Ghosts of Games Past

A thread on DreamLyrics has got people waxing nostalgically about legendary online games of the past, both in Dreamlyrics itself, and in it's predecessor, the CompuServe RPGAMES Forum.

My most memorable game has to be the very first online game I ever played in, HVG: Maughn Matsuoka's Hawaiian Vacation.

The system was GURPS Cyberpunk, and Maughn put together a very detailed near-future dystopian setting, with pages and pages of background material. There was a plethora of megacorps, all detailed, and massive changes in geopolitics. The EU had fused into a single state while the US had fragmented into several smaller nations. Ebola rampaged unchecked across Africa turning the continent into Hell-on-Earth.

The pace was fast and furious, with a whole sequence of set-piece battles; the roadside rest stop attack and the ninja attack in the Frontier Hotel were particularly memorable. The latter was a real 'so this is it we're all going to die' moment, much scarier than many supposedly horror games.

Despite all the fights, my character, the techie Neil Jones, wasn't really a combat character; he spent one entire fight cowering in a ditch while bullets flew overhead. He considered mere survival to count as victory.

The climactic finale had us foiling a Russian plot to set of a load of nukes along the San Andreas fault, calculated to set off a massive tsunami which would have taken out the whole of the Pacific Rim. Nicki Jett's scary cybered-up amazon Kiko took out a whole squad of Israeli special forces who were supposed to have been our allies! Fortunately she took out most of the Russians as well.

It's notable as one of the few online games that actually ended, rather than suffer the usual online game fate of fizzling out.