Feature: 'Book Extract: Legend Of The Syndicate'

The Syndicate is one of the longest-running MMO guilds of all time, and it's just about to publish a book discussing its 11-year social history, from Ultima Online to Everquest and beyond - Gamasutra has an exclusive excerpt from 'The Legend Of The Syndicate'. To be published by Avari Press and released on August 6, 2007, the book will detail the guild's efforts within numerous popular online worlds. Author Sean Stalzer retraces The Syndicate's roots, as well as that of its originator, guildmaster Dragons, in the following extract: ”Dragons, the guildmaster and founder of The Syndicate first became involved in online gaming back in the days of the Commodore 64 with a 300-baud modem. In those days, gaming was limited to playing your daily allocated series of turns in text based games and then logging off of the BBS (Bulletin Board System) so someone else could dial in and play their turns. Most of the gaming ‘worlds’ had some level of persistence in that your character may be there so that others could see it and sometimes kill it. It was from those early Commodore 64 days, playing games like Questor and Ultima 1 that Dragons became hooked on fantasy gaming and on the idea of online gaming with friends. Years passed and the technology advanced to the dawn of the PC era. Modems slowly became faster and soon they were up to a blazing fast 14.4kbps speed followed not too much longer by the previously unimaginable 28.8kbps. America Online and a few other Internet Service Providers sprung up and this thing known as ‘The Internet’ began to grow in popularity. The internet brought a whole new revolution to online gaming with MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) and MOOs (MUD Object Oriented) and even some basic graphical games like the early AOL hosted version of Neverwinter Nights. Dragons played many of those and in doing so began to get involved with different guilds.” You can now read the entire extract from 'The Legend Of The Syndicate,' which includes more select passages from this upcoming book, covering the dawn of the MMO game space, to a reflection on the emergence of the titan that is Blizzard's World of Warcraft (no registration required, please feel free to link to this column from external websites).