
The Game Archaeologist Discovers the Island of Kesmai (2012) - benbreen
https://www.engadget.com/2012-03-06-the-game-archaeologist-discovers-the-island-of-kesmai.html
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freetime2
My first MMO experience was Legends of Kesmai, which was a successor to Island
of Kesmai. In fact, I think it basically was the same back end that Island of
Kesmai used, but with a crude GUI instead of being text based. But I think
most of the maps were identical, and I remember all of the text commands still
worked.

I remember logging into the game for the first time, creating a character, and
getting dumped at the "dock" (the starting point for new characters) with
absolutely no idea how to play. It was really a very terrible GUI and I didn't
even really know what I was looking at, how to move around, etc. It was all
foreign to me.

Fortunately two other players saw me struggling and were kind enough to spend
a couple hours with me showing me how to play. Where the dungeon was, how to
kill things, how to pick up and sell loot, and even walked me through the
"black broadsword" quest. And then a couple days later I ran into them again
and they helped me through the first Knight's quest. From that point on, I was
hooked.

Looking back on it now, it's really kind of amazing how generous that was of
them. I really can't think of any examples from my adult life where someone
has been so patient and generous with their time, with absolutely no
expectation of reward. Some of those early MMO communities were really
special. Do places like that still exist these days?

~~~
raywu
> The provider charged $6 an hour if you were accessing it from a 300-baud
> modem or $12 an hour for a 1200-baud modem.…What made it more expensive is
> that there was a significant time lag between the players and the game.
> Island of Kesmai processed a user command every 10 seconds, which meant that
> for every command given, you were paying $0.016 in game time.

Wow, did you recall paying to play?

~~~
freetime2
I played through a service called GameStorm that was founded by the Kesmai
corporation in their later years. They offered a very reasonable $10/mo
subscription for unlimited to access to their collection of games.

~~~
raywu
Thanks for this detail. We need a People's History to video games

------
aeontech
Second part of the article here:

[https://www.engadget.com/2012-03-13-the-game-
archaeologist-a...](https://www.engadget.com/2012-03-13-the-game-
archaeologist-and-the-kesmai-legacy.html)

