The History of ORKFiA… The Stories Behind The Game (Part I)
Hey there, we will here on the portal in a serie of articles try to describe the stories behind the game that became two, the first three articles is written by Jamzi and takes us up to around the part where Scarlo started looking for a way to launch a classic version of ORKFiA.
But lets start from the start and here is part one.
The History of ORKFiA… The Stories Behind The Game (Part I)
ORKFiA has been in the hands of many different people since it’s birth seven years ago and the behind the scenes history of the game is just as dramatic as the goings-on in the game itself.
The idea for ORKFiA came from a successful Utopia player named Kadagar.
Achieving “celebrity” player status in Utopia left him with a thirst for a game faster, more bloodthirsty and more friend orientated than Utopia.
Although the idea was Kadagar’s, creating a game was not something he had all the necessary skills for and so he concluded he needed help in realising his dream.
Through the Utopia player community he met fellow Swede C4lV1N who offered to design the graphical interface and Canadian MoDo who came forward to help with the programming.
With the new partnership formed the three set to work, with Kadagar coming up with the ideas and his two helpers putting them into practice.
MoDo later said their ambition for ORKFiA was “to start a small, personal, community type game. Just a game for serious players to have fun playing without worrying about mass inactives, multis and commercialisation.”
Unfortunately not long after the initial burst of ideas, Kadagar decided to lay down his ORKFiAn dreams and in an unexpected twist he left the game completely to pursue his career as a Ski Instructor.
Meanwhile C4lV1N and MoDo continued to build up ORKFiA. MoDo took on the public-facing role and hosted the server and C4lV1N was in the background learning his coding skills as he went along.
Both men had busy careers in the military and found they spent most of their free time working on bringing ORKFiA to life.
The game started to attract players – not only people who were close friends of the creators but also outside people who had heard rumours of a game faster than Utopia where you had real things to do every four hours instead of every sixteen. In a time when Utopia had tried to put a stop to people choosing which Kingdom they played in, invitations to regroup in ORKFiA, where you could play with your friends again spread like wildfire.
ORKFiA became a victim of it’s own reputation and the game which was intended to only be tested by a small number of close friends and Utopian Kingdom Mates of the three creators suddenly had people flocking (in their fives!) who wanted to try it for themselves.
With an overload of people putting pressure on the server it was becoming instable and slow. Bugs were being found and reported in such numbers that the pair of coders were finding it hard to keep on top of things and the reputation of the game began to drift from “whats hot” to “whats not”.
The duo realised they could not keep up with the demands of ORKFiA and came to the decision to quit.
They didn’t want all their work to be for nothing though and a strong community had already built up around the infant ORKFiA. They decided the right thing to do would be to leave the game to the community by leaving it open source. This meant the code was there, free for the taking, by anyone who cared.
They hoped this would protect their work but still make it possible for someone to help ORKFiA survive. They then left ORKFiA for good.
To be continued..
~ By Jamzi ~
Next part will be posted in a day or two.
Editorial note: This article was first posted Aug 11 2007.
