Returning to your hometown can be an alienating experience, especially when all you find is a dead link to a long-abandoned website.
For nearly a decade, this has been the experience of the Cytonians—they were members of an early virtual world called Cybertown, which operated from 1995 to 2012. But since 2019, a group of ex-citizens have worked to revive their old home. The Cybertown Revival (CTR) successfully launched a pre-beta version of the new Cybertown earlier this year. It’s the result of hundreds of former residents banding together to rebuild the digital city, leveraging everything from former users’ blog posts to hard drive content.
The original Cybertown was launched in the early days of massively multiplayer online games, a few years ago Ultimate Online and endless mission Become the second home of millions of players. It follows the formula pioneered by multi-user dungeons, or MUDs: text-based worlds consisting primarily of rooms, objects, and avatars, designed as much as structured games for social interaction. But the city echoed real life in a way that many digital spaces of the time did not.
Cyber is a digital metropolis that players can experience through text-based descriptions or by typing a 3D world into a web browser. Once they “immigrate” to the city, Cytonians can choose the location of their virtual home, which they can fill with virtual property. They can then spend their time in cafes, shops, town squares, earning a digital currency called CityCash by selling self-encoded digital objects or by working as “neighborhood agents” community moderators. Higher-level mods are assigned duties such as house cleanup, abandoned houses by residents before decommissioning, etc. There’s even a jail for breaking the rules.
“Internet City is personal.”
The world confuses some newcomers.one orlando sentry For example, the writer recounts the experience of being banned after a frustrating robbery spree triggered by falling into Cybertown’s virtual pool. But for many others, it was an incredible find. “Cyber is personal,” said CTR founder Lord Rayken. (Participants in the project are asked to be identified by their first name or pseudonym.) Among other things, the platform supports importing custom avatars that look like anything from regular people to animated Christmas trees. “You choose your avatar, you choose where you hang out, you choose your home, you choose the items to decorate it, you choose the club you join,” recalls Rayken. Signing up can feel like joining a community and a real space in a digital world that was a daily occurrence for years before that. Cytonians can even run for office within the city, though developer Blaxxun Interactive maintains the lion’s share of power through a semi-mythical figure known as the founder.
CyberBank in the pre-alpha of Cybertown Revival.Image: Cybertown Revival
And platforms like Active Worlds and Onlive! Traveler, Cybertown helps bridge the generation gap between text-based worlds and 3D virtual worlds. The city is pure 1990s cyberspace, filled with bright, angular rooms with minimal decor and low-poly graphics.Even people too young to remember Cybertown can find its influence in new projects like 2019’s games Hypnotic Space Outlawsaccording to designer Jay Tholen, partly inspired by Blaxxun’s computer gamer.
Cybertown continues into the next decade. In the early 2000s, Internet ethnologist Nadezhda Kaneva said Blaxxun touted more than 1 million inhabitants, even though only 350 to 500 were online at any given time.But it never stood out as prominently as later virtual worlds second Life. After being sold by Blaxxun in 2003 and implementing a monthly fee, the platform slowly declined in the second half of the 2000s and finally went dark in 2012.
Cybertown’s death, though, was inappropriate for some ex-citizens. “Cybertown is where so many people meet for the first time in a virtual world,” Rayken said. “Coming back after many years, I was surprised that no one had focused on restoring the site.”
Rayken said 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 team of five or six people, he created a Discord server dedicated to bringing it back. Slowly, the group grew to more than 300 people, including a handful of members with coding skills who could get them involved. Today, it operates with about five core developers and a slightly larger group that provides technical assistance on a regular basis. More users contributed assets such as avatars or digital objects, looking for them on the internet or in their old offline collections.
Virtual worlds can generate memories that are just as meaningful as the physical world: where people meet new friends, learn new skills, start businesses, and even find love and get married. However, they are much more fragile than real-world spaces. Many are controlled by the companies that create them or rely on fleeting hardware and software standards. As players churn and code becomes outdated, they can be lost forever.
Over the years, however, fans of these worlds have gone to great lengths to keep their communities alive. MMO players flock to servers hoping for official re-release of the original World of Warcraft and created a self-identified “diaspora” migration from the defunct game Ulu: Beyond the Age of MysteriesGroups such as art museums and digital entertainment (MADE) have been fighting for legal immunity to bypass the lock on old software in favor of unofficial attempts to maintain defunct games. In 2017, MADE helped reboot Habitatone of the earliest graphical virtual worlds, such as new habitat — A project that has a lot in common with CTR.
Cyber City Prison.
CTR isn’t working with larger programs like MADE, but it has two things in its favor. The first is a group of residents dedicated to revival, albeit a relatively small one. The second is Blaxxun’s choice to develop the world using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, or VRML, an early foray into a 3D graphics standard, just as ubiquitous, interoperable HTML browser code does for text. Although VRML is no longer used, objects made with it can be rendered in modern web browsers via JavaScript – so instead of manually rebuilding the space, CTR can drop the original file directly into the world. “We were able to do this entirely thanks to the beauty of open standards,” said Mike, the project’s lead coder.
However, these 3D spaces are only part of the experience. CTR does not have access to the source code that powers some of Cybertown’s most important features, such as its chat client and CityCash. While team members had sporadic contact with Blaxxun staff, they had to rebuild back-end systems from scratch, many of which had not yet been added to pre-alpha — including things like personal homes and a well-functioning economy that enabled Cyber town feels like some key elements of a small town.
“We were able to do this because of the beauty of open standards.”
The online footprint of CTR pre-alpha is still small. There are about 200 members in the world, and if you visit today, you’ll find that most of the environment is empty, Rayken said. But through the portal on your browser, you can explore many of Cybertown’s original areas. Below the 3D renderings, you’ll find chat messages from residents who reminisce about the long-lost space and say hello to fellow citizens they haven’t seen in Cybertown in years.
CTR rebooted during a surge of interest in the metaverse, a term coined by author Neil Stephenson three years before Cybertown launched. (Developer Blaxxun formerly known as Black Sun, the name of a metaverse club in Stephenson’s novel avalanche.) Many modern platforms are using areas that Cybertown’s creators and users explored decades ago, such as digital real estate and the virtual economy. “This is truly an underrated ‘first’ in the virtual reality world,” Rayken said.
Today, the new iteration of Cybertown isn’t trying to compete with the newer virtual world. That said, it’s also ready to accept new residents — and the pre-beta is open to anyone who clicks the spinning blue “IMMIGRATE” link on the Cybertown Revival login page. “The whole goal of this project is to preserve the great part of the internet of the 90s [and] ’00s,” said David, CTR program lead. “Obviously it’s great to see the familiar old names again, but we’re very excited for newcomers to experience Cyber. “
