Long Island

Chapter 23: The Interview

Please Note: Statements between % something in italics % are game system messages. 

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"Hi and welcome to tonight's show. Tonight we feature Mr. Samuel Collins and Mr. Varun Mehta, cofounders of the company Archesoft and makers of the increasingly popular game Long Island. I am Noah Finney. First of all, welcome to our show."

*clapping sounds, the view expands and two middle aged men wearing suits appear next to the interviewer.

"Thank you." both of them replied.

"I am sure you and the audience must have seen this amazing Long Island game video, now making its rounds over the internet. It originated in the game forums and was uploaded by someone having the handle Raka. The video has quickly gone viral. Copies have been uploaded to youtube and other popular video hosting sites.

The main thing of the video, I would say, is this amazing naval battle between npcs but where players did not play a significant part. We have seen loads of player battles where npc soldiers are being used or where players are playing important parts as soldiers or generals. We have even seen large scale battles fought over the sea between players or between players fighting npcs. But this would be first time where strong npcs of three races fought a battle on their own displaying their own charm, strength and power. This video also shows for the first time, three races available in the game....humans, dwarves and beastmen."

"Alright so lets get started. First question what motivated you to start this company and make this awesome game Long Island?"

"Ah well I think the game came first and then the company," Mr. Collins said to which Mr. Mehta nodded.

"Could you elaborate on that?" asked Noah.

"Well we, that is me, Varun, Nancy and Jiang, were all students at the Stanford University. We started this game, in fact it was not a game then, just a virtual world. We started this virtual world as a project. At that time we had started it for fun, no idea how far we could go with this but then Varun and Jiang did some amazing things with it and somehow we decided to make it into a game."

"Oh so there were only four of you who worked to make this game then?"

"I wouldn't say only. We had more passionate people join after we started the company, without whom this game would not have become a reality. But yes, the four of us did come up with the main idea for this game. Like Varun came up with the idea of how it should look like and behave, Jiang programmed the basic AI, Nancy introduced the rules of magic." Mr. Collins said.

"And Samuel's contribution would be the concept of memories." Mr. Mehta added.

"Too many things I hear. Could you explain them for our interested viewers?"

"Hahaha" both of them chuckled.

"Long Island was started as a simple virtual world creation. You know an earth like environment which could be explored, studied, etc. We had this, then a crazy idea, that it is possible to create species and let them develop themselves. You know how earth developed over millions of years? So we were trying to simulate earth conditions and then looking at the origin of life itself as they say." Mr. Collins started.

"But then, after a night of drunken revelry (*more laughing) Varun here had this even crazier idea to develop an altogether new world and see what kind of species developed there. You know kinda like an alien planet but where the environment is similar to earth."

"Yeah....well the idea was to see if there could be alien planets out there and what would the aliens look like." Mr. Mehta said.

"This was how our project started. After we presented it in class, Jiang and Nancy approached us with some ideas of their own. Nancy was deeply interested in adding magic to this world. See what kind of evolution will happen if you introduced magic. She already had all the rules of magic in her head even then. And then Jiang wanted to make a game out of it. He also made a basic AI which included all of these rules and then we created a new virtual world based on the same concept."