I was in the middle of work yesterday when a friend of mine messaged me and asked if I wanted to log onto Skype and "explore one of the darkest corners of the internet". I told him I was busy, but that the idea did sound rather amusing. He sent me a video of an unspeakably ancient-looking MMO called WorldsPlayer--which, he explained, was created in the early 90s and yet somehow still had a sizable following. After viewing the game's horrendous footage, I was intrigued, and the two of us agreed to download and play it together after I finished working.
The main WorldsPlayer mirror is down for the time being, so we didn't have any proper way of getting it. I'm still not sure whether it's a temporary issue or if the download link is simply broken and no one cares enough to fix it. I like to think it's the latter, because then it feels like the game is this ancient piece of history--a living fossil only available to those who downloaded it before the mirror stopped working. But, all things considered, it'll probably be back up and running eventually. That's not the point. Either way, after a couple hours of searching, my friend managed to find a secondary download link on another website... for an outdated version.
Yep, you heard me right; we downloaded an outdated version of a game that has barely been updated since the 90s. The most recent update was released sometime this year, but from the looks of the game itself, the development team isn't really big on making any significant changes. I should note, though, that some of the problems we experienced during play might have been caused by the fact that we were using an older build.
Getting WorldsPlayer to run was a trial in itself, because the interface is just... so... old! It was especially tedious for me because I use avast! Antivirus, which forces suspicious programs to open in the sandbox by default. Every time I tried to run the installer, avast! basically said "LOLNOPE!" and terminated the process. It even tried to make me verify each individual update, which would have taken forever. I had to change the settings just to start the game, but that's more avast!'s fault than anything wrong with WorldsPlayer itself.
Once the game started, my desktop color scheme immediately changed from gray to light blue because the game is so old that it's incompatible with custom Windows 7 themes. My friend even said that when he ran it, he got an error message warning him that he didn't have the required 25 MB RAM needed to play.
I was greeted with this charming
My friend (who started the game before me) had already changed his avatar into this weird little blue bear that I decided to call Aoikuma. He showed me to the Avatar Gallery, where I tried on a few alternate skins; some of the available avatars were in fact 3D models, but they were so poorly made that I feel confident saying that Ocarina of Time's hideous, sharp-nosed NPCs would look better by comparison. I settled on this evil jester avatar that held its hands out at the sides and jerked like a marionette as it walked, because my friend pointed out my love for gay clowns and I figured it was pretty much the only appropriate option I had.
Then we tested some of the action animations. There was one called "gymnastics" that made our avatars sort of levitate and do slow-motion spins in midair. Loved it. There was also an action called "chairsit", which made them sit down--again, in midair, and it also allowed us to move freely as if we were still standing. Pressing CTRL+W made our avatars wave, which yielded some hilarious results depending on which model we used; for example, bipedal animal avatars would stand on their tails and kick their legs.
In the WorldsPlayer lobby, a bunch of other players were gathered around doing God-knows-what. A hilly expanse could be seen through the windows, but we couldn't exit the building no matter how hard we tried. I mean, there was a door leading outside, but opening it just caused lots of clipping and forced us back in the direction we came. Which was weird because my friend saw a bunch of other players moving around outside.
The game's universe is comprised of a number of different worlds, which had to be installed as we went along. The funny thing is that many locations couldn't be entered even after we downloaded the correct upgrade. Clicking on them just... didn't do anything at all. The ones we did visit were truly bizarre, to say the least. First, we went to "The Blair Witch World", which turned out to be some kind of greasy spoon restaurant with a single NPC and not the spooky forest I was imagining based on the name. Then we went to the Animal House Club, which was a giant empty house with a bunch of locked doors, graffiti all over the walls and an attic housing what I can only describe as the tackiest 90s sofa I've ever seen. The thing was made of multicolored bricks. Another world had a Stargate that led to outer space, where we just sort... aimlessly drifted around.
Beneath the lobby, there was some kind of magic mirror that took us to a big, cubical room. It was mostly empty, but there was a winding, invisible path leading up toward the ceiling. We spent around 20 minutes or so trying to reach the top without falling, only to have another player inform us that there was nothing up there. We couldn't tell, because there was no way to pan the camera up.
I should also mention that in this room, we encountered a user whose avatar was a multicolored Spinosaurus with the tiny head of a frog. I initially thought the thing was headless.
The weirdest part was when we visited Hanson World II--this really strange place themed after the band Hanson which I don't think I'd ever heard of prior to last night. Hanson World II was by far the largest world we encountered, as not only was it huge, but it also contained a bunch of weird sub-worlds. For example, walking through one of the doors took us to a school with red lockers and a classroom filled to the brim with beakers and test tubes; the students were conspicuously absent. Another door led to an empty desert with a single road. Just surreal as hell all around.
Deep within Hanson World II, there was this weird disco that was connected to some kind of underground maze, which ended in this big, cavernous room that I figured was supposed to represent some kind of hell. As if to confirm that line of thought, the game pretty much trapped us there until we warped to another world. No matter which way we went, we just kind of looped back around to toward the dead end.
We ended our journey in this garden-like area, accessed via some kind of elevator in Hanson World II. I should mention that soon after I booted the game up, the BGM stopped playing for me and there were barely any sound effects at all. So I was taken aback when this depressing little melody started playing once we entered what was ostensibly the least unsettling location in the entire game. There were a ton of clipping errors that prevented us from exploring anything beyond the central portion of the garden, so after dicking around for a little while, we decided to call it a night.
When we finished playing the game, I was left feeling as though I'd taken some of the most amazing drugs. I'm probably gonna play a little more at some point, because there were a few things I didn't get to see. For example, I'm told that there's a certain group of players who make up this strange little cult, and that they all apparently have adorable doggy avatars and possess hAxx0r 5k!115 that can force other players' avatars to behave in unusual ways.
All in all, it was a very... eventful night. I likened it to an archeological experiment because hot damn if I didn't feel like we were examining some kind of long-lost civilization.
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