Thread by @ChristopherA

Twenty years ago today I launched Castle Marrach to the public, my first multiplayer online game design. Unique in offering a #Bartle “socializer-dominant” interactive fiction experience, and a hybrid text & web interactive environment, it was novel for its time. [1/15]

I had founded Skotos in 1999 with a goal of creating "multiplayer interactive fiction on the Internet". We wanted to make games that were more social, more dynamic, more interactive, more “real”, and in particular more story-focused than anything that had been seen before. [2/15]

I also become interested in experimenting with cross-media, and produced two comic books based on our games, Castle Marrach: Awakenings awakenings.marrach.com and Lovecraft Country: Return to Arkham lovecraftcountry.com. [3/15]

In the couple of years that followed, we surged forward with all of the excitement and enthusiasm of a dot-com company at the turn of the century. As with any endeavor, some projects fell by the wayside, and others prospered. [4/15]

We brought in expert designers from the RPG field, hired Brian Moriarty, a legend of the interactive-fiction community, made connections with existing roleplaying publishers, and published columns by masters in the field such as Richard Bartle and Jessica Mulligan. [5/15]

And, we continued to launch games. Many of our earliest were strategy games that were focused on building a gaming community, such as Galactic Emperor: Hegemony, Droidarena, Space Federation, and early Days of Wonder games. However, these games were just the appetizer. [6/15]

Roleplaying and storytelling games were always the main course. The Eternal City was our second roleplaying game, created by Worlds Apart. In the years that followed we launched Grendel's Revenge, Lovecraft Country, Ironclaw Online, and The Lazarus Project. [7/15]

Skotos never grew as big as our initial dreams. The communities never exceeded a few hundred people each. But those communities were vibrant and exciting, and they told the stories that we'd always dreamed of, even if we never learned to scale them massively. [8/15]

Today, they’ve been telling stories for twenty years since the release of our games, the creativity and continuity of these communities has mainly been thanks to the players. Witnessing hundreds of works of art & written stories has been inspiring: deviantart.com/skotos-art/gal… [9/15]

We've now reached the twentieth anniversary of Skotos, and it's a time of change — and just as we've long promised in Castle Marrach, we hope this marks a New Spring. [10/15]

We are closing the Skotos the company & website, but in doing so we are also releasing our games to the world. Four of Skotos' past games have been running independently for a few months now. We invite you to visit them, and become a part of their stories. [11/15]

Castle Marrach (marrach.com), The Eternal City (eternalcitygame.com), Allegory of Empires (allegoryofempires.com), and
Multiverse Revelations (multirev.net). Finally, we'll be maintaining an archives of our popular articles and history. [12/15]

We've also spent much of this year releasing our Chat Theatre technology as open source, so that you can create games or other experiments (a #jitsi mud chat?) of your own to add to the list above. Source at github.com/ChatTheatre & live demo at ChatTheatre.com. [13/15]

I’m proud of my stewardship of these communities & pleased that I can offer them them continuity. Though Skotos as company is closing, I plan to continue to be involved in the open source side, both in supporting the old SkotOS codebase, and investigating a next generation eOS.

Long live SkotOS games and communities! Long live new eOS experiments! And thank you for 20 years of support of my dream of collaborative interactive storytelling! [15/15]