The Shadow of Yserbius

~ the obituary ~

Yserbius went quiet in 1996, two years before my first modem, on a network that only took calls from inside North America. It sits in the part of internet history I can read about but cannot personally remember. Reading about it is a strange experience, because what it was doing in 1991 is roughly what every online game has been doing since.

The Sierra Network launched in May 1991 out of Oakhurst, California, Ken Williams's attempt at a dial-up service built around games rather than message boards. Yserbius shipped with it and became the reason most people paid the bill. Joe Ybarra built it under his own shop, Ybarra Productions, and Sierra On-Line published it.

You made a character out of six professions and eight races, walked into a mountain, and went hunting an elemental thing called En-li-Kil down through level after level of dungeon. Combat was turn-based and clicked at with a mouse. Rooms held thirty people at first and sixty later on, and inside a room you formed parties of up to four.

The billing is the part that dates it hardest. The Sierra Network opened at twelve dollars a month flat if you lived in California, and five dollars a month plus two dollars an hour for everybody else. A meter changes what a game is. You did not log in to see what was going on, you logged in with a plan. A minute spent standing around talking cost exactly what a minute spent killing something cost.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

Two sequels followed, The Fates of Twinion in 1993 and The Ruins of Cawdor in 1995. Sierra also sold boxed offline versions, and Computer Gaming World was blunt about what taking the other players out had removed: playing Yserbius alone, it wrote, was like being in an amusement park after hours where the rides were not that good to begin with.

Guilds and player sparring came out of the players rather than out of the design document. So did the thing nobody in 1991 had planned for, which is that a good share of the people paying two dollars an hour were paying it in order to talk to each other. The dungeon was the excuse. The room was the product.

~ the postmortem ~

AT&T took a stake in 1993 and bought the network outright in 1994, renaming it the ImagiNation Network. AOL bought what was left in 1996 for a price never disclosed, rumored around forty million dollars. AOL was already running its own graphical online RPG in Neverwinter Nights and had no use for a second one, so Yserbius was not so much shut down as put in a drawer. Online play ended that year and nobody sent a notice.

That is the honest death certificate for a lot of pre-web software. No announcement, no final server message. An acquiring company looks at what it just bought, finds a duplicate, and stops paying for the smaller one.

~ the long tail ~

In late 2007 a group calling itself the ImagiNation Revival Project got the original client running under DOSBox and put Yserbius back online with graphics and macros intact. Old character files from version 2.4 onward still loaded. That server went down in early 2016. A separate remake called MedievaLands rebuilt Yserbius and Twinion for machines people actually own now.

Nine years is a long run for a volunteer server hosting a game that an acquisition killed off. It is also the only reason anyone born after 1990 has been inside that mountain at all.

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