Chapter 14. Anarchy Online Post-Mortem

by Gaute Godager , Game Director for Funcom's Anarchy Online

KEY TOPICS

The Foreplay
The First Trimester ”Development of the Bone Structure (The Technology)
The Second Trimester: The Heartbeat of the Auto Content Generator System
The Last Trimester ”Getting Ready to Be Born
The Birth: The Launch
Post-Launch: Infancy and Toddler Years

AUTHOR NOTE

The first time I met Funcom's co-founder and game director for Anarchy Online ( AO ) , Gaute Godager, it was across a conference room table in Oslo, Norway. He was holding a report about AO , which my company, The Themis Group, had written for Funcom's president. He was not very happy with us; he had no idea we were writing the report until he'd been handed a copy and was wondering why we hadn't consulted with him and his team. He felt ambushed, somewhat justifiably so.

From that rocky start, we grew to appreciate each others' talents and experience and dug in on the game. Using some of the recommendations Themis made and adding in their own talents, ideas, and agile minds, he and the rest of Funcom's team performed that rarest of feats: turning around a persistent world (PW) that had become synonymous with the phrases "bad launch" and "failure," making it a successful enterprise. These days, I proudly tell my friends in the industry that Funcom may have used us as advisors, but the work ”and the sweet smell of success ”is all theirs.

And because AO is one of the very few examples of a turnaround in our industry, I thought it important to have Gaute write a post-mortem on what he and the rest of the Funcom crew experienced and what lessons they learned. I think you'll find this article fascinating; I did.

"Every man should get a terminal disease, and, in fact, we all will. It makes us realize how much we take for granted ”sunshine ”the laughter of grandchildren."

^[1]

” Desmond Tutu , Archbishop and Nobel Prize winner, December 2000

^[1] Speaking about his cancer in an interview with BBC World Radio, December 2000.

I would like to start out saying this is not a regular post-mortem. It does not follow the normal "form" of such a document, and we have just begun! Anarchy Online ( AO ) should hopefully run for several years. This is a personal chronological tale of the events that shaped the game.

Looking back on the years of work on the game that came to be AO , it leaves me now with a feeling of melancholy. It would be a bold lie pretend AO so far has become the success we, Funcom, yearned for. Be that as it may, we shall nevertheless search history to find the battles won and also try, like any pirate on the Caribbean sand, to hunt the buried treasures. We will hopefully uncover some invaluable lessons learned. I put the quote from Archbishop Tutu at the top to try to remind me that some of the lessons we learned might have seemed like stuff we take for granted.

Also, I think it is a bit early to talk about the after-death of this game, as it has only just been born. But then again, birth and death are forever intertwined. Let us thus go back in time, to the very beginning