Over the many years, the contributors to this history page have been
Martin Drury (Chiapet) for 1995-1997, then later Cory Helson (Casian) covering
1997-1998, and most recently by Tim Johnson (Tim).
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What was then known as Esperville began life on March 7th, 1995 when
Chris Pomeroy (Acid@Esperville) expressed the desire to create a MUD based on
Final Fantasy, on the Final Fantasy: RPG mailing list.
For the next 9 months, things proceeded at a snail's pace. A friend of Chris
had a site, but decided to do RubbeRoom (created by Looney MUD exiles), instead
of a Final Fantasy based MUD. After that, another associate of Chris, Sam,
offered to help us, but after a few months of site troubles, we were forced to
give up on that location as well.
In late Summer 1995, we (Chris, Sam, and myself, Chiapet), got in touch with
Scott Schimmel (Alaric@Esperville), who had a site available, and wanted to
create a Final Fantasy MUD. For three months, Sam and Scott tried
unsuccessfully to compile MudOS on the site. Then, in November of 1995, Katrina
joined the team, and Esperville was born! (Of course, it was originally known as
Final Fantasy MUD)
However, there was one major draw back of the original Final Fantasy MUD. It
was a databased diku derivative, something Scott, Chris, Sam, and myself were
not too happy about. After struggling with that for nearly 3 months, In early
February 1996, I (Chiapet) got tired of it, and grabbed a copy of the MudOS
driver and TMI lib myself. Within 24 hours I had it compiled and running, and
the current incarnation of Esperville came into being (though it was still known
as Final Fantasy MUD).
Sometime in late April, we were approached by a representative of SquareSoft
who informed us we should change the name of our MUD, or face possible legal
charges. While we felt that this was probably just a bluff, we complied, and
after a few weeks discussion, and voting, the name Esperville was chosen as the
new name for the MUD.
In early May, Esperville moved to esperville.dragonfire.net 7777. Our problems
didn't end there. When Dragonfire moved, we were down for over a month, waiting
for Bell Atlantic to upgrade switches and everything else.
By the time Dragonfire was back online, 2 of the original Administrators had
left (Katrina and Sam). Shortly after this, Chris left to rejoin RubbeRoom.
And finally, no-one had seen Scott for nearly 6 months. Faced with a sudden
vacuum in the Administration, I (Chiapet) was forced to become the Head
Administrator, and to promote the few Wizards I trusted to Admin status.
The first of these were Casian and Mynock.
Finally, we began to work on bringing Esperville up to speed. Of course, by
then it was fall, and we all went back to school, and things have slowed down
to a snail's pace. During this time, we've added Scanford and Kenh to the admin
crew, and finally, we have admin who are able to dedicate a good deal of time to
making Esperville Better.
In May of 1997, we moved to dragon.xmission.com 7777. Also, Kenh left the admin
crew rather unexpectedly, but we promoted our mudlib guru, Edbard, to an admin
position. We also promoted Hawkeye to admin to direct the FF3 domains.
Sometime in 1998, I (Casian) think we moved over to Dreamhaven.org. We now had
much less lag, and I got Edbard to institute my class system, before anyone
could say no ;-)
And finally, the original concept took form into a usable system.
Firemyst came onto the admin team, in name only, as he owned the site ;-)
Time went by, lots of it... and problems came up. Chiapet had decided to leave
Esperville and that left the position of Head Admin in the air. Chiapet decided
to leave it in the control of Scanford and Edbard (the 2 most knowledgeable
coders).
However, they had lost interest in Esperville, and created a new MUD called
"The Badlands", with a new theme not related to Final Fantasy.
Zephan, Luger, Casian, and Magius decided to continue Esperville, but with
a new name, "The Eternal Fantasy".
In December 1999, I (Tim) joined the admin team.
June-September 2001, Casian too lost interest in the MUD to work on another one.
January 2002, Magius got an account with BetterBox, and we moved to
bb14.betterbox.net 3333. I believe some of our awesome players helped with
paying for the setup.
January 2004, I (Tim) took over payment for the account. At some point I moved
it to TekTonic, and I think the domain name was around this time as well.
We're currently at eternalfantasy.org 3333.
I think that the current web site hosted through the game started around this
time. Prior to this, we had bits and pieces spread out between personal web
sites. It was hosted on port 3330 for a while, but now it is on
www.eternalfantasy.org.
November 2015, TekTonic deleted all our data without warning, including their
redundant copies. So, I moved to Google Cloud Platform. My last offline backup
was a few months old, so it took some time to recover from that and to redo some
of the progress that was lost. While I was doing that, I updated the MudOS
software to a more modern version, and we spent some time fixing compatibility
issues with that. We've had a lot of things that were buggy all along, so it
was a bit more than just compatibility issues that got addressed at this time.
As of 2021, our active team is Tim, Alex, Enker, and Lailoken.
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