imonk: H3z's icon comes from a short movie directed by Chris Cunningham. It's the image of a man and woman embracing back-to-front with a beam of light striking them.
Andy: Extra points if you know the Beast connection there.
Wolf: We loved it! Wish there'd been more! As you know, we picked up some of your stuff and worked it in (ODES, Rev Lee's square dancing...) as we went, when it didn't radically alter the course of the story.
Krystyn: There's nothing like staying up the whole night banging my head against a wall trying to re-work some HTML, and then heading over to a spoof male chauvinist fan site for the game, getting slightly annoyed at the letters section, and then realizing several things simultaneously: it's like, a fan site, I am way overtired, and I can't really e-mail or talk to any of you guys, and really, the letters are meant to be annoying and funny, and once I get all my contexts in order at 4 am or whatever, it gets awfully twisty.
Brooke: Yes and no. Once you all reacted to Barbie the way you did, she became more of a central figure and if she was going to put things together, she needed stuff outside of Moreland. So, once that all happened, we needed you to funnel info to her.
Krystyn: I'll concur with Brooke. Mostly we were just glad you didn't ask too many questions about D.C., and that when we didn't respond to D.C. queries, you didn't mind... much.
Wolf: No, nobody did. There was no way to contact him except via the message board.
Krystyn: Vern!
Andy: Hey, you guys brought it all on yourselves, always talking about how everything was much too simple for you! Did you check the horoscope for the week after you solved it? It said that if you complain about how easy things are, don't be surprised if the universe takes notice. Actually, there's a story about that puzzle, maybe I'll tell you it some day.
Krystyn: And of course this all happened during a very excruciating 4 days where I had no phone service at home (thus no dial-up, dude), so I came back to all this crazy stuff happening at TS, and it was just very surreal. I felt like a player for a day, watching you all trying to solve this cipher.
Wolf: There was almost always at least one of us there. Sometimes we were 25% of the crowd. Fortunately we have a few insomniacs aboard, which came in handy the night the sites disappeared.
Clay: I actually never joined #jb...since some players couldn't access chat, I elected myself to the post of "hey, that wasn't on the yahoo group!" information management specialist. I'll admit to forcing other pm's to relay some of the #jb chatter though.
Wolf: The brute force hits. Definitely. Luckily there were three or four of us in our own channel when it happened so we were able to react immediately. We wept openly over where.gif right along with you. We all have flat foreheads now from banging them against walls for three weeks.
imonk: Finding Ganmed.com before any of the 3 sites you were meant to find first :)
Brooke: definitely agree with monk! the first night...we'd been struggling with how to get you all to find us. we were in our channel hashing out a math equation (that was posted and ignored someplace) and then out of nowhere was y2kbozo's post on GanMed.
Krystyn: Yeah, when y2kbozo posted, we all about nearly had a heart attack. Never mind the fact that we'd launched officially a few days earlier, so this was sort of a rude awakening. :) We thought at the time, "Oh man, this is all so *real time!* We're responding in *real time*! We better be careful not to do that too much for the rest of the game!" HA! Anyway, we mobilized, we used the adrenaline to good purpose, we learned in our first days to stay on the very tips of our toes.
Wolf: I loved all of mine. I had the most fun writing Doan, Serpent and Lee. Doan was my Myst opus, and Serpent was so sarcastic. Lee was just plain fun. He was also my toughest dev job; I wanted him to be fun and likable, flamboyant but not immediately clear who he was siding with.
Brooke: Eric. I love the little bugger. It was a blast having him go crazy on the email day. Then, however, you all hated him and I didn't know how to bring him back to reality. His paranoia was fun. Creeper was the most difficult for me which was surprising. I inherited the site and the characters, Maddie was the only one that I had created. She was to be far more utilized, but there were issues that kept that from happening (sorry Ozy).
Clay: I loved all my characters (with the single exception of Depro, who made my head ache and my eyes bleed l33t). Linda was a great character to work with after a frustrating day in the lab, and moot was wonderful to write for when I was running behind schedule. (!) Overall though, my favorite piece was the article about Trout for the April Fool's Zine.
Andy: Mephista was pretty satisfying, but very very complicated. She may make little sense, but she makes little sense in a very clever way. Unexpectedly, Jo was a lot of fun to write, once we started to hint that she had an unusual past. I often thought that after the game ended I might hold a competition to see who could write the most entertaining account of the Phoenix Incident, because I have really no idea what it was either. Except that it didn't involve Feng Shui.
Krystyn: Jo was cool, yeah. And since I liked writing her, it was hard not to be overly defensive of her as Vad discussed working for her, during euchre chats. I also liked writing Mayor Devenish's welcome, and helping to develop Nadine's throughline. I also especially liked collaborating with Andy on Robert Marshall-Hardcastle.
Wolf: Short answer: 7.
Long answer: We started with over 100 and culled the list in purges. The main design forum ended with 18 members, and of those 18 there were seven actively writing and designing. The others offered critiques but didn't write or develop sites or content.
As a side note, only two of us ever met face-to-face and discussed the game: Brooke and Bruce. Bruce was visiting Disney, and Brooke lives near there. The pic of Doan and Linda was from that meeting. The game was designed, built and PM'd entirely online other than that two-hour meeting and some phone calls.
Wolf: Yeppers. GanMed: Go re-check the numbers in Jarrett's pathology report (easter egg time). Wired Souls: Re-read Dan's "Home again, home again" post. Pay attention to the first letter of each sentence, and WM1's reply. A whole subplot flew under the radar.
imonk: Check the middle animating gif in the hack of Serpent's page.
Brooke: Yes, but unlike the others, I'm not going to tell you :) Nothing overly important, just character development and such.
Andy: Oh hell yeah. So many references to things, not necessarily plot-related; I rarely wrote a name which didn't have some wider significance. You probably need to read a lot of comics to get some of them.
Krystyn: Yeah, like Gina Genet? Totally not the pun you were thinking. Really. Also, the Swedish furniture thing was a nod to a very popular blue and yellow home furnishing megastore. I was very pleased with how the House of Leaves metaphor played out, you seemed to get the general gist of it. Most of the names at Moreland had to do with either youth or healing.
Wolf: The core seven had been working on it since last June. Time devoted by each PM varied due to work and school hours. Some of us did 80 hour weeks, and others did a few hours a week. Resources needed were the normal web publishing kind of stuff as well as our wide variety of backgrounds and areas of expertise, and if we wanted to do something but didn't know enough about it we became experts very quickly.
Andy: I'll give you a list of what I was using, just to give you an idea of the sort of setup you'd need. Hardware: A PC with a printer and a scanner. Software: Word, FrontPage, DevStudio, Delphi, mIRC. Books: New Oxford Dictionary, Bloomsbury Thesaurus, Macmilllan Encyclopedia, Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable, Forgotten English, the complete works of Shakespeare, The Art of War, The Tao Of Pooh, The Book Of Five Rings, The Bible, a Kanji dictionary, assorted Elizabethan plays, the Times Atlas Of The World.
Krystyn: Materials used were PC, printer, scanner, Mavica digital camera with EditPad, MS Image Composer, Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady, mIRC, Snood (for sanity). Also used were many web resources (I heart Google), scissors, watercolors, my friend's architectural portfolio, reserves of patience, a sense of humor, various texts.
imonk: Heh. :D
Brooke: Mos. ;)
Brooke: ridiculously hilariously wrong? you guys? oh, never ;)
Clay: well, little things, like a character's gender (Those weeks when you thought Serpent was male, and I know some of you still think Jules is a guy)
Andy: Guys, they're JUST APPLES.
Krystyn: Mmmmm, pie.
Wolf: Vad was going to be a Laia-type character but that changed. Barbie became more of a player liaison.
Krystyn: I never intended Gina Genet to be anything other than the 1000th resident. Jo also seemed to be interesting, so we tweaked her level of involvement in the game a bit.
Brooke: We're nothing but cold hearted PMs, we don't know what laughter is.
Wolf: Y! JB posts 1116 and 2883 come to mind. And the fact that I gave out a puzzle hint via Serpent mail when you were hung up on something but nobody sent her mail during the time the puzzle was unsolved. As soon as it was solved I put the old autoresponder back on, so nobody ever saw the hint.
Krystyn: If I told you all the times I laughed during the production and execution of this game, you'd all be bibbling in channel.
Brooke: Because she was being cute and clever.
imonk: Hey, it made sense to *me* :) You just had to read it the right way, which you didn't, and stick with the material *right there in front of your face within the puzzle* which you didn't.
Krystyn: Mmmmm, pie.
Brooke: :(
Krystyn: Yeah, what the heck? Put yourself in his place! See if *you* like getting stalked like that! Having strange internet people impersonating your family members! Fer cry-eye!
Wolf: He had an experimental voice transplant when his own voice died. The donor was much younger than Arney.
Andy: Did we say it was Arney? Could just as easily have been one of his henchmen.
Brooke: Me. Oh, and btw, feel free to come and blast some Sex Pistols any day! I have a very eclectic taste in music.
Brooke: Would you really want us to spoil your fantasies?
Wolf: Abused maybe, certainly carrying some baggage into adulthood. One of the things that didn't make the final cut was a 7 sins message about Dan that just said "Daddy loves you. If you love daddy you'll keep this our little secret, OK, Danny?"
Andy: Feel a bit guilty about this one. I just wanted to see how much fevered spec you'd create about them. They were just a red herring. But not, as one person suggested, painstakingly created with an advanced PhotoShop filter; they were drawn by my own hand on actual paper with an actual pen.
Andy: Kind of. Another comic-book reference that you didn't get.
Wolf: i_monk, aka Derek. Solely his inspiration and work.
Wolf: Coincidence. We originally were split into teams and intentionally kept in the dark about other game sites and their plots, but it became clear very early that wouldn't work. When we merged all the teams we had a few duplicates, but most were eliminated.
Andy: Eric Wyngarde was originally going to be called Eric Neill, trivia fans.
Andy: Yes, that's him.
imonk: It was kind of fun watching Mos email h3z each time and react negatively to the autoresponder.
Brooke: The eric emails were a lot of fun. UZ's 'notadoll70b' survey was very creative and fun to write in.
Wolf: I don't remember who sent it, but Serpent got one that started out "O Circular One." That was funny. Oh, and S never *promised* more information via mail, she said "No promises, though."
Wolf: Yes. Without a doubt. (whispers) there are rumors...
Clay: In an instant.
Andy: If you guys would want us to. And pay us. It really isn't cheap.
Krystyn: Yesh. Money is good, but chocolate is also acceptable payment.
Clay: Deproductr. I loved moot and if my favorite URFer was going to die, I wanted to use my "get out of one l33t free" card and send Depro off to the great mainframe in the sky at the same time.
Wolf: I agree with Depro here. Makes sense since he was the one that
Moot was having the hardest time translating, so he'd be sent to try
and form a friendship with Moot.
Clay: Yes. Nadine's daughter is, as you might have noticed, something
of a ZPG activist and a "save the planet" type. Her parent's, as
Moreland residents, obviously don't share that viewpoint, so the family didn't really get along. Nadine missed her daughter and sent
her messages hidden in the flower meanings. Oh yeah, "Devi" is a
nickname, short for "Devenish", parents might not care, but I
wouldn't be able to sleep at night with a "Devi Devenish" on my
conscience!
Krystyn: Yeah, Devi's not her given name, of course! And I'd have to say that Vernon was a bit more displeased with the direction his daughter was taking with her life, thus the secret messages between mother and daughter.
Andy: We have no idea either.
imonk: Unfortunately no.
Clay: well, bribes work wonders, and it's possible that with the right financial backing I might be able to locate a legible copy of the Necronomicon. :) Seriously, I'm thrilled that he was so popular!
Wolf: Ross was one of the original moderators of the group but he had to bow out early. Unfortunately, the WIRED article mentioned him so his name was out there from day 1.
Andy: White as scrambler was just a convenience; a slap in the face from Banevsky to Jo.