Pith and Vinegar

10 years ago today, on December 12, 1999, the world saw the introduction of the greatest game ever released. Planescape: Torment (it’s also Wikipedia’s Featured Article for the day).

Okay, maybe not the greatest, but it’s certainly up there. It’s still getting attention 10 years later. I was a big fan of Planescape from the first time the box set was released in 1994. The game line had ended in 1998, but I still loved it, and Torment had been in production for a while, so I still had something to look forward to.

It used the Infinity Engine of Baldur’s Gate fame, but before Baldur’s Gate was released. It was a D&D game, but broke every convention they could get away with, as was appropriate to Planescape. No elves or goblins, no swords, one of the first games with moral choices that mattered (i.e. being a bastard wasn’t an objectively wrong choice, although it might have consequences in-game), sympathetic undead, travel to other planes… it was fantastic.

As we know, I liked the setting so much I got it as a tattoo in 2000. Nearly 10 years on and I don’t regret it.

Unfortunately, Torment never got a sequel, although fans have made several of their own unofficial sequels over the years.

Thanks to everyone connected to the game for making such an impact on me.

I realize I haven’t updated at all lately. Until I get together some actual content, I’m just going to reminisce.

Tomorrow, GeoCities closes forever.

I put my first website on GeoCities back in about 1996. It’s so old that even the Wayback Machine’s only records are those of the guy who snapped up the address behind me.

Those were back in the wild days without usernames, but instead “neighbourhoods” and “addresses.” I was in Area51/Vault/1863.

In fact, I just found a very old Guestbook entry I made at Mimir.net, which was originally hosted at Athens/7117, which references my old website.

I later made a World of Darkness fan page there, at TimesSquare/Fortress/6967, which the Wayback actually has, surprisingly enough.

I used GeoCities for maybe two years back, more than ten years ago. While some people are weeping for the loss of their Internet adolescence, I jumped ship as soon as something else became available. In my case, in 1999-ish while GeoCities was advertising 2MB of storage (wow, 2MB!), freeservers.com began advertising 11MB. While GeoCities actually altered the HTML files, such that if you re-downloaded them you’d need to remove the extra banner code, freeservers did it dynamically.

The index.html page is in the Wayback, but all it is is a definition of frames. And the frame contents are apparently blocked due to a robots.txt exclusion. So nothing viewable there, although I think I still have it backed up on my hard drive after all this time.

2000-ish I began administrating http://www.newbremen.net for White Wolf’s New Bremen chat. 2001 I first bought wolf-spoor.org.

So I’m not terribly sad to see GeoCities go. Like many people, I was sort of surprised to find out that it’s still around. Good times while they lasted, but I moved on a long time ago.