Dragon's Gate

~ the last words ~

A lightning storm killed Dragon's Gate. Not a publisher and not a spreadsheet. By then the server was in a basement, one of the two people who had built the thing seventeen years earlier was paying its electricity bill personally, and the weather got to it before the accountants ever did.

It started as Aradath, written by Mark Jacobs in 1985, and became Dragon's Gate when Adventures Unlimited Software put it on GEnie in late 1989 with a public opening the following spring. Darrin Hyrup had come over from Simutronics, where the work had been GemStone and Orb Wars, and the two of them built one of the longest paid runs anything in this genre ever had. Six dollars an hour was the price in 1992, and reviewers at the time called that reasonable, which tells you what the alternatives cost.

I was never in Dragon's Gate. During the years it was living out its last act on an independent server I was on Turkish Ultima Online private servers, Sylveria and Overdone among them, and the arrangement was identical in a different genre. One person's hardware, one person's electricity bill. A world that stayed up exactly as long as somebody was willing to keep paying for it out of pocket. Those servers died the same way this one did, without a notice, because a machine somewhere stopped.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

It was text, and it was staffed. The distinguishing feature was live game masters running scenarios inside the world while people were in it, which meant the thing happening tonight was not on a respawn timer and would not happen again. Players ran their own scenarios too. A world with a writing staff on shift is expensive in a way that a world with monsters on a loop is not, and the hourly billing is what paid for the staff.

That model traveled badly into the era that followed. Once a monthly subscription became the standard shape, the arithmetic that funded a room full of game masters stopped working, and the games that survived were the ones that could run unattended.

~ the last year ~

The game moved to AOL in 1996 and then to Mythic, the company Mark Jacobs had built, which by the early 2000s had Dark Age of Camelot to run and a much larger business around it. On 31 January 2006 Mythic dropped Dragon's Gate from its services and its sponsorship.

Hyrup took it home. It came back free, running from a basement, which is the part of the story worth keeping. Nobody was going to make money on it again and it went back up anyway, for whoever was still playing, and it held that way for a year. Then the storm hit the equipment and there was no company left to replace it. The official closure is dated 10 February 2007.

~ the legacy ~

Mythic is the obvious inheritance. The studio that came out of AUSI made Dark Age of Camelot, which is one of the few games of its generation still running, and the realm-versus-realm design in it grew out of years of watching what people did to each other in text.

The other inheritance is less flattering to the industry. Dragon's Gate proved that live staff make a persistent world better and that almost nobody will pay for it. Every large game since has arrived at the same answer, which is scripted events on a calendar and no human on the other side of them.

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