&T's Interchange network approached Strategic Simulations wanting a graphical Dungeons and Dragons game, because Neverwinter Nights had done exactly that for America Online and AT&T wanted the same anchor for its own launch. Andre Vrignaud led the project. Development was thin from the start, with one part-time artist and a codebase lifted from Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager, plus sprites borrowed out of Al-Qadim and Thunderscape. Then AT&T closed Interchange, and the finished game had no network to live on.

TEN took the deal in April 1996 and the game shipped on 2 October that year, after two years of production. The world was Athas, the desert setting where water is currency and everything wants you dead. Eight races and eight classes, fifteen levels, a chat window borrowed straight from text muds, turn-based combat on a short per-player timer, and player versus player enabled almost everywhere outside the safe zones. Dying cost you equipment and a full level.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

The critics were unmoved. PC Player in Germany gave it three out of five and CNET's Gamecenter gave it two. The numbers were better than the reviews: TEN reported it as the service's second most-played title of 1997, with close to a million player hours between launch and that December, and the development team said in October 1997 that the game was generating tens of thousands of paid hours every month.

What people actually described afterward was the social machinery. Guilds, grouping, scheduled roleplay sessions run by the developers through the chat system, live events improvised on top of a world that had no tools for any of it. All the furniture that later MMOs would treat as a design requirement showed up here first, badly supported and used anyway.

~ the cracks ~

The architecture was peer to peer, which in 1996 sounded like a way to save on servers and turned out to be a way to hand the rules to the customer. Game logic ran on players' own computers. GameSpy's later account puts it plainly: the code was ripe for manipulation, and within weeks of launch people had learned to alter and improve their own abilities whenever they felt like it. SSI never found a fix.

In April 1997 SSI split the world into Law and Chaos regions, a patch that reads now like a surrender dressed as a feature. Law leaned toward cooperation and Chaos was sold in TEN's own words as a hostile world where trusted allies are extremely valuable and equally scarce. Version 2.0 arrived in December 1997. In July 1998 TEN announced that Dark Sun Online was complete, promising a stable environment free of troublemakers, which was the last significant thing anybody said about it in public.

~ what got buried with it ~

TEN was taken apart in 1998 and what survived of it became Pogo.com, a place for card games. Dark Sun Online had no massive userbase to sell and no modern engine to license, so nobody picked it up. It shut down quietly in 1999 and the trade press barely recorded the date, which is why every source on this grave says "in 1999" and none says which month.

Ultima Online launched a year after it and collected the credit for nearly everything Dark Sun Online had already been doing, unrestricted player killing included. By 2000 the magazines were filing it under a first generation of MMORPGs alongside Meridian 59, the ones that died fast and cleared the ground. A sequel called Dark Sun Online: The Age of Heroes was announced in December 1997 and never made.

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