Time travel adventure time! Back in 1991, King’s Quest creator Sierra Online launched The Sierra Network, one of the world’s first major gaming services. In the UK, nobody really noticed. We couldn’t connect to it, we couldn’t see it and we only knew about it because sometimes one of Sierra’s advertising magazines would slip across the ocean. Still, I remember being excited by the possibilities. This was a time before the web mattered, an era of Compuserve and Usenet and BBS systems. They didn’t come close to what I saw in The Sierra Network, with its stack of games and glorious VGA theme park design.
Almost two decades later, I finally got to try it for myself. The INN Revival Project offers a server to connect to and an application to download. No fees, no phone calls, no geographical restriction. Provided the server’s up when you want to play, just run the application and log in.
It’s a later version than I remember seeing, after the world was renamed ImagiNation as part of a deal with AT&T, but all the charm is there. It’s stunningly impressive stuff for the early 1990s, right from the title screen. As it asks for your password, you look out on a beautiful scenic vista. Hit the code (or not – at the moment the system doesn’t actually verify what you type) and that world comes alive, with stars falling from the heavens, monsters looming up behind the hills and a crowd of people racing to enjoy the fun. At one point, those people would have been there in the game too. These days, you can easily have the server to yourself unless you decide to bring in a friend.
Welcome to ImagiNation, circa 1995
ImagiNation harks back to a smaller era, where services such as CIX and Compuserve meant that you weren’t just signing up to an ISP but a family. It goes out of its way to offer club-houses and online chats, bulletin boards and personal ads for its users. After all this time, it’s easy to forget how amazing being able to play something as simple as backgammon or chess online really was back then, to say nothing of 3D games such as Red Baron and Golf, simple RPGs including The Shadow of Yserbius and its two identical sequels, or just sitting in a room of customised faces to have a chat. Playing ImagiNation, even casually for a couple of evenings, reminded me of the rush of that modem-connect sound like nothing else, not to mention the horror of waiting for the bills to arrive in those early years of hourly costs and expensive phone calls.
(ImagiNation didn’t skimp on these in the day, incidentally. If you wanted unlimited playtime, it would set you back a whopping $129.99 a month, not including the cost of the phone calls…)
Of course, the actual games aren’t too exciting any more. You’re not going to play Red Baron 3D if you can fire up Team Fortress 2, and Shadow of Yserbius is nothing compared to World of Warcraft or watching paint dry – although people were hooked at the time.
The charm of the setting remains fun, though, from knowing that players originally had to send in a card to access the Casino area, to the fact that when you get there, you play with virtual money earned by selling virtual blood. There, your avatar gets decked out in stylish gambling clothes. Over in the Aerodrome, everyone becomes a smiling kid with impossible hair. Maybe you’d never have found true love hanging out in Lefty’s Bar, but it’s hard not to smile at your ability to buy people virtual gifts to try to win their virtual hearts – and there were plenty of hookups that started in The Sierra Network/ImagiNation’s cartoon halls.
Are you mature enough to win virtual money from real people?
Of course, online gaming ended up taking a different direction. Where ImagiNation had its theme park map (changing to take in the seasons), the rest of the world moved to simple menus. Instead of closed-off services, the web made it possible for everyone to play. ImagiNation did pretty well for the time, with over 30,000 users (including a few celebrities, such as Bill Gates), but even so, it struggled to stay afloat and closed its doors for good in 1996.
As for modern offerings, ImagiNation’s closest successor is probably Facebook, with its social games like Farmville and Bejewelled Twist sitting alongside the more traditional fare, but it’s just not the same. Better, probably. Sleeker, more efficient and more popular, no question. Lacking the same spark? Definitely. ImagiNation may be a broken branch on internet gaming’s evolutionary tree, but it’s still an interesting one, and well worth taking the time to go back and visit, even now.
