![]() Once they “immigrated” to the city, Cytonians could choose the location of a virtual house that they could fill with virtual goods. They could then spend their time browsing cafes, stores, a town square and earning digital money called Cit圜ash by selling self-coded digital items or taking jobs like a community moderator “Block Deputy “. Higher-level mods were given tasks such as cleaning housing, deactivating abandoned houses of former residents. There was even a prison for transgressors. A Orlando Sentinel The writer, for example, recounts being banned after going on a frustrated flying spree spurred by his fall into Cybertown’s virtual pool. But for many others, it was an incredible discovery. “Cybertown was personal,” says CTR founder Lord Rayken. (Project participants asked to be identified by their first names or aliases.) Among other things, the platform supported the import of custom avatars that looked like anything from ordinary humans to animated Christmas trees. “You chose your avatar, you chose where you hung out, you chose your house, you chose the items that decorated it, you chose the clubs you belonged to,” Rayken recalled. Signing up could feel like joining both a community and a real space in a digital world, years ago it was a daily occurrence. Cytonians could even run for office inside the city, though developer Blaxxun Interactive has retained the lion’s share of power thanks to a semi-mythical figure dubbed the Founder. The Cybertown bank in the Cybertown Revival pre-alpha. With platforms like Active Worlds and Onlive! A traveler, Cybertown helped bridge a generational gap between textual worlds and virtual 3D worlds. ![]() The city is pure 1990s cyberspace, full of bright, sharp-edged rooms with minimal decoration and low-poly graphics. Even people too young to remember Cybertown can find its influence in more recent projects like the 2019 game. Hypnospace Outlawwhich – according to designer Jay Tholen – was inspired in part by Blaxxun’s promotional spreads in Gamer on PC.Ĭybertown lasted until the next decade. In the early 2000s, cyber-ethnographer Nadezhda Kaneva said that Blaxxun boasted over a million inhabitants, although only 350-500 people were online at any given time. But it never reached the prominence of later virtual worlds like second life. After being sold by Blaxxun and implementing monthly fees in 2003, the platform slowly declined in the second half of the 2000s, eventually shutting down in 2012.Ĭybertown’s death never pleased some former citizens, however. “Returning several years later, I was surprised to find that no one had made a concentrated effort to revive the website.” “Cybertown was a place where so many people met in a virtual world for the first time,” says Rayken. Rayken says he started searching the web for anyone who remembered Blaxxun or Cybertown, from small Facebook enclaves to random commenters on Twitter and Reddit. And starting with a group of five or six people, he founded a Discord server dedicated to bringing him back. ![]() Slowly, the group grew to over 300 people, including a handful of members with coding skills that allowed them to participate. Today, it operates with around five core developers and a slightly larger group that regularly provides technical support.
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