At the time it was called Azaria.

It was 1997. There were three of us working at our downtown San Marcos, Texas offices looking out onto the town square that hadn’t really changed that much since the days of the old west. We were above a café that had great breakfast food, and where waitresses in aprons served coffee out of smudgy glass pots. The world was still four years away from 9/11, and the internet still felt like something new and non-threatening. Just a couple of years before, a company called ID had showed up and changed the gaming world with visceral experiences and network play.

We had high hopes and spiral notebooks full of ideas. Guy and I dreamed of building the ultimate connected gaming experience. I was influenced by the all-consuming puzzle games of Myst and Seventh Guest that brought high production values and polished experiences to computer monitors. Guy envisioned influencing the way communities evolved, and we had been captivated by the idea of making something both technically and aesthetically engaging. Keith joined us and rounded out our vision with top class artistic capabilities. Although there weren’t many examples, we were following in the footsteps of some big players.

Just a few years earlier, Guy and I were collogues working at the edge of innovation in Austin with an IBM business partner, adding images and sounds to computers for the likes of IBM, Dell, and Texas Instruments. We were pioneering personal multi-media at the dawn of the PC revolution, and we both had fresh ideas about what we could bring to the new platform.

At that moment we were mired down in the muck of building profitable business models…

Engineering beyond a game

I learned a career worth of technical skills from Guy during our first working experiences together. I can say it 30 years later, and with a lot more confidence – Guy is simply the smartest person I’ve ever met. As we have started digging into the remains of the original code, we’ve discovered that so many of his ideas, now common practice, were invented by him to make our game more fun and the experience more collaborative.

Although Guy added quite a bit of gameplay and Ideas to the content of Azaria, his love and focus was on the incredible game engine he envisioned. The Azaria game engine, I think, is an example of something I’ll call a malchronym. It’s like finding a battery in ancient Egypt, or some metal tool calcified in a million-year-old substrate.  In perspective, it’s just out of place and time.  As form follows function, the Azaria game evolved around peer-to-peer, spanning trees that shared access to a common set of self-resolving state machines. Years before peer-to-peer networking was even a thing, our game was using interesting algorithms to resolve game and puzzle state without the use of a server. Twenty-seven years later, this is what certain block-chain technologies do to create and manage cryptocurrencies.

As the producer, I pressed Azaria toward the uniqueness of the engine. I brought in the notion of collaborative play vs. competition in the major puzzles and used its state machines to create item factories and other inventive setups. We ended up with something that no one had ever seen before.  It was unique and entertaining – and it felt fresh and easy to play.  In 1996, we had over a thousand beta testers connecting and playing from all over the world, from 42 different countries.

I think it would be wrong to say that Azaria had a hard time finding a publisher.  Every new game development company goes through this difficulty, and that was certainly the case back then without the ability to publish via the internet. We did eventually sign with Malofilm Interactive (formerly Readysoft), and were slated for a press tour, when the rug was pulled out from under us.

I think part of the trouble we had was that, at the time, the industry was looking to capitalize on billing for play time.  There were a few services that were selling network time to play multi-player games, and the traditional publishers were wanting to understand how to cash in.  With Azaria’s massplay engine, we weren’t about charging for the network server time, because there just wasn’t any. That tripped us up, along with the fact of being a somewhat different kind of genre.

In 1997, two things happened in succession to kill Azaria, the second of them truly tragic. About a week after we signed a contract, Malofilm folded its interactive department into another company, invalidating the contract. A week after that, our chief investor passed away, leaving his company assets to his elderly mother. For us, this was essentially the end, because Guy and I couldn’t secure the rights to move forward at that point.

So why now? The simple answer is…because we can. Time and interests have passed away, and we’ve obtained the rights to our work. We’re not expecting for the game to compete with big modern games, but we feel it deserves a small moment in the sun, some time to be appreciated in a historical context. So we’ll keep our fortune and fame expectations low and release the service on top of more modern topology. Our thought is that maybe it took 27 years for the world to catch up to Azaria, and that it makes much more sense as an Ethereum client or as the genesis of web3.0 gaming. Time will tell!