99% Invisible - 153- Game Over (R)

Episode Date: February 18, 2015

A few months before the end of the world, everyone was saying their goodbyes. The world that was ending was The Sims Online, an online version of The Sims. Even though The Sims was one of the most popular computer … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. A few months before the end of the world, Paul Monaco posted this message on YouTube. Hello, everyone. Paul Monaco here. Buddha Paul is most of you. Know me as...um...you probably all heard the news, Yeiland. The Sims Online, closing down. The world that was ending was called The Sims Online. It was an online version of one of the most popular computer games ever made. You've all been wonderful. You've helped me through a hard time in my life when I first got online.

But ironically, the online version of The Sims was not very popular. They ended up losing tons of subscribers and changing the name to EA Land, and then they finally pulled the plug. As you can probably hear, EA Land is not a normal video game. There are no monsters, no killing, and although it had some competitive elements, for many players competition wasn't the point at all. Unlike a lot of other games where you might be shooting people or slaying dragons or something, this is a game about socializing.

That's Robert Ashley. And Robert Ashley? He produces a very popular and fantastic internet radio show that's been on a very long hiatus. And the creator of a life well wasted. A life well wasted. It's about video games and the people who love them. And EA Land was a video game that had dedicated few absolutely loved.

The crowd that had attracted, I think, were people who just wanted to get together and sort of chat, meet strangers. It was a nice place. Over time it became a kind of intimate, almost bar, like the cheers of video games. Where everyone knows your name and at the moment that Paul Monaco aka Buddha Paul found EA Land, it was exactly what he needed most. land, it was exactly what he needed most. My wife had a long-term illness. She from a blood transfusion she had hepatitis C. And the last three years or so of her life were pretty, you know, pretty much a challenge for both of us.

And after she passed away, I had absolutely no function of then the wake up go to work and go to sleep again. With with her illness, I didn't get out of socialized much. We were able to go out to the bars and meet up with friends and have dinner. I totally be socialized myself. And this game was kind of a way for me to just kind of get back into into living again. It was it was pretty amazing.

In Paul began to live for E.A.L.A.L.D. He would play it for hours and hours. It was the first thing he did when he got home from work. You treated to a big warm greeting everyone would say hi and you know your I.M.S. would be beeping along and you'd be in and taking it with that. It made you feel really good. your IMS would be beeping along and you'd be hitting it with that. It made you feel really good. It wasn't the real world, but his friends were real friends. In virtual worlds, do have an upside. You're a race, you're a college religion,

all that can be totally masked and you're truly judged on who you really are and how you present yourself. There's no prejudice, there's no preconceived anything. You're really taking a face value. People could really like break loose and and be themselves and have some fun. It just feels really good. But Paul's utopia didn't last because E.A.L.A. and started hemorrhaging money. The writing was on the wall, the surbra was about to go dark, and this event, this virtual apocalypse, might only exist in the memory of the players if it weren't for Dr. Henry Lowwood.

I had just stumbled across this project by Henry Lowwood. My name is Henry Lowwood, who is this archival researcher at Stanford. And I had a project called How They Got Game, which is on the history of digital games and simulations, saving video games for future generation. You know, 50, 100, 200 years from now, how are we gonna save that history? You know, like we've gotta save the video games.

So Dr. Lowood and his colleagues preserve what happens inside video games. Now for a single player game like Pac-Man, for example, this is easy. You effectively take out the Atari cartridge and put it on the shelf. But saving multiplayer on-line games is not so simple. Saving the software alone is kind of a barren exercise. If you save the code for Eiland and turn it on 100 years from now, you'd enter a world and nothing

would be there. All the things that Paul Monaco and his friends love would be impossible to find. You need to document what people are doing in these spaces. That situation is much more like what a historian or an archivist would do when faced with the problem of documenting the real world. So when Dr. Lowood caught wind of E A-Land shutting down, he had the opportunity to record something a historian or archaeologist would die to witness firsthand in the real world. To see what it would be like when an online world came to an end.

What happens when a virtual world closes? The end of a cunter. What is it like to be there in the last minute and when it shuts down? So the tape is rolling in the last few hours via land or being recorded and the most dedicated diehard users are there exchanging virtual hugs and reminiscing. The players are typing messages that appear like comic book word bubbles. You hear all these avatars cry. And you also hear all the coos and moans in the gibberish language of the game known as Simlish. And you know, they sound like they're gonna be bombed and everything, but it's not like a big pity party.

But then toward the end of the night, there's this radio station that you can listen to in the game called Charmed Radio. And they had this DJ there named Spike. He is sort of the only voice that you end up hearing at the end of the world. In his soon as he starts talking, you understand what is being lost. Hey guys, the last time you're going to have me speak, well, the last time before TESL goes down. I just want to thank you all. It's been an amazing experience. It really has and I'd probably saw my myself cry but I can't. I can't stress enough how much you guys have been to me over the past however many years it's been. It really has

been awesome. Some people don't get attached to things, but when you make friends, I look people having this game. It's actually really hard. So, I'm going to play the last song. It's Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bichelli. Time to say goodbye. Hopefully you guys will like, it's been such my Yahoo ID is 1,2,3,4,5,

D- D- Are you why? 1,2,3,4,5. You're lucky in life, everybody. And the best wishes. I'll have you all and that's been great knowing you. Take care guys, and

let's just, I just want to, even if you haven't got a drink, propose a toast to Parasad who's been absolutely amazing. Parasad, we can have done this for that. Thank you. You get this feeling like being on the deck of the Titanic. Anyone who actually stayed to the end was very much invested in the game on an emotional level. When they pulled the plug on the server, bits and pieces of the world started to disappear.

The environment began to disintegrate. The texture on the trees flickered, and all the people froze in blanks out of existence. The actual ending was, you know, not with a bang with a whimper. And the last thing that they saw was basically just an error message, a server disconnect message. And then the world ended. 99% Invisible is Sam Greenspan, Katie Mingle, Avery Truffleman, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxine,

an architecture and interior's firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. I produced this story a long time ago for a radio show called Snap Judgment. Also from Oakland, California, I was their first senior producer many many years ago. In of all the people and places I worked for in radio, it is the credit for which end of the video. at 99pi.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX.