Island of Kesmai

~ the last words ~

In December 1985 I was one year old. There is no version of this story where I was in it, and the honest distance is not regional or technical but simply the calendar. What does carry across is the meter. When I finally got a modem in Turkey in 1998 the connection was billed on the phone line by time, which meant every session had a number running underneath it and you learned to feel that number without looking. Island of Kesmai charged six dollars an hour on top of a call. The instinct is the same one, thirteen years earlier and considerably more expensive.

John Taylor and Kelton Flinn were classmates at the University of Virginia. In the summer of 1980 they wrote Dungeons of Kesmai, a six-player game built out of the same source material every programmer in 1980 was building out of. They founded the Kesmai company in 1982, and in December 1985 an enlarged version of that game went onto CompuServe under the name Island of Kesmai.

Flinn later put the launch at 15 December 1985, after what he described as a very long internal test. The price was six dollars an hour at 300 baud and twelve at 1200, which is the detail that explains most of what the game became. Faster modems cost double. Every command took about ten seconds to process. Players did the division and concluded that a single instruction to their character was worth roughly two and a half cents, and then they played anyway.

~ the record ~

~ what six dollars an hour bought ~

The world was five regions and somewhere around sixty-two thousand distinct locations, holding about twenty-five hundred creatures and non-player characters. A hundred people could be inside it at the same time. All of it was drawn in text characters arranged as a grid you moved through a tile at a time, with an optional front end available for anyone who wanted a graphical layer over the top. In 1988 two new lands were added for characters who had run out of things to do, which is a maintenance problem that would not become common for another fifteen years.

The rule that shaped the culture was the one against killing other players. It was forbidden outright, and stealing from them was frowned on hard enough to work. What this produced was a game where the other hundred people were a resource rather than a threat, so the hunting parties and the shared maps circulating through the CompuServe forum libraries both had somewhere to grow. The learning curve was steep enough that new players were expected to download somebody else's maps before they started.

~ the inheritance ~

Kesmai built a two-dimensional sprite version called Legends of Kesmai and put it on AOL in 1996, and later on GameStorm, the company's own service. It was a slightly reduced Island of Kesmai with pictures instead of letters, and it was among the first graphical multiplayer role-playing games that anybody made money from. News Corp had owned the company since 1994. Electronic Arts bought it in 1999.

In May 2000 EA announced the closure of most of the Kesmai catalog, Legends of Kesmai and Air Warrior Classic included, and the studios followed the year after. Fourteen and a half years is a long run for anything, and it is a very long run for a product that was still charging by the hour in a decade that had stopped doing that. What it left behind is mostly structural: a persistent world holding a hundred strangers who cooperated because the rules would not let them do anything else. That was working in text on CompuServe while the people who would later be credited with inventing it were still in school.

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