Turbine Entertainment
Software is an Internet computer games company. Turbine's games,
called "massively multiplayer games", each involve a virtual world,
which thousands of players can visit simultaneously through the
Internet. The gameplay and artwork are extensive, and it's all based
on cutting-edge 3D graphics and server software. The first game,
Asheron's Call,
and its sequel, are published by Microsoft, and shipped in 1999 and 2001. This
is the story of how I founded and ran the company. — Jon Monsarrat,
jonmon@alum.mit.edu.
Copyright (c) 2002
Jon Monsarrat.
Duplication prohibited. All rights reserved.
I don't speak officially for Turbine.
Click to contact Turbine directly.
It Seemed Like a Good Idea
April 1994. I was a PhD student at Brown University, building mobile
A screenshot from Asheron
|
robots and programming them to roll around. It was great fun to stay
up all night hacking away at the code. Managing projects and going to
robot contests was to me more fun than the mathematically-oriented
artificial intelligence research I was supposed to be doing.
Eventually, I realized my heart was really not in academia.
Meanwhile, I was getting more and more excited about starting a company.
This idea really got me going. I've always been a "projects-based
personality". At MIT we'd call that the "work hard, play hard" attitude.
I get hooked on some undertaking, and just go go go with it.
Like most entrepreneurs, I was long on enthusiasm and short on experience.
The olthoi was the first monster
written for Asheron
|
For some reason, every programmer seems to want to write a computer
game. So a game seemed like a logical product to me. But it couldn't just be
any game. This had to use the most cutting edge technology. If it
wasn't a challenge, it wouldn't be fun. At MIT, I had done a lot of
live roleplaying with a strangely-named group called
The MIT Assassins' Guild. It
sounds scary, but it's basically improvisational theater: Dungeons &
Dragons, live and on stage. I was one of the actors and
playwrights. Click for
a description of live roleplaying.
So a company that put live roleplaying on the Internet would be very cool.
I'd almost started a company to do so back in 1991. Imagine thousands
of people in some kind of huge graphical chat, playing wizards and
fighters and magicians. They call this a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), but
it would be more than a MUD. It would be a huge party. It would be the
biggest, longest roleplaying game ever.
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