#Cybertown reddit full#
#Cybertown reddit mods#

#Cybertown reddit full#

The city is pure 1990s cyberspace, full of bright, sharp-edged rooms with minimal decoration and low-poly graphics. With platforms like Active Worlds and Onlive! A traveler, Cybertown helped bridge a generational gap between textual worlds and virtual 3D worlds. The Cybertown bank in the Cybertown Revival pre-alpha. 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.

Signing up could feel like joining both a community and a real space in a digital world, years ago it was a daily occurrence. “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. (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. “Cybertown was personal,” says CTR founder Lord Rayken. But for many others, it was an incredible discovery. 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.

There was even a prison for transgressors.

#Cybertown reddit mods#

Higher-level mods were given tasks such as cleaning housing, deactivating abandoned houses of former residents. 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 “. Once they “immigrated” to the city, Cytonians could choose the location of a virtual house that they could fill with virtual goods. But the city echoed real life in a way that many digital spaces of the time did not.Ĭybertown was a digital metropolis that players could experience through text descriptions but also by entering a 3D world inside their web browser. It followed a formula pioneered by Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs: primarily text-based worlds of rooms, items, and avatars, designed as much for social interaction as structured gameplay. The original Cybertown was launched at the very beginning of massively multiplayer online games, a few years before Ultimate online and EverQuest have become second homes for millions of gamers. It’s the result of hundreds of former residents stepping up to rebuild the digital city, building on everything from former users’ blog posts to content on their hard drives. Cybertown Revival, or CTR, successfully launched a pre-alpha version of a new Cybertown earlier this year. But since 2019, a group of former citizens have dedicated themselves to resurrecting their old house. Coming back to your hometown can be an alienating experience, especially when all you find is a dead link to a long-abandoned website.įor nearly a decade, that was the experience of Cytonians - members of an early virtual world called Cybertown, which operated between 19.