Rubies of Eventide

» see eventide.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I missed this one on discovery rather than on bandwidth. A text MUD is precisely what a 33.6k modem in 1998 Turkey was good for, and I had the modem. What I did not have was the address. English-language telnet worlds circulated on American college newsgroups and in magazine listings I never saw, and Ankara was a long way from that list.

Rubies of Eventide started as one of those worlds in 1998, old enough to ship with a working DOS client. Cyber Warrior ran it as text for five years while everyone else discovered Ultima Online and EverQuest, and then did the thing almost no MUD ever managed. Instead of writing a new game, the studio built a 3D client on Lithtech's Jupiter engine and bolted it onto the world it already had. The MUD kept running underneath. What came out on 2 June 2003 was the same game with a face.

It kept the MUD's habits too. Combat sat close to turn-based, with a timed pause between rounds long enough that you were expected to think instead of react. Characters had blood points and spirit points on top of hit points, different weapons drained different pools, and emptying any one of them killed you. There were seven races and 104 classes, a count that ran to tailors and linguists and political sycophants, with fifty freely chosen skills stacked on top.

The market had no room for it. A subscription game with blocky models and a ten-day trial, arriving eighteen months ahead of World of Warcraft, needed a reason for anyone to abandon what they were already paying for. By early 2004 the studio put the paying population at 806 people. The servers went off on 14 February 2004.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the private server that got found ~

Julia Howe and Jeff Grubb, who had both worked on it, could not leave it switched off. They stood a private server up so they could keep playing with friends and family, word got out, and committed fans worked out how to hook themselves onto the connection. The population grew far enough that the two of them started doing arithmetic about whether the game could pay for itself on what the players were willing to hand over.

Mnemosyne, LLC was formed in August 2004 for exactly that. Rubies came back free, funded by donations and by content the community produced itself. Patrons got priority access when the servers were busy along with some benefits in the world, and everyone else played for nothing on limited server space. Howe's public reasoning was blunt about the economics: tapping the skills of the players cost less than doing the work in house, and it gave those players somewhere to show the work off.

~ thirty-six ~

The reborn game never got large and never appeared to want to. It grew to three servers, one of them open-world PvP, and kept every part of itself that made it awkward. Death left your inventory on the ground for five minutes before it vanished, unless a friend dragged your body to a temple and paid for the resurrection, and either route cost you a random hit to experience or stats.

A GameOgre reviewer logging into the main server somewhere in the late 2000s counted thirty-six players on it. Howe also claimed a figure nobody else in the genre was claiming, a male-to-female ratio of around three to one, and credited it to a deliberate refusal to draw the female characters the way the rest of the market was drawing them.

~ the last announcement ~

Mnemosyne's attention wandered. The company branched into a lolcats card game and a novelty soda, and in April 2009 it handed Rubies of Eventide back to Marc Howe, who had founded it. He closed the PvP server almost immediately and the remaining one in July. Wikipedia files the end as August 2009 and the company's own homepage was carrying a closed sign by the tenth of that month, but the last server had already been off for weeks.

Jeff Grubb wrote the goodbye because there was nobody else left to write it. "I am sorry to be the one who has to do this, but unfortunately nobody else is around to make an official announcement," it opened, and it closed on the arithmetic: they had waited until the last minute looking for a way out, and the server population was lower than it had ever been. The first time this game was killed it came back inside six months. The second time, nothing happened.

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