ZeniMax Online Studios Interview

Shacknews was able to corner ZeniMax Online Studios’ Matt Firor for a brief Q&A about the many online games he’s worked on over the years.

Q: Tell me about the MUD-style game Tempest/Darkness Falls. How expansive was the world? How many users did it support? Also, I read that it actually provided the code base for Dark Age of Camelot?

A: Tempest–renamed Darkness Falls in 1993–was Interesting Systems’ first and only title. It was a text-based multi-user role-playing game based in an original fantasy world. It was a huge world that was developed over a couple of years–I think we were up to 10,000 unique “rooms,” as areas were described back in those days. After we merged with AUSI and became Mythic we resurrected Darkness Falls, made it a three-realm conflict game, and introduced many of the concepts that were later used in Dark Age of Camelot. And yes, Darkness Falls served as the server codebase for Camelot, just like [the first-person shooter] Spellbinder served as the client codebase.