Wyvern (video game)

Wyvern is a 2-dimensional Graphical MUD/MMORPG game ^[1] which was released for public play on February 4, 2001 by creator Steve Yegge through his company Cabochon Inc.^[2] The game was announced to be permanently down on November 24, 2013.^[3] Wyvern was a free game that was influenced by games such as Crossfire and NetHack.^[4] Wyvern was available on all platforms through a pure Java version.

Once users downloaded the stand-alone game client, they selected a character from a collection of fantasy races. Users navigated through the game through a mixture of mouse-clicking and text-based commands. Players moved throughout the lands of Wyvern, adventuring in areas that were created and modified by moderators known as Wizards.

In addition to allowing access to the game via a downloadable client for desktop users, Wyvern offered its users the ability to play the game with handheld devices.^[5][6] In 2002, the game won the grand prize of $10,000 in the JPDA 2002 application developers contest, for the Java application which allows PDA users access to the game. It was stated that it won for its "originality and extra innovation" in comparison to the other applications submitted to the contest.^[7]

Wyvern's server was shut down down, and the game therefore suspended, in April 2011^[8]; however, in March 2012, Steve Yegge stated that he was working on rebooting Wyvern, although there were legal issues in the process of doing so.^[9] In April 2013, Yegge, having received clearance from Google to use Wyvern as a side project^[10], announced his vision of a cloud-based Wyvern initially to be brought back on a mobile platform. In December 2016, Wyvern was re-released as an iOS game^[11], with Yegge as the sole owner of the game after two years of negotiation with Wyvern's original owners.

References

External links

• Official website at the Wayback Machine (archived March 3, 2011)
• Official forums