It is only when looking back over 20 years that I realize how pivotal the internet was. At the time very few thought that the internet would be anything other than a fad. The internet was cumbersome and expensive, a technical headache that felt more like the domain of nerds and tech wizards then that of the average person. You would never have guessed the evolution of the website from the 90s to today's sleek professionalism by comparing them. Websites then were designed to be playfully silly, often whimsically ridiculous in styles and colors which defied expectations. There was a collective innocence that I have never experienced before or since.
Exploring the edges of possibly of the early internet was wonderous as child, and I felt like a young explorer discovering an entire world for myself. In those days using Altavisa, Yahoo, and Google to find websites felt like entering a doorway into the imaginative minds of fiction writers. For as wide as the web was championed, to us early adopters it felt like a very small community of close friends. The early demographic of adopters were mostly older young people who were tech savvy, mainly from college who were able to get access to the internet through their school's computers. The internet felt like a mature place without the nastiness that anonymity brings as few very young people had access, and most treated the space as an extension of the real world, with relationships that needed to be curated through name or reputation. I recall Tibia feeling much like the internet. You might have been killed by a PK, but the player who killed you was respectable, and often helped you recover your loss, hiding that it was him who had just killed you. Very few players where truly toxic and most interactions were civil. Many conflicts in these days could be solved peacefully and the community rallied in solidarity against any who were making the game a miserable place for others. It was very common to help other players who were complete strangers.
Much of the immaturity we experience today didn't exist, which allowed the Tibian community to become a strong and close group. Old players who look back at those moments fondly will say they cherished the newness of everything, pioneering every trick that is now commonplace, experiencing and exploring every nook without even a notion of what they might find; each hole was a mystery that many times had real and frightening surprises. All players back then were trailblazers, bound together by the external limits of the medium. Limits like slow and undependable internet connections, massive and seemingly random bugs that caused the client to crash and battling their own household for connectivity as dial up connections used the phoneline which meant playing Tibia prevented calls from coming through. We rode the wave of change and boy was it exciting!
To us, the internet felt enduring and we treated it like it would never change, believing that our messages would be saved forever on bulletin boards, chronicling an ever-growing narrative of our experiences, backed up by the growing plethora of new webpages. Our naivety prevented us from seeing that nothing is eternal, as what we thought was unending, was a finite moment suspended in time. We could not have known how fast so much of what we saw would fall into the oblivion of obsolesce; suddenly gone as if it never existed at all. It is only through services like the WayBack Machine that we can still glimpse into the past. This history project largely exists because of the WayBack's foresight and efforts. I will always be eternally grateful for their silent contribution to this project, and to the memories I can now recall because some small fragment still exists to prove their existence.
The shattering of innocence is one of a child's first real life changing lessons, and Tibia was slowly learning that it could no longer continue to be a game created by amateur university students; filled with funny jokes or silly content. Just as the internet's early days was the birth of something new, so too was Tibia.s Alpha stage. Infancy however, always progresses towards adulthood, and with Tibia seeming "to have grown up", it was also time for the game to move out it's Alpha stage, and into the real development towards a professional game.
