Passion is an interesting thing.
As some of you who have known me for a while know, about 10 years ago I worked on a game called Star Wars Galaxies. There were a few things interesting about this game; it was an MMO, which basically means that it had a huge player community that played it online. Nowadays that's pretty common, but back then it was a pretty big deal still, and kind of a niche world. It was also a Star Wars game, so that was cool. But what was really interesting to me was how passionate everybody was about it. I don't just mean the players either; they definitely were passionate, but so were the people that worked on it, including me.
Back when I worked in games, sometimes people would ask me what games I had worked on, and usually they would try to infer from that what I was into, either as a gamer or as a person. But life of course doesn't really work that way; we don't get to pick what we work on generally. If somebody works at Walmart that doesn't mean they are passionate about Walmart. Hell they might not even like it. So I always hesitated answering. But Star Wars Galaxies, or SWG, was one of the exceptions; I liked working there. Well, that's not entirely accurate - I had a love/hate relationship with working there. But it was always passionate.
About 5 years ago or so, the game was finally shut down by the owners, Lucasarts. Population had dwindled and there were newer, shinier games to play. But an interesting thing happened after that. Despite the herculean nature of the task, a group of people got together and singlehandedly pieced the game back together. You see, with some games, when you buy them, you own them, and you can play them forever even if the company goes out of business. But with a game like this one, the company owns the server and all the code up there, so when they say "no", that basically means no. The only way around that is to painstakingly rewrite the entire server - from scratch, and without the ability to modify the client. For those who don't know much about coding, suffice it to say that would be like trying to rebuild the World Trade Center to the exact specifications of the original, without owning any of the blueprints, just some photographs. Essentially impossible. And, yet, it happened. Today I had the (admittedly slightly creepy) experience of logging in to SWG and playing, courtesy of www.swgawakening.com (clever name). And, yes, it was cool, and weird.
But this is what I find interesting - I've worked on a lot of games, many of which did better than SWG. And there are a lot of MMOs that went under, some with far more of a user base than SWG. But none of them inspired the kind of passion in people that would cause them to go out and rewrite - for free, in their spare time - thousands of lines of code just so they could play again.
Passion is an interesting and fickle thing. And you never know when it will come, and you have to cherish it while it lasts. I consider my time spent on SWG the finest of my professional life because of the passion of my coworkers, the players, and my friends. And I am delighted to see it live again.
