From Monarchy to Canon
In June 2000, Audyssey Magazine, a gaming magazine for blind people, introduced Evernight Design Corporation in one of its issues. The article stated that, in 1998, the online game Monarchy had become part of the Shareplay Network of Games, and that the original creators—Dustin Collis, Daniel Crowe, and Brian Goff—were now working for Shareplay. [1] Monarchy was voted as Multiplayer Online Game Directory's January 2000 Game of the Month and ran at Shareplay until 2001. [2] On November 1, 2000, Evernight Games returned, having split from Shareplay, and Canon was born. [3] Like Monarchy, Canon proved to be successful. In August 2001, it was also given the MPoGD's Game of the Month Award. [2]
Less than six months after leaving Shareplay, Evernight had almost 7,500 registered members. [4] However, the bursting of the Dot-com bubble forced the site to become "pay to play", in order to keep its games running. To cater to their now paying userbase, Evernight released several new versions of the game—Last Guild Standing and Last Man Standing—and two additional theme-based message boards—Jersey Shore and Exodus 7. The early days under the pay-to-play era were troubled, with the site frequently shutting down for different reasons. [5]
In April 2002, Evernight announced they were opening a free version of Canon to the public. [6] The game became completely free in November. [7] In April 2003, OMGN broke news that Evernight's Canon had been removed from the internet over an apparent dispute with hosting providers and financial problems. Tempers Ball was reduced to running from a small server. [8] It was later announced that a move to the dedicated server was complete. [9]
During the recorded history of the Maxim game (from late 2002 to 2005), 39,000 roleplay posts were posted in almost 2,000 story threads, [10] Much of the creativity expressed by players of Maxim was lost, when the message boards were reset in late 2002. A June 2002 snapshot from the internet archive, Wayback Machine, shows another 23 pages of lost Maxim storyline threads. [11]
In December 2006, following the introduction of Oliver Piotrowski to the development team, a new version of the Canon game, called Canon: Massacre, was introduced. [12] July 2007 saw the next chapter in the reshaping of Canon. The three guilded environments—Guilds, Valid, and Covenant—were all discontinued. [13] In their place, another new game called Unity was introduced. Unity built on the changes Massacre had introduced into the code-base, and added another selection of new elements, which included a built-in scout's database, a guild-wide news store, and a second realm to play. Unity also took nine races, including the three that had been made available in Massacre, and introduced a random "guest" race to join the usual suspects within each age. [14]
The changes continued into the year 2008, with the introduction of the Chaos games and combining the Solo, Turmoil and Massacre forums into a single one in Tempers Ball. [15] At this point, Solo joined Massacre and Unity in the newer version of the Canon game code. While no major features were added for Solo, it inherited the random selection of playable races from Unity, as well as receiving a few tweaks to make the game a little more fair and challenging. [16]
The final development, in May 2008, saw the end to the Turmoil game. In its place, another new installment called Last Quad Standing was released. [17] LQS was seeing several combinations of options from Unity and Massacre. New-player protection was set for a week, and during that time, each realm received enough turns to build significantly strong realms. NPP was then removed and sign-ups closed.
