Zydeisland
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ZydeIsland.com was a large free multiplayer web-based RPG.
Famed for being completely free to play, it boasted over 16,000 unique users at its peak.
Started as a rebellion to The Alien Adoption Agency (as it became pay-to-play) it was worked on day and night endlessly for almost 2 years.
The three men behind the game (Chris Cameron, Darren Cassidy and Kevin Dougans) all played a major part in the success of the game and to this day remain close friends and are always exchanging ideas for other projects around although time isn't in their favour.
During the games three year presence the direction of the game, software of the game, design of the game and even the players of the game differed immensly.
The three 16-year-old Scottish men behind the game soon had different ideas and different schedules which lead ultimetly to Kevin Dougans taking charge of the game development and management.
Darren ("DonGio") and Chris ("DonRaa") kept their education and game time on a neutral balance (both at university in Scotland, now) where as Kevin ("DonGans") pretty much dropped out of school to work on the game full time after it had been around for around 1 year.
Towards the end of its life the game suffered a few server problems and a lot of data was lost and on one occasion (on New Years day) the whole game and data was lost with no backup.
IME UK Ltd & Kevin attempted to bring the game back to life from scratch, with a substantial financial backing but the project was doomed due to the amount of time it would have taken to redevelop the game.
The game won many awards and a quick google search of "ZydeIsland" will show you this and the amount of fans it did have.
Some reports say Zyde Island was the influence to other similar online text based games like CritticAge and Robowars.
There has always been rumur it may return some day...
[edit] External links
kevin dougans actually sucks penis in his spare time now.
