The Old Days of Eve
So back in 2002 I started playing this game called Eve Online. I don’t have time for deep MMO experiences any more, but it was amazing while it lasted. Together with Will and Craig, we ran an in-game corproration called Taggart Transdimensional and we had a great time. We were, by far, the richest corp in the galaxy, the first to build cruisers, the first to build battleships, etc. We ran the corp from a different point of view and our corp attracted some of the best and brightest in the gaming world. In fact, that’s how I met Gustaf. He used to give the philosophy tests to incoming recruits (yes, we had essay tests requirements).
I was being interviewed for a magazine recently (EON) about all of this, and I found a bunch of old Eve pictures I have uploaded to Flickr. I had forgotten about some of the great art we made for the corp and some of the great experiences we had. Here is a little sampling:
First, here are a few pictures of the still secretive Jovians. Our corporate space station was visited by five Jovians that arrived in their behemoth battleships and they were calling for Ragnar (me) to come out. I actually spent 95% of my Eve-time in space stations controlling our corporation, treaties, alliances, trade, wars, etc.
These Jovians were actually all the guys at CCP that run the game. They were demanding a special item that I had come in posession of, an elite Mining Laser that I was sold. Apparently, this item had slipped into the game via a reporter, who sold it to some random guy, and that random guy came and found me because he knew I was the richest in the game. I paid a crazy price for the mining laser (about a billion ISK, which was a lot for the time), and then I promptly outfitted one TTI Apocalypse battleship with this mining laser and took an absurd screenshot of the entire fleet out sucking an asteroid belt dry of the most valuable ore. The new mining laser was INFO highlighted so everyone could see what TTI was using as our standard mining package, even though everyone else was using regular mining lasers. This caused amazing controversy, since they were sure we cheated to get these lasers… but I had no idea the origins of this mining laser. So rather than being jerks and just snatching it back, the CCP guys created an RP event and five of them appeared as Jovians outside our space station, asking for their property back.
They whisked me away and teleported me and my Raven battleship deep into Jovian space and negotiated a trade with me. I still can’t talk about the trade, but they ended up with their Jovian mining laser back. Here are a few pics of their battleships and some of the Jovians themselves I grabbed during the surprise event.
We also had a load of fun with all the propaganda and the wars with other corporations. There was one philosophically opposite corporation called Endless Corp headed by this guy HellGremlin. We ended up doing all sorts of great capers together. Here are some of the pictures I still have left over from the proaganda… Some of these caused a lot of controversy because they were Nazi-related, but it was all in good fun, just like the real Nazis.
We also had a big load of advertisements and promotional pictures. There is some very creative stuff in here.
March 11th, 2006 02:29
Wow! Very interesting story and amazing screen shots. And I love your campaign adds.
Seems Jovians were a much more common thing way back then. Hopefully with war brewing up, they’ll come out of hidding.
Hope you don’t mind if I post some of your shots on my blog (with proper credit and all of course)?
March 11th, 2006 12:40
Trey is so freaking good at photoshop… you have no idea.
March 11th, 2006 14:19
I always thought he had a closet full of asian students doing it for him.
Now that I’ve joined the rest of the world in the 1990’s and have cable, I tried out EVE again. It just wasn’t any fun going it alone.
March 14th, 2006 10:33
You forgot to mention the awesomest person you’re friends with from Endless.
March 19th, 2006 21:06
Oh yes sorry about that Reina…
Also Crazy - feel free to use that stuff however you wish - no worries.
March 25th, 2006 09:31
[…] Its nice to see the old school pictures. You guys where the best. Hope everything is going well. We here in Eve are still going strong. On sunday high spots we are running at 25K online users. Most nights there are 20k online. They where really nice to see. […]
April 4th, 2006 06:30
[…] The book is basically about virtual worlds and how they have real economies and the willingness of people to put their real life on the back burner because they consider these virtual worlds to be a more fulfilling experience. I’ve seen all of this first-hand, of course, but it was interesting to read the professorial Castronova’s analysis. Among other observations, he first made notoriety in gaming circles for determining that Norrath (the virtual world inside Everquest) has a real world GDP slighty larger than Bulgaria. That is, the average worker in Bulgaria would be better served playing Everquest all day; they would make more money. Chapter 7, in particular, talks about the merging of real life corporations and in-game communities. The chapter begins by quoting from me, yes yours truly, albeit while in character as I wrote our in-game corporate website. Although I am not attributed at all (which is strange, but I am not mad), the entire chapter talks about “Taggart Transdimensional” and the corporation we built for the online space-based MMO called Eve Online. There is a previous post about this here. We created this virtual company for a virtual game that was based on a real corporation. We took this approach because of the sophisticated nature of the game itself, which demanded that an organization have various disciplines work in concert: mining, industry, defense, finance, trading, etc. We had to do everything a real corporation does from HR to accounting to recruitment; and the organization was constantly evolving (see high level org chart). […]
May 3rd, 2006 18:45
Yes this is the old EVE Online…
I fixed my blog soo my other reply can be deleted. I sense tho that EVE has grown. It is growing and changing.
There are changes coming I feel confindent that EVE is growning and changing. WE all can not exspect things to stay the same. But I loved the…
February 3rd, 2007 05:47
ambien…
news…