I knew Kinux back in the day, albeit peripherally. My time in Guild of Thieves predates him by at least 2 Guildmasters as I was active in the era of Fademan and Dumaka as Thavius (clever huh?) which was slightly before Elisabet took over. Yet today I still think about his time as Guildmaster on a regular basis, normally when checking to see how Abelard is holding up. Good old Abe has passed through a few hands; I inherited him from Silet. Abe is not the oldest pfile on the game, obviously, but if he keeps going the way he is, he will be the first to find out if there is a bug with ages getting very high. At present he’s 63,079 years old … played 126,124 hours … that is almost 14.5 years continuously online!! I mention this because Kinux created Abelard before becoming an immortal on Realms of Despair so this gives you some feeling for just how long this particular “K” imm has been around.

Kinux was one of the first to reply to my request for stories and has been an avid supporter of this and other projects of mine and I want to take a moment to publicly thank him. So here’s what the geezer had to say!!! 🙂

I came upon Realms at university in 1994. I had been a co-sysop of a BBS (yes that is dating me) that ran a circle mud in the early 90’s and when it shut down I heard about RoD through word of mouth and tried it out. I lasted about 6 months then got busy with other things. I’d return from time to time but wasn’t very dedicated at that point.

In 1998 I decided to get back into things and started a new character named Kinu. Kinu had 9 strength. Kinu did not get very far in life. Some ask where the name ‘Kinux’ came from… was it version of ‘Canucks’, or possibly a deritive of ‘Linux’? The truth is that it is Kinu(x). As in the 10th variant of Kinu.

Kinux got involved with the Guild of Thieves at level 15, and quickly rose up the levels. I ended up joining GoC, GoM, GoW, GoD, and GoV, and liked the Guild system so I never felt the need to enter an Order. To this day, I’ve never had an ordered alt either. While I was a Deity of a clan, my mortal deadlies also never joined any clans either.

In 2000, Elisabet, the GoT Leader of the time, was Immortalized. I was nominated and ran in an election and became the GoT #2. Losing Elisabet wasn’t easy on the guild and within a couple months I was raised to Guild Leader after the other leaders stepped down. Kinux was GoT leader from early 2000 to the end of 2001. It was a great time for Guilds. I had weekly meetings where 20 members would show up and discuss various things, do a quest, run a mob, pkill each other in the arena. Many who knew me then knew I ran Abelard, the GoT Bot and current record holder for age online. It’s been great seeing him continue on even after the Guild has transitioned from GoT to GoO. In addition to my duties in GoT I was also co-leader of IGQC and was active with TS.

In mid-2001 I was sponsored to be an Immortal by Selina. I was turned down at that time. Later that year I made the trip to Ontario for the 7th annual RoD reunion. Still have the cup that says so. It was a great chance for me to meet a lot of players and Imms and was probably the thing that made it possible for Selina’s second nomination of me to be successful in November, 2001. When I was put into the position as an Immortal with TS, who were charged with recruiting new Immortals, it was nice to be able to tell them, honestly, that if at first you don’t succeed it can still happen.

I came into Immortality at a great time. While I had absolutely no building or coding experience to speak of, I was eager and jumped right in. For those that recall, the ‘big port’ was on its way and I was able to dive into it, providing a number of rebuilt and new areas. The village of Edo was actually my first full area, though it came in later with the big port. My first area to the game was the rewrite I did with Selina of Wyvern’s Tower. Knowing the port was a while off, Selina and I were keen to get one of our areas in, but because the code base between Smaug 1.8 and 2.0 was so different we had to copy every mob, obj and room manually into the game for it to be able to come over.

Selina and I were good friends in the game and made a great writing partnership. In addition to the many rewrites and original areas, there was also a number of areas we just jumped into at author request to help out. When she decided to leave the game, we lost a great Imm and area builder and I was never able to recreate the competitive push we had to finish new things and show them off to one another.

My favourite [quests to be involved with] were the Deity Death quests I did with Cersei to kill off all the old Deities before the Shattering. I’ve been asked what my favourite area (that I built) is and while I’ll always like them all, two stand out: Edo, as my first and The Mountain of Lost Souls as the one I enjoyed writing the most. Some ask are there still puzzles in my areas to be found and solved? Yep. Am I still adjusting current areas with new quests and equipment? Yep.

Inclusion within the ranks of the CoE was no less stunning than my original inclusion into the ranks of Immortality. We’ve done a number of things as a council to make the process of working with ideas work better, not least of which is having weekly meetings and including our higher level Immortals to help provide further thoughts on the direction of the game.

The game has developed and continues to develop thanks to the ideas of Imms and players alike. We have some exciting changes in the works and while change doesn’t come fast and furious, it comes. I think that’s the part of the game that keeps us going, 20 years later. We don’t allow any one person to direct the way the game will be played. It’s a team effort.

Many of us have given a good chunk of our life to this game. While I’m sadly not as prolific as I once was at building, I still log daily and each day I still learn something new. That I can say that 20 years later is a testament to not only the longevity, but to the many layers that this game has. At the end of the day, it’s the players who play, leave for a time, then come back that keeps this game going. We have a game that is built on the power of the mind’s eye. While text based games may be passe to some, I still find they are more satisfying given the level of creativity that they allow compared to any other graphic based world, past or present.

Ultimately, I believe I’ve gotten more out of this game than I’ve put in. I’ve met fantastic people, learned to build and code and been given an opportunity to help with the direction of the game itself. It’s for others to decide whether they’ve liked my areas and the choices that I’ve made along the way, but I hope they recognize that it was always done with the best interest of the game in mind.