However, the death of Cybertown never sat well with some former citizens. After being sold by Blaxxun and implementing a monthly fee in 2003, the platform slowly declined in the second half of the 2000s, finally going dark in 2012. But it never achieved the prominence of later virtual worlds like Second Life. In the early 2000s, cyber ethnographer Nadezhda Kaneva said that Blaxxun marketed to more than a million residents, though only 350 to 500 people were online at any given time. Hypnospace Outlawwhich, according to designer Jay Tholen, was inspired in part by Blaxxun’s glossy promotional spreads on pc gamer.Ĭybertown lasted well into the next decade. Even people who were too young to remember Cybertown can find its influence in newer projects like the 2019 game. The city is pure 1990s cyberspace, filled with bright, sharp-angled rooms with minimalist decor and low-poly graphics. Image: Cybertown RevivalĪlong with platforms like Active Worlds and Onlive! Traveler, Cybertown helped bridge the generation gap between text-based worlds and 3D virtual worlds. The Bank of Cybertown in the pre-alpha of Cybertown Revival. Cytonians could even run for elected office within the city, though developer Blaxxun Interactive held most of the power through a semi-mythical figure dubbed the Founder. ![]() Signing up could feel like joining both a community and a real space in a digital world, years before that was an everyday thing. “You chose your avatar, you chose where you hung out, you chose your house, you chose the elements that decorated it, you chose the clubs that you were a part of,” recalls Rayken. (Project participants asked to be identified by their names or pseudonyms.) Among other things, the platform supported the import of custom avatars that looked like anything from ordinary humans to animated Christmas trees. “Cybertown was personal,” says CTR founder Lord Rayken. But for many others, it was an incredible discovery. One orlando sentinel The writer, for example, tells that he was expelled after a series of frustrated robberies caused by falling into the virtual pool of Cybertown. Higher level mods were assigned tasks such as house cleaning, deactivation of abandoned houses of former residents. They could then spend their time roaming cafes, shops, a town square and earning digital money called Cit圜ash by selling self-encrypted digital objects or having jobs as a “Block Deputy” community moderator. Once they “migrated” to the city, Cytonians could select the location of a virtual house that they could fill with virtual possessions. But the city echoed real life in a way that many digital spaces of the time did not.Ĭybertown was a digital metropolis that players could experience through text-based descriptions, but also by entering a 3D world within their web browser. It followed a formula pioneered in multi-user dungeons, or MUDs: mostly text-based worlds made up of rooms, items, and avatars, designed for both social interaction and structured play. The original Cybertown was released during the early days of massively multiplayer online gaming, a few years before Last Online Y Ever Quest they became second homes for millions of gamers. It is the result of hundreds of former residents mobilizing to rebuild the digital city, based on everything from blog posts by former users to the contents of their hard drives. Cybertown Revival, or CTR, successfully launched a pre-alpha version of a new Cybertown earlier this year. But since 2019, a group of former citizens has been dedicated to resurrecting their old home. ![]() Returning to your hometown can be an alienating experience, especially when all you find is a dead link to a long-abandoned website.įor nearly a decade, that was the experience of the Cytonians, members of an early virtual world called Cybertown, which ran from 1995 to 2012.
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