Originally posted by Hangtime
Yeah.. the good old days, when 150 guys regularly flew, and we knew each and every one of 'em.. what they drank, what they flew, and dammit, it was more fun than anything I care to remember now.
Message From Blue Baron, brought to you by AW Spam Hole:
Having seen the game develop over more than ten years I understand the temptation to anoint earlier eras as "the good old days" or "the golden age" of this or that. My view is not so sentimental, though.
In the early days online gaming was text based. Air Warrior was the first online game that was fully graphical. Yes, other games had graphical interfaces (usually developed by the players), but they simply overlaid the text based system. Sometimes we'd develop graphical interfaces for our text games (Stellar Emperor for example), but most veterans stuck with their terminal emulators. Air Warrior was different in this, and so many aspects, but it arrived in absolute obscurity. What gaming press there was had no clue about this esoteric pastime. Very few people were online. Thus part of what made Air Warrior seem so special back then is that we all knew that we were onto something, years before anyone else was.
But that was really a very small part. It wasn't just that we were discovering something before the masses did, it was that there were so few of us - no more than 10 or 20 souls each night - and thus we got to know one another very well indeed. You could tell, just from the behavior of a dot far away, who everyone was. New players were rare, and the development of relationships among players was a long, evolving process.
The fundamental change to the game took place in the winter of '92, with the release of SVGA AW. At the '92 Con that year in Los Angeles, veterans were already bemoaning the loss of their game. "We won't matter anymore," one of them said in an unguarded moment. "But we'll be like gods to them!" I said, kidding. All of us knew better.
For a box game market, completely unfamiliar with any concept of anything having come before the moment they ripped the shrink wrap off their shinny new game boxes, the very notion of a tradition in computer gaming, much less one that spanned years, was alien. One customer even accused me of making up the quotes from players that I put in the manual. Another asked me why the hell did I think he'd be interested in stuff said by guys he never saw up in the game. Although it hadn't happened overnight, the new guard displaced the old. Many of us thought it would be fun to kill the "ten THOUsand dweebs" but it lost its charm quickly, and the social dynamics of the arena had been forever altered.
SVGA AW was the first box sim to model departure from controlled flight, but we didn't offer this feature online. So called realism was not all the rage back then. Computer Gaming World, in their review said, "With its realistic flight model, Air Warrior is not an adventure, it's a job." Thus Kesmai was reluctant to enable it online. The vocal players - the ones posting on the GEnie BBS - started the chant, "Throw the switch!" Meanwhile Kelton created a separate development: the real time packet. Previously, Air Warrior had run at half speed, even though your gauges showed full speed. This was a concession to networks of the day. Real time added another "realism" factor, separating further the game play of earlier and later AW. When they finally added a full realism arena, they did something inexplicable - they ran it in half time, but added half time rolls. The reasoning was odd. One way Air Warrior disguised the fact that it was running in half time was by having aircraft roll in real time. In the realism arena, the thinking was that everything should be realistic. Thus the roll rate should match the overall time scale. This made the realism arena anything but realistic.
Finally all the screamers got what they asked for - real time, full realism. The majority stayed in half time. The community, already altered by the box release, was now split in two. Squads split up over this, and many old timers still hanging on left the game.
It's difficult to second guess all of this. Air Warrior had been a financial loser. Kesmai made its money from other games. The game had to reach out to a larger audience, or die. By reaching out, in a sense it died as well.
Yet, if you paid attention you saw that the game was anything but dead. New players made dumb mistakes, got better, made friends, developed rivalries, formed squadrons, and got to know people that they otherwise never would have. They found kindred spirits, people to "hate," people to respect, and people to miss when they were gone. These are constants to this game. When we moved it to AOL - again out of pure survival - the cycle repeated. Same for GS, same for AWII, AWIII.
None of us has any idea when we're fooling around in the simulated skies just how important the relationships we're developing are. The bonds we develop with one another happen insidiously and, despite all the explosions going on around us in the game, quietly. None of us has any idea just how much we'll miss those guys we flew with after they're gone. The human heart can't tell the difference between virtual and face to fact worlds. Shared emotion bonds people, no matter where or how that emotion takes place.
Thus, there is only one golden age - the time when YOU first learned the game, and played it for long hours every day or every week. Each of us has his own good old days. And for each, they were just as good.
And for the so-called veteran who complains to me how my latest release killed the game he loved, I can say, "Yes, and you killed the game I loved. You and your kind chased away all my buddies seven years ago." In both cases the accusation is unfair. That's another thing all players from all eras share: the good old days can never last forever. Enjoy yours while you have them. Remember them fondly when they're over. In either case you are experiencing or have experienced something evermore rare in this world.
BB
