I was a developer on AW from 1994 to 2010. I know from the outside it felt like the company had no plan. Internally, it was because most of our income came from corporate clients. Those outrageously priced universe servers? Lots of companies would buy those, and then pay us to make content for them. They wanted a platform for training, remote meetings, distance learning, etc. Those corporate clients kept the lights on for years, but they also took a ton of our time. We had to take those jobs to pay the bills, but those jobs also greatly slowed down our progress on the software. Thanks for such an in-depth video. It was great to see those garish old polygons again.
Hey Shamus! I absolutely recognize the name, haha. It's both surprising (and not surprising) that companies were buying universe servers (and that you also struggled to bring in revenue via other methods). Back then, it seemed like there was counterintuitively both a big thirst for something like AW, and a lot of hesitancy, all at the same time. I wonder what the general attitude was when trying to court investors -- or if that was even a viable option at the time (vs. individual companies that wanted to appear ahead of the curve -- a pattern that continues to this day with the KFCverse, or w/e). "Ahead of its time," seems like such a cliche, cheap phrase, but I really don't have a better way to describe AW. You and your team clearly had a strong vision -- I just wish today's energy for virtual spaces existed back then.
Holy shit, i recognize your name!! I was nobody big on there (Disembodied/338371) but hot damn it's cool seeing people around in the Internet after all these years
@@Stonehawk Woah, I remember you! I distinctly remember that you made a house in Silver Valley, and I fondly remember a conversation we had literally two decades ago, haha. Crazy stuff!
@@Straszfilms what was your name back then...? Heh. The silver valley house was one of the few builds I actually ever "finished" in some sense; seems i never got over my problem with biting off way more than i could chew with ambitious projects that i'd never complete... Did you ever meet Ferruccio? I wish I had managed to stay in touch with him - now THAT MAN could *BUILD.* I believe I recognized a few of his structures in your video. I wonder where he is today... But yeah, definitely, birde life. I preferred the alien avatar myself but birde was excellent for building because of its compact size, like being an agile little camera zipping around. Feel like I remember someone who always wore birde but ... jeez it's been forever @_@
I think a good thing to remember is that when people treat stuff like this as "creepy" and "weird", it isn't really an indictment of the people who built it on either the program or user side. It's really that it's a liminal space - looking around an abandoned shopping mall is creepy because people used to be there, it's like it expects people to be there, but now it's empty. It doesn't matter how normal or mundane something used to be, the passage of time and absence of humanity can still make it feel creepy later.
@@qaudius741based on my in depth jungian analysis of liminal spaces, yes it is Jokes aside, what this person is referring to is the uncanny valley experience of observing a place outside of its usual context. A familiar place, yet is subtly different enough to deviate from expected reality. They are referring to the simpler and more commonly understood idea of liminal spaces; as mere places of abandonment that create a sense of eeriness due to the aforementioned reasons. An abandoned mall would fit perfecrly in this definition. You don't need to go "erm actually". If you actually know about liminal spaces then you should know what they meant. Besides, "erm youre wrong" doesn't exactly help or educate anyone. If you're so knowledgeable you should elaborate. Give us your deep, rich ocean of knowledge on the intricacies of liminal spaces within history, psychology, religion and folklore.
@@monmon0946 If you had done your long research, you would know that the literal meaning of "liminal space" is a place between point A and B, such as an elevator or hallway. The description of these emotions falls more under the "dreamcore" category. And yeah, I just did the "ehm, actually" thing - I'm on the internet, man, not taking it seriously.
@@qaudius741 My bad I didn't know you were using the google definition. Even with that simplistic definition, which isnt the one that was being referred to by anyone else here, a mall could still fit within it. The vast spaces between you and the places you want to enter could be included within the "literal" definition. But again, thats not what was being referred to. When talking about aesthetic movements, it isnt necessary for the liminal space to be one of transition, it just often is. Its much more about the imagery deviating from expectations to create those feelings. Dreamcore is a similar aesthetic movement but is totally separate. It can often use liminal spaces but does so specifically to create surrealist imagery, often to invoke nostalgia by using dream like visuals; hence "dreamcore". The purely liminal space aesthetic relies on grounded imagery that deviates slightly from what you would expect, such as an abandoned mall, to create the feelings I mentioned. Dreamcore will include additions and edits to the images whereas purely liminal spaces will not. And if they do, its nothing like dreamcore. I dont have an issue with "erm actually", but if youre gonna do it, at least dont confuse dreamcore with the general online aesthetic of liminal spaces and the different feelings both are supposed to invoke. They differ completely in terms of visuals too. Idk how you managed to confuse them, and idk why you referred to a google definition when you seem aware such a definition wouldnt fit when referring to aesthetic movements.
@@monmon0946 I guess you don't get it. The "ehm actually" was just me playing the role of a toxic smart ass for fun, and that's just your viewpoint that liminal space is aesthetic. If I were to talk about the literal meaning of it, you can't really say anything about that because it would be my opinion. Yours is that liminal space is aesthetic, and you define it more broadly, which is generally what people think of it. My mistake in comparing his comment to dreamcore; his comment was an aspect of liminal spaces.
I miss the golden age of ActiveWorlds, that prime period between 1997 and 2003-ish that was widely considered to be its heyday. 300 people in AWTeen at one time... you'll never hit numbers like that again. There are so many great memories.
active worlds was definitely before my time, so as a younger person who still spent a lot of time on the internet growing up, it's interesting to see how these sort of concepts reinvent themselves in different ways as the internet has evolved. a lot of what you said about the appeal of this game reminded me of spending time on minecraft servers, where you'd have these endless expanses of creative mode plots where people could build whatever, but at the same time a lot of people forming their own little communities or doing roleplays in the chat. so even if a lot has changed, a lot has also stayed the same at least from my point of view. still, there's a lot that's lost to time, which is a shame. it's weird to me to think that some people are growing up in an era where most online forums are either dead or on their last legs, there's a certain level of small self-contained community there that only somewhat exists in modern fandom spaces (in my experience anyway). weird to think about how much stuff I've missed, too. your content is really cool, and I've been looking forward to hearing you talk about this game for a while since you've featured it in some other videos. looking forward to what you'll talk about next! :)
minecraft totally hits the same flavors once you actually begin building away from others so you can build as much as you wanted on AW. minecraft servers was fun in the same ways. a different part was there were opportunities to go into static parts that were built by the designers and emote and text to a lot more people. One world had this night time futuristic look. for some reason there was always a party of avatars a hundred or something feet up in the air. When starting active worlds, you used to begin at a place called the gateway, that had portals to different worlds and played a midi file of AC/DC You Shook me All night long. The song would welcome us as we logged on as alien avatars. This changed once the corporate updates began to occur. All of a sudden intel bunny men from intel Pentium processor promotional ads was the default avatar. it got all weird after that. it was soooo weird, but so cool.
I was one of the early world builders, working with the Titans Guild on projects like Winter Wonderland (later called Winter) and Oct31, a world that was only available on Halloween (I built Hell, for anyone that remembers...) The Titans Guild was a contemporary and competitor to Circle of Fire, but we were all friends. I'm still very good friends with many people I knew and worked with in AW, it was definitely a cool time to script renderware (rwx) files and build experiences, even if it's all moot now... Oh yeah, OuterWorlds (OW) was one of those uniservers... It was a really cool place with some really cool people as well.
My dad has been building his world ? 24 plus years massive sculpture gardens and galleries…. With call to all artist ect .. try as he might , my father was never able to talk his offspring into joining.. presently.. active worlds is ? Working on them.. discarding old tools … sadly breaking functionality , too worlds that have been there since the start … Thousands of sculptures no longer have shadows or reflect light.. alas crushing the one person that keeped that world alive……. I wish there was a way to move his world .. 20 plus years of art .. to be lost….. .. lost like a phone.. with the weight of 25 years of a loved habit .. I am 53 .. my dad has been making sculpture in this world since 1996…. I loved this listen
The closing thoughts at the end really tied it together for me, even in the age of web 2.0 where 99% of most people's internet usage is on the same three sites, we *still* find virtual spaces like Active Worlds pop up. VRC being an obvious contemporary one. It must just be humanity's inexorable pull toward socialization being too strong even for great distances to stop.
The nostalgia is strong with this one. I remember at the age of 12-13 logging onto AOL & signing in & going to the desktop to click that AW icon to be teleported to another world everyday after school. On the weekends I would stay up til about 5-6am, forgetting about time. Crazy!
Back in 1997 I found out about AW from a tech show I was watching. Right away I took to it and made a bunch of virtual friends. Eventually I would build my own castle in Alpha that I've even added to up to a year ago. Over the years my visits declined and when the people I made friends with stopped visiting I did too.. at least for a little while. Now when I visit AW I have the feeling of nostalgia and sadness. It's like going to a childhood home where you had tons of great memories but the house is now in the middle of an abandoned mining town with no occupants; just a lonely place that you wish would come back to life! Still, I hope it never goes away.
Great video! I am Likeness. A group of us bought a universe from AW back in 1997 and called it Outerworlds. We had an amazing community of people that bought worlds in our universe. Several people met and married including myself and my husband, Guardian. We have been married since 1999. He was a modeler in OW. A lot of us met in real life on what we called Road Trips. People from all over the world would come to the states for these road trips. We were all sad when AW shut us down because we could not afford to pay for an upgrade. It was maddening that we paid so much for the universe and they would not let us host the one we bought, on our own. So we lost our great community of people. We now have a world in AW, Imagica. It was the world where it all started in AW back in 1997. For posterities sake, I keep it open year after year. I am still a citizen of 25 years. What glorious memories!!
I was a citizen of Active Worlds and spent most of my awkward teen years in AWTeen after I got out of school. I still keep in contact with friends I made thanks to AW 😊❤.
AWTeen was so cool. It's a shame the site and the world are basically unusable these days, at least around GZ. Granted I'm no longer a teen anymore, but back in those days it was like a little second home.
I used Active Worlds back in the late 90s. My friends all originally started building on mars. I vaguely remember that they were at something like 690N 690E, something symmetrical like that. But I lost the coords so long ago. Soon after Mars, though, the people who stuck around with the game migrated to AWTeen. It had more objects, and was less "red". My base is still within the first 100x100 square, within "view distance" of ground zero. But we also built it before a lot of the more advanced "moving" objects existed. If you go to my base, there's weird objects that don't actually exist but have been moved and animated to mess around with the ground and the buildings. But it's cool to see that all those original buildings are still there. We had a gallery set up that displayed old DBZ art because we were big DBZ nerds. My user name was SSJ4 Gohan, haha. All those links are long gone, most of them likely linking to angelfire or geocities. But it's neat to see that it's still there. My giant pool. My "recreation" of snake road. And then the buildings of friends long forgotten. I still have builds deep on the edges of AWTeen, but the coordinates have been lost to time. Large, sprawling builds that mimiced gundum wing bases, giant space ships and space stations, etc. Good times. I miss it.
@@noshoddy Right? It's a nice snapshot of my childhood right there, even if here 20+ years later I'm still obsessed with DBZ and to a lesser extent "building" games.
I'm so glad someone else has played it, I get blank looks and mentions of second Life whenever I try bring it up to people 😂! I'm 30, so must be caused by growing up internet-bound at roughly the same era. I thought it was a fever dream for ages because I forgot the name of it. Was so great to see some of what still exists, makes me want to pop in and look too. A great essay too, love your writing and editing!
This is such a great essay. One of my dreams to never be realized is to do nothing but build in SW City for the next decade or so. There really isn't anything quite as free-form and creative as Active Worlds that's available to end users, even with the tech limitations. Minecraft comes close but it doesn't surpass it. As an aside, I really believe you have something valuable to say about AW and our generation's experience of it, and TH-cam can surface this video to more of your target audience better (the people who want to watch this!) if you used the current parlance, i.e. "metaverse", in your title and thumbnail. I was sad to hear you didn't want to do that, because I think you have something valuable to say here and it deserves to be seen.
It's both so nice and also a shame that your content is so niche, yet so well put together. every time a video of yours pops into my front page it feels like I'm about to hear/witness something important.
Thanks for this video! It's even surprising that although I got a bit interested in VRML technology at the turn of the 90s and 2000s and even made my own 3D website (it ran entirely client-side on free hosting) I had never heard of this project before
I went into the french servers of AW alongside my sister on her school issued laptop way back when (2005-2006). It was insane to see this stuff. And I remember it fondly. Even if I was too young at the time to really understand just how cool it was. A few years later, in the early days of Roblox, I would get on almost every day after school, and with IRL and online friends alike, we would build stuff on each other's places, and check out the most random crap uploaded by other players. To me it feels a lot like what I do today on VRChat, getting on with friends, and worldhopping, hanging out. It's just more advanced today. I hope AW is backed up somewhere safe that can be forever revisited in the future.
ty so much for making this, it filled my heart with joy! I related to so much you said. I found AW in the late 90s and it absolutely formed who I am today - I’m friends with people I met on there over 20 years later. I’m still hoping to bring it up in irl convo one day and someone’s eyes light up, knowing what I’m talking about. thank you again for this video.
17:57 Atlantis! Man it has been so long! Now you have shown my favorite two worlds, Mars and Atlantis. My parents played this and sometimes I would hop on or my friend, cousin, or sibling would play and we would get so lost. I remember a weird thing on mars that was like a levitating people mover or something.
I was addicted to Active Worlds back in the day. It was like Minecraft before there was Minecraft. I only hung out on the Norwegian server named (for some reason) Patagonia. I made several buildings, one of which was seen in screenshots in the Norwegian PC magazine TEKNO in an article about AW and Patagonia, which was amazing at the time! Hosted one or two awkward disco events. There was a 'newspaper' website with the latest Patagonia news. The server was owned by some less known Norwegian musician (sadly can't remember the name) whom you had to pay regularly to get server access. People were experimenting with making 'cities' (larger, more controlled building areas where you could apply to build or move in). Good, awkward times! And sadly somewhat fuzzy memories.
'pata' was an interesting world with its unique object yard and architecture. It was called 'the Scandinavian world' even though it mostly consisted of Norwegians. I remember spending many hours in that world exploring buildings like "Pyramid La Defence" (I believe it was built by a user named Boheme L Etoile), "Tingvollen" (where the Norwegians had their occasional community meetings) and others which I no longer remember since the world is now long gone. The musician you are referring to, was probably Lars Kilevold. Only way I managed to dig up his name was remembering his connection to a now defunct political party called Direktedemokratene (no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Kilevold). Good times indeed!
@@marcfoster715 Yes, Lars Kilevold, thank you! And I jus remembered, the Patagonia world was even opened by the Norwegian Minister of Culture at the time, Turid Birkeland, on 18. June 1997. (Found the date through a quick Google.)
i was around 11 or 12 when i found Active worlds, and funny enough, it was a ad on some website advertising "A GODZILLA virtual world!", which was a tie in for the 1998 US godzilla movie. It got me into Active worlds, and kept me there for a few years. I learned how to type, interact with people, how to use a computer (through file browsing and DOS) and how to just explore the internet in the late and early 00's, learned about bots and programming, windows 98-00, to website coding and to more personal things like different Anime, movies and cultures. It's a big part of my early teens when i look back, and im glad/scared that it still exists today (We need to back it up somehow!). Sadly, i built a lot of stuff outside normal "ranges" in the AW world. i was in the thousands somewhere, and i lost those coordinates long ago, but i still think my creative works still exist out there somewhere.
I remember using this program back in the day. I could jump to multiple worlds, some of which had restricted access. I met a user going by "Ren-chan" (short for "Ren-chan," according to them) who had a horse avatar. There were sexy mermaids. I used a poorly coded skateboard which didn't work right. I visited a user carefully constructed house, tried to copy it, but unfortunately the copy fused with original, ruining it. Also, alienware was there. I also remember a user "shouting" about someone deleting their stuff and another saying that's what happens when you don't have a paid account.
Glad to have found this. With all the discussions of the metaverse I keep thinking back to AW. I was a teen on this platform every day when it came out. I have several friends still from all over the world that I met there. I built an entire town and linked my photos to put in my homes there. I’m so happy this was around when I was growing up.
you should do a video on the topic of VRChat mute community its a topic that lot of people do ask n have lots of questions about and can be very interesting especially if you get some in the mute community to answer the questions too
First discovered AW when I was looking through the archived sites of it’s offshoots, and thought it also closed until a month or 2 later when I discovered its modern website while searching for WorldsChat communities. I’ve read up in AWs history, but it’s really nice having the perspective of someone who was there during its golden age. Definitely learned a lot from this video that I otherwise wouldn’t have known until I had asked around enough or seen the forum or some obscure fan site (except for that Gor stuff, which I’ve seen mentioned and seems like a really fun flame war to kill time looking at). Good video.
In AlphaWorld (AW) in the world list a good place to visit it Panne's Interactive Map, located at 15461.82N 23500.05E 5.13a 1 those numerical sets are coordinates to teleport to in their respective worlds for anyone who's not familiar. Nice video though and I was glad to see it.!! Drop by Avalon Galactic in cofmeta (Metatropolis) in AW, there are some newer builds to be found.. at coords 101.65S 52.57E 9.49a 155 and feel like it should be mentioned that in any of the public worlds you have to get further out from the central zones to see newer creations. In some ways it's like the rings of a tree with the oldest in the center which, of course, gives the impression that the whole thing is what you see throughout which is definitely not the case. Enjoy!
This is a blast from the past. I remember building cities on AWTeen and Mars that never grew with oversized event venues that never got used, and by the time I could reliably maintain a citizenship, it was already dying. Cobra Village on Alpha is one I'm still proud of because of the detail I put in to the park that made up the tiny town center.
Regarding people thinking of Active Worlds as "haunted" or "cursed" or whatever: honestly, that just happens in reality, too. I watch urban exploration videos from time to time and my Mom was way into ghost hunting shows and more often than not people are afraid of things that signify the loss of life. A "haunted doll" is often just an abandoned doll, its original owner now long dead. It's a reminder that our material possessions often outlive our mortal forms, and thus a reminder of our mortality. I'm not saying that's great, abandoned things still deserve to be loved, and can serve as monuments to great things, but that's the way it is.
you had me at "3d version of irc" also, alpha world kinda reminds me of the late minecraft server, megacitycraft. its just kinda a haven for building and people doing whatever and it even has a similar land claim system and how theres a whole buncha chaos near spawn.. and because of the land claim stuff, the buildings were always left standing, you could walk through cities and people's marks on the world could be seen even if they hadn't been on for years vids like this makes me really wish i was able to properly experience the golden age of the internet. theres still things that have a semblance to it nowadays but its never the same. theres never gonna be as many people on pesterchum as there was on the old ircs, and thats just sad
I used to explore this in the 90's and my pc couldn't run it very well, but it was still an amazing slide-show adventure lol plus it didnt look quite as good as it does in this video. everything was sprites for the most part in the beginning.
Great video! Virtual social hubs like these where a dream for me when I was younger, but unfortunatelly I lacked the hardware to access them at the time. I hope that the algorithm gods shine their light on your content, you deserve it!
Thanks for this video. I was an active user of Worlds Chat when it was in the Beta stage 1995-1996. It was a vibrant community of chatters. I'd heard mention of AlphaWorlds (which became ActiveWorlds) at that time, where you could construct things. However, I never visited it. Now I know a lot more about it. Cheers!
I'm really happy to see someone else making connections between AW and the modern socialVR apps. Right after getting my first headset (Rift) back in 2017, I looked to find something that would give me that same feeling as good ole AW. I did find a bit of that in VRchat, RecRoom, and probably most similarly the early AltspaceVR. I used to talk to people in Altspace about how it reminded me of AW, and no-one, including the people developing the app had any idea what I was talking about. It felt like we were doing all the same things again, in a new more immersive way (game shows, community meetups, virtual malls, etc.). Heck, people were implementing the same games we had in AW for the same reasons in these new platforms. That said, none of the new platforms have the build permanence of AW. There are already huge parts of Altspace that are gone forever, and only captured in a handful of videos. VRchat is better preserved, and may have a better fate relative to digital rot given that it is pretty close to raw Unity. Alpha World could and should persist indefinitely somewhere. I really hope when its current keeper gets tired of keeping the lights on, they allow interested former users to find a way to preserve it somewhere. I know the client is eventually going to become a problem, but I can't image the database is very large relative to modern games of this sort.
Thanks for opening up to tell us a bit more about yourself and younger years in this one. This whole virtual world blows my mind considering it was made nearly 30 years ago. I wonder if we'll look back at VR chat worlds or Minecraft worlds like this in 30 or 40 years. Also, when is the Patreon coming :)
This looks like the embodiment of 90's and early 00's internet. A virtual metaverse existing then? It was hard enough to even get a broadband internet back then. We had dial-up in the beginning, and it was a paaaaain, but I knew I would love the internet back in the late 90's. Believing I could just "copy the internet" to a floppy disk, and take it to my elementary school to cheat my way into thinking "I just brought the internet to school on floppy!" or some shit, even though in truth, the computers were connected to the internet anyways, but removed the shortcuts to access the browsers. I was probably too young for something like Active Worlds, so I never really heard of it. My first into any virtual world was the MMORPG: Runescape (classic), and I was probably too young for that at the time too lol. I had played the game during a time players could PVP anywhere. It was pure chaos, but also very new at the time. Playing with players across the world and doing npc quests, or making friends with complete strangers... or getting your account hacked. It was a unique era. It's not one I'd want to go back to either, but I'm happy with how far we've come since then. Now I can make my own 3D models/avatars, and bring it into virtual reality to BE the character I have always envisioned.
A lifelong friend and I met at the ages of 11 & 12 on ActiveWorlds. I remember before we had cits, we made a cool build in the sky together and some jerk named Twister came and griefed the whole thing. We bonded over that, along with our similar sense of humor and music taste, and are best friends to this day. Never would have met him without AW!! Does anyone else remember AWGate, with that repetitive whistling tune, the "wall of china" around it, and the hidden underground face with lots of gears and stuff? Nostalgia! Spent most of my time on AW as SaberMage/SabreMage, and always used the Cedric avatar. I remember being fond of Mutation, building mostly in AWTeen and a bit in an old world called Broadway. All of my friend and I's old builds in AWTeen are still there. It's wild to be able to revisit them to this day!
I found out about it because I was trying to find the history of virtual worlds like Second Life and when I looked at there web page and I saw they had an SDK and that it looked like they have the server software available, I was like: WOW this looks so cool!
If you go to the edges of Alphaworld (32750 as one or both of the coordinates), you'll often find objects from disparate points in time. People from 1997 and 20?? all posting that they were there
I am 30 years old. This is exactly what made computers interesting back in the day. Although I didn't have the opportunity to experience this myself at the time, thanks for the reminder. Active Worlds gets one brand new user today.
I always like learning about things like this, the old internet and other things like that. I wasn't around (at least on the internet) when it all happened, but it still gives me a weird, detached sort of nostalgia. I obviously never personally experienced it, but I wish I could. I think that's why I like VRChat so much. Like you said in another one of your videos, VRChat has that same sort of feel as the old internet. No corporate influence or governing bodies or anything, just a bunch of random people finding their way through a no man's land, if that makes sense. There's something beautiful about the chaos and everything that happens when you toss a bunch of people together on a platform and let them do whatever.
I was on active worlds from the mid 90s to very early 2000s. I went by PILMAN and my brother was Blaine. We ran the world Flood which was based on a Pokemon RPG. Lots of fond memories.
I played back from 1997-2001! I was also in a few Pokémon RP towns, and I feel like I'm the only one who remembers how to find them. People also usually built along memorable coords, like 8888n 7777e.
my brother and I ran a pokemon rpg world called flood, my un was pilman and my brother blaine. We programmed the prof oak bot, was around the later 90s early 2000s. I actually won that world from Bingo.
Second Life had one thing over Active Worlds. Multi-platform client. AW is windows only. No Mac or Linux users allowed. I'd like to see something like Second Life, but using the Unreal engine. Now that would be something. Something close to The Oasis from Ready Player One. VR is getting really good these days, we're close. About 7 years ago, I picked up the early Oculous devkit and was thrilled to discover a hacked version of Second Life that supported it. Wandering around in Second Life in VR was amazing. And possible for me, being a linux user. Some day soon, someone is going to create a virtual world on something like unreal and it's going to be the big win.
Thanks for psoting this I was a citizen on Alphaworld for quite a while as a kid. This brings back so many memories. Everytime after school i would get on and spend hours on there playing. Went back on the other day to try and find my house, unfortunately i coudnt. Used to have some friends on there, to this day would only just like to meet them again and see wat they are up to.
Hello, fellow cyber-explorer. I miss the early internet very much. Watching people roam through these old worlds and websites feel like exploring abandoned buildings or ghost towns. They have an almost haunted, aged quality.
It's things like this game that I consider the cave paintings of the digital age. I'm incredibly jealous, I would have loved to be a part of something like the community of this game. But when you think about it, in a decade or two, I'll be feeling old when referencing my youth with games like spore, or Lego racers. Quoting you, everything will be crushed into sand eventually, flowing through one of the many hourglasses. Great video, I love your style of narrating.
It's like old-school web pages turned into a 3D environment! Look at all the creativity! These days everything looks so similar with that pervasive "professional" look. Old web pages didn't have that, and neither do the environments in this.
I grew up playing on active worlds, was the first virtual worlds program I ever saw. Built a lot of stuff in AWTeen as well as small things in other worlds.
maaan I remember trying my hardest as a kid to develop a game on AW. I remember chatting and messing around in mutation too which was arguably the best polished game there.
I just want to comment I got recommended your channel and now I binged through almost all of your videos. Wow it is quite interesting stuff. The whole vr chat thing doesn't seem like something for me, past just not having the tech to play it but its very interesting to look at the community from the outside and to see what virtual worlds are... So yeah please keep it up dude this is fascinating
Activeworlds (awteen specifically) was where i straight up LIVED as a homeschooled kid in 08-11.. no one i ever meet knows about AW but I always went by Lusie if anyone remembers me!
Wow I didn’t know if alphaworld still worked or not. I first started building there about 96 or 97 I believe. I built my first place pretty close to town, where I found an empty lot close to some other people, but then decided I wanted to do a new place out in the country with more room, so I went out where there was nothing around. But remember how you had to have one object to begin with, and then you could just copy and paste? Well there was nothing out there to use for my first object. So I had to fly back towards town until I finally saw something, and then I copied it, and then I would fly back as far away from it as I could and still see it, then I copied and pasted a new one where I was at, and then turned it into the tallest column they had (something I could see better from a distance) then I kept doing the same thing over and over until I had finally brought an item out to my new place in the boonies. Hahahahaha. Then I had an object to start building with. Those were good times back then. I had an internet girlfriend from another state, and I turned her onto aw about 97 or 98 and she really got into even more than I was and she built a lot of neat houses. I went by (soggy doggie) and she went by (wet pet). We must have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours there over the years. It was pretty fun. Sometimes I would get bored and go to ground zero because there was always a group of newbies there wandering around and one night I decided to mess with them. Remember if you held down the shift key and down arrow at the same time, how you would go through the floor and drop til you finally hit the bottom? (I think the bottom was like 30 meters down). Well I spoke to all of them as a group and said “hey you guys, if you hit shift and down arrow, it will drop down a list of different avatars you can use!!”. I about died laughing as I watched them all sink through the floor and disappear!! Hahahahaha. I told my girlfriend about it and she went down to the bottom to see. She said Chris I felt sorry for them!! She goes, they were all down there wandering around talking to each other and didn’t know what to do!!! Hahahahaha
ActiveWorlds was literally one of the first online things I ever became addicted to when my family first got the internet. If anyone out there remembers Lanstan, hello!
Me and my friends have FOND memories of Active Worlds. Somewhere out there is a nightclub my best friend built. We lost our coordinates and will never see it again.
i left SecondLife a few years before just getting started in AW in 2019-2020 and left a few weeks later. My shitty laptop couldn't run SL. Was a little awkward learning to build stuff. I ended up in Twinity and stayed there for a while. Ishould go back and check on my stuff.
I had an account on this back in the day. I headed a small team of builders that worked on a virtual mall that ActiveWorlds was trying to set up. The head developer had a change of mind at some point though and undid everything my team did in it. I thought they'd reset the world entirely, but I found our notes to each other under the floor and I had to contact the business I'd manage to convince to set up shop in the mall and apologize to them that they wouldn't be able to have a shopfront there. I gave them the email address of my contact on the AW team and deleted that email. Somewhere in AlphaWorld, I'd been building Angkor Wat. I remember finding it again awhile ago and it was still there years after I built it. No idea if it's there still though. Did you know that Wells Fargo Bank worked with ActiveWorlds to make a short lived StageCoach Island? I had an account on SI for a little while. It was mostly to teach kids about banking.
I had a P40 world in AW from around 2009 to 2013. I finally left because I was not happy the direction they were taking AW. It does amaze me it is still running, but I was told by someone not long after I started that they would never let AW die. It seems they were serious 🙂. I made many friends and had a good time in AW. I do commend you on your presentation of AW; I thought it was well balanced, and I learned a few things.
cofmeta (Metatropolis) has some fun things still.. I suggest Destinations and Rest Area1 and the micro-grid area near gz. Destinations is at .. 86.71N 75.93W 2.13a 5 It would be really neat to see AW rise again with whatever could be done to enhance and improve on it without any further losses of the past.!
AW was amazing..I had read about it in the mid-90s but did not finally get access to it until my laptop was powerful enough to run it in 2001. There are many other amazing metaverse style places of that time like Cybertown and Digitalspace (OnLive) Traveler that should also be re-assessed.
Used to be able to do this during math classes in 6th and 7th grade. Had to make a report of some kind. Spent my time building in the free practice world, hoping no one could demolish it or the world got cleaned up. No idea how I did it without knowing English or Google.
I built highways and bridges all over the place for this back in the day in the AWTeen world. I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I turned on my Quest 2 headset a while back and saw a new program called Horizon Worlds. Its almost an exact copy of Active Worlds, complete with the 1995 era graphics! And wasn't there a city in Alpha World called Horizon City?! I loved Active Worlds back in the day but a new from-scratch program developed by a huge company like Meta surely can produce better graphics than we had been in the ca. 2000 era?
I was a developer on AW from 1994 to 2010. I know from the outside it felt like the company had no plan. Internally, it was because most of our income came from corporate clients. Those outrageously priced universe servers? Lots of companies would buy those, and then pay us to make content for them. They wanted a platform for training, remote meetings, distance learning, etc.
Those corporate clients kept the lights on for years, but they also took a ton of our time. We had to take those jobs to pay the bills, but those jobs also greatly slowed down our progress on the software.
Thanks for such an in-depth video. It was great to see those garish old polygons again.
Hey Shamus! I absolutely recognize the name, haha.
It's both surprising (and not surprising) that companies were buying universe servers (and that you also struggled to bring in revenue via other methods).
Back then, it seemed like there was counterintuitively both a big thirst for something like AW, and a lot of hesitancy, all at the same time. I wonder what the general attitude was when trying to court investors -- or if that was even a viable option at the time (vs. individual companies that wanted to appear ahead of the curve -- a pattern that continues to this day with the KFCverse, or w/e).
"Ahead of its time," seems like such a cliche, cheap phrase, but I really don't have a better way to describe AW. You and your team clearly had a strong vision -- I just wish today's energy for virtual spaces existed back then.
Like ImaTowns @ Ima genius?
Holy shit, i recognize your name!! I was nobody big on there (Disembodied/338371) but hot damn it's cool seeing people around in the Internet after all these years
@@Stonehawk Woah, I remember you!
I distinctly remember that you made a house in Silver Valley, and I fondly remember a conversation we had literally two decades ago, haha.
Crazy stuff!
@@Straszfilms what was your name back then...? Heh. The silver valley house was one of the few builds I actually ever "finished" in some sense; seems i never got over my problem with biting off way more than i could chew with ambitious projects that i'd never complete... Did you ever meet Ferruccio? I wish I had managed to stay in touch with him - now THAT MAN could *BUILD.* I believe I recognized a few of his structures in your video. I wonder where he is today...
But yeah, definitely, birde life. I preferred the alien avatar myself but birde was excellent for building because of its compact size, like being an agile little camera zipping around. Feel like I remember someone who always wore birde but ... jeez it's been forever @_@
I think a good thing to remember is that when people treat stuff like this as "creepy" and "weird", it isn't really an indictment of the people who built it on either the program or user side. It's really that it's a liminal space - looking around an abandoned shopping mall is creepy because people used to be there, it's like it expects people to be there, but now it's empty. It doesn't matter how normal or mundane something used to be, the passage of time and absence of humanity can still make it feel creepy later.
Thats not liminal space
@@qaudius741based on my in depth jungian analysis of liminal spaces, yes it is
Jokes aside, what this person is referring to is the uncanny valley experience of observing a place outside of its usual context. A familiar place, yet is subtly different enough to deviate from expected reality. They are referring to the simpler and more commonly understood idea of liminal spaces; as mere places of abandonment that create a sense of eeriness due to the aforementioned reasons. An abandoned mall would fit perfecrly in this definition.
You don't need to go "erm actually". If you actually know about liminal spaces then you should know what they meant. Besides, "erm youre wrong" doesn't exactly help or educate anyone. If you're so knowledgeable you should elaborate. Give us your deep, rich ocean of knowledge on the intricacies of liminal spaces within history, psychology, religion and folklore.
@@monmon0946
If you had done your long research, you would know that the literal meaning of "liminal space" is a place between point A and B, such as an elevator or hallway. The description of these emotions falls more under the "dreamcore" category. And yeah, I just did the "ehm, actually" thing - I'm on the internet, man, not taking it seriously.
@@qaudius741 My bad I didn't know you were using the google definition. Even with that simplistic definition, which isnt the one that was being referred to by anyone else here, a mall could still fit within it. The vast spaces between you and the places you want to enter could be included within the "literal" definition. But again, thats not what was being referred to. When talking about aesthetic movements, it isnt necessary for the liminal space to be one of transition, it just often is. Its much more about the imagery deviating from expectations to create those feelings.
Dreamcore is a similar aesthetic movement but is totally separate. It can often use liminal spaces but does so specifically to create surrealist imagery, often to invoke nostalgia by using dream like visuals; hence "dreamcore". The purely liminal space aesthetic relies on grounded imagery that deviates slightly from what you would expect, such as an abandoned mall, to create the feelings I mentioned. Dreamcore will include additions and edits to the images whereas purely liminal spaces will not. And if they do, its nothing like dreamcore.
I dont have an issue with "erm actually", but if youre gonna do it, at least dont confuse dreamcore with the general online aesthetic of liminal spaces and the different feelings both are supposed to invoke. They differ completely in terms of visuals too. Idk how you managed to confuse them, and idk why you referred to a google definition when you seem aware such a definition wouldnt fit when referring to aesthetic movements.
@@monmon0946
I guess you don't get it. The "ehm actually" was just me playing the role of a toxic smart ass for fun, and that's just your viewpoint that liminal space is aesthetic. If I were to talk about the literal meaning of it, you can't really say anything about that because it would be my opinion. Yours is that liminal space is aesthetic, and you define it more broadly, which is generally what people think of it. My mistake in comparing his comment to dreamcore; his comment was an aspect of liminal spaces.
It blows my mind that it could even run back in the 90's at all!
I miss the golden age of ActiveWorlds, that prime period between 1997 and 2003-ish that was widely considered to be its heyday. 300 people in AWTeen at one time... you'll never hit numbers like that again. There are so many great memories.
active worlds was definitely before my time, so as a younger person who still spent a lot of time on the internet growing up, it's interesting to see how these sort of concepts reinvent themselves in different ways as the internet has evolved. a lot of what you said about the appeal of this game reminded me of spending time on minecraft servers, where you'd have these endless expanses of creative mode plots where people could build whatever, but at the same time a lot of people forming their own little communities or doing roleplays in the chat. so even if a lot has changed, a lot has also stayed the same at least from my point of view.
still, there's a lot that's lost to time, which is a shame. it's weird to me to think that some people are growing up in an era where most online forums are either dead or on their last legs, there's a certain level of small self-contained community there that only somewhat exists in modern fandom spaces (in my experience anyway). weird to think about how much stuff I've missed, too.
your content is really cool, and I've been looking forward to hearing you talk about this game for a while since you've featured it in some other videos. looking forward to what you'll talk about next! :)
Yes creative plots and also survival plots is so similar to this and for example the urban sprawl near spawn is so similar
minecraft totally hits the same flavors once you actually begin building away from others so you can build as much as you wanted on AW. minecraft servers was fun in the same ways. a different part was there were opportunities to go into static parts that were built by the designers and emote and text to a lot more people. One world had this night time futuristic look. for some reason there was always a party of avatars a hundred or something feet up in the air. When starting active worlds, you used to begin at a place called the gateway, that had portals to different worlds and played a midi file of AC/DC You Shook me All night long. The song would welcome us as we logged on as alien avatars. This changed once the corporate updates began to occur. All of a sudden intel bunny men from intel Pentium processor promotional ads was the default avatar. it got all weird after that. it was soooo weird, but so cool.
I was one of the early world builders, working with the Titans Guild on projects like Winter Wonderland (later called Winter) and Oct31, a world that was only available on Halloween (I built Hell, for anyone that remembers...) The Titans Guild was a contemporary and competitor to Circle of Fire, but we were all friends. I'm still very good friends with many people I knew and worked with in AW, it was definitely a cool time to script renderware (rwx) files and build experiences, even if it's all moot now... Oh yeah, OuterWorlds (OW) was one of those uniservers... It was a really cool place with some really cool people as well.
I think there's been a placeholder lot held by Titan in front of my Winter build for 20+ years now.
I remember the Oct31 places each year and I always made sure to explore them. That's awesome!
Remember the 13th floor and how there were scripted bots for that place? Thought it was super cool at the time in the 90s also enjoyed the film too.
I remember OuterWorlds. What was the space-themed dance club in AW? This is a deep memory.
My dad has been building his world ? 24 plus years massive sculpture gardens and galleries…. With call to all artist ect .. try as he might , my father was never able to talk his offspring into joining.. presently.. active worlds is ? Working on them.. discarding old tools … sadly breaking functionality , too worlds that have been there since the start …
Thousands of sculptures no longer have shadows or reflect light.. alas crushing the one person that keeped that world alive……. I wish there was a way to move his world .. 20 plus years of art .. to be lost….. .. lost like a phone.. with the weight of 25 years of a loved habit
.. I am 53 .. my dad has been making sculpture in this world since 1996….
I loved this listen
The closing thoughts at the end really tied it together for me, even in the age of web 2.0 where 99% of most people's internet usage is on the same three sites, we *still* find virtual spaces like Active Worlds pop up. VRC being an obvious contemporary one. It must just be humanity's inexorable pull toward socialization being too strong even for great distances to stop.
The nostalgia is strong with this one. I remember at the age of 12-13 logging onto AOL & signing in & going to the desktop to click that AW icon to be teleported to another world everyday after school. On the weekends I would stay up til about 5-6am, forgetting about time. Crazy!
Back in 1997 I found out about AW from a tech show I was watching. Right away I took to it and made a bunch of virtual friends. Eventually I would build my own castle in Alpha that I've even added to up to a year ago. Over the years my visits declined and when the people I made friends with stopped visiting I did too.. at least for a little while. Now when I visit AW I have the feeling of nostalgia and sadness. It's like going to a childhood home where you had tons of great memories but the house is now in the middle of an abandoned mining town with no occupants; just a lonely place that you wish would come back to life! Still, I hope it never goes away.
Great video! I am Likeness. A group of us bought a universe from AW back in 1997 and called it Outerworlds. We had an amazing community of people that bought worlds in our universe. Several people met and married including myself and my husband, Guardian. We have been married since 1999. He was a modeler in OW. A lot of us met in real life on what we called Road Trips. People from all over the world would come to the states for these road trips. We were all sad when AW shut us down because we could not afford to pay for an upgrade. It was maddening that we paid so much for the universe and they would not let us host the one we bought, on our own. So we lost our great community of people. We now have a world in AW, Imagica. It was the world where it all started in AW back in 1997. For posterities sake, I keep it open year after year. I am still a citizen of 25 years. What glorious memories!!
I was a citizen of Active Worlds and spent most of my awkward teen years in AWTeen after I got out of school. I still keep in contact with friends I made thanks to AW 😊❤.
AWTeen was so cool. It's a shame the site and the world are basically unusable these days, at least around GZ. Granted I'm no longer a teen anymore, but back in those days it was like a little second home.
I was a player of AW around 1999 to 2002. I found my house again after 25 years.
I used Active Worlds back in the late 90s. My friends all originally started building on mars. I vaguely remember that they were at something like 690N 690E, something symmetrical like that. But I lost the coords so long ago.
Soon after Mars, though, the people who stuck around with the game migrated to AWTeen. It had more objects, and was less "red". My base is still within the first 100x100 square, within "view distance" of ground zero. But we also built it before a lot of the more advanced "moving" objects existed. If you go to my base, there's weird objects that don't actually exist but have been moved and animated to mess around with the ground and the buildings. But it's cool to see that all those original buildings are still there.
We had a gallery set up that displayed old DBZ art because we were big DBZ nerds. My user name was SSJ4 Gohan, haha. All those links are long gone, most of them likely linking to angelfire or geocities. But it's neat to see that it's still there. My giant pool. My "recreation" of snake road.
And then the buildings of friends long forgotten.
I still have builds deep on the edges of AWTeen, but the coordinates have been lost to time. Large, sprawling builds that mimiced gundum wing bases, giant space ships and space stations, etc.
Good times. I miss it.
There's an AW Property Search! So if you still have your cit number, you can find your builds across a lot of the public worlds!
@@KazyEXE Oh snap, I never realized you could pick different worlds, I thought it was just the main AW world!
also for what it's worth most angelfire links still work from my experience
Dbz and AW is a helluva late 90s combo. Extremely fond memories of days when we were on the frontiers of internet culture
@@noshoddy Right? It's a nice snapshot of my childhood right there, even if here 20+ years later I'm still obsessed with DBZ and to a lesser extent "building" games.
i havent seen ANYONE talk abt this... instant sub.. i grew up playing this game and made so many friends there. heavy nostalgia hit
I'm so glad someone else has played it, I get blank looks and mentions of second Life whenever I try bring it up to people 😂! I'm 30, so must be caused by growing up internet-bound at roughly the same era. I thought it was a fever dream for ages because I forgot the name of it. Was so great to see some of what still exists, makes me want to pop in and look too. A great essay too, love your writing and editing!
This is such a great essay. One of my dreams to never be realized is to do nothing but build in SW City for the next decade or so. There really isn't anything quite as free-form and creative as Active Worlds that's available to end users, even with the tech limitations. Minecraft comes close but it doesn't surpass it.
As an aside, I really believe you have something valuable to say about AW and our generation's experience of it, and TH-cam can surface this video to more of your target audience better (the people who want to watch this!) if you used the current parlance, i.e. "metaverse", in your title and thumbnail. I was sad to hear you didn't want to do that, because I think you have something valuable to say here and it deserves to be seen.
HOLY SHIT CHRIS IT'S YOU
I was Disembodied, in SW City
You guys gave me most of my fondest memories from back then...
hey Chris it's Artillo here from Nexus City
@@ArtilloUtube Nice to see you again!
@@Stonehawk Wow nice to catch up again! Sorry I didn't see this for 6 whole months!
the legend himself
It's both so nice and also a shame that your content is so niche, yet so well put together. every time a video of yours pops into my front page it feels like I'm about to hear/witness something important.
Thanks for this video! It's even surprising that although I got a bit interested in VRML technology at the turn of the 90s and 2000s and even made my own 3D website (it ran entirely client-side on free hosting) I had never heard of this project before
I went into the french servers of AW alongside my sister on her school issued laptop way back when (2005-2006). It was insane to see this stuff. And I remember it fondly. Even if I was too young at the time to really understand just how cool it was.
A few years later, in the early days of Roblox, I would get on almost every day after school, and with IRL and online friends alike, we would build stuff on each other's places, and check out the most random crap uploaded by other players. To me it feels a lot like what I do today on VRChat, getting on with friends, and worldhopping, hanging out. It's just more advanced today.
I hope AW is backed up somewhere safe that can be forever revisited in the future.
I had so much fun on Active Worlds sometime around '99-'00. The internet in general was way better back then.
I don't really understand why this game was basically forgotten by history. What an amazing accomplishment for the time it came out.
ty so much for making this, it filled my heart with joy! I related to so much you said. I found AW in the late 90s and it absolutely formed who I am today - I’m friends with people I met on there over 20 years later. I’m still hoping to bring it up in irl convo one day and someone’s eyes light up, knowing what I’m talking about. thank you again for this video.
This game was made in 1996 & STILL looks better than Decentraland.
17:57 Atlantis! Man it has been so long! Now you have shown my favorite two worlds, Mars and Atlantis. My parents played this and sometimes I would hop on or my friend, cousin, or sibling would play and we would get so lost. I remember a weird thing on mars that was like a levitating people mover or something.
19:00 I big time identify with everything you said here. IRC roleplaying and early internet is how I discovered my creative writing skill too!
I was addicted to Active Worlds back in the day. It was like Minecraft before there was Minecraft.
I only hung out on the Norwegian server named (for some reason) Patagonia. I made several buildings, one of which was seen in screenshots in the Norwegian PC magazine TEKNO in an article about AW and Patagonia, which was amazing at the time!
Hosted one or two awkward disco events. There was a 'newspaper' website with the latest Patagonia news. The server was owned by some less known Norwegian musician (sadly can't remember the name) whom you had to pay regularly to get server access. People were experimenting with making 'cities' (larger, more controlled building areas where you could apply to build or move in).
Good, awkward times! And sadly somewhat fuzzy memories.
'pata' was an interesting world with its unique object yard and architecture. It was called 'the Scandinavian world' even though it mostly consisted of Norwegians. I remember spending many hours in that world exploring buildings like "Pyramid La Defence" (I believe it was built by a user named Boheme L Etoile), "Tingvollen" (where the Norwegians had their occasional community meetings) and others which I no longer remember since the world is now long gone.
The musician you are referring to, was probably Lars Kilevold. Only way I managed to dig up his name was remembering his connection to a now defunct political party called Direktedemokratene (no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Kilevold).
Good times indeed!
@@marcfoster715 Yes, Lars Kilevold, thank you! And I jus remembered, the Patagonia world was even opened by the Norwegian Minister of Culture at the time, Turid Birkeland, on 18. June 1997. (Found the date through a quick Google.)
i was around 11 or 12 when i found Active worlds, and funny enough, it was a ad on some website advertising "A GODZILLA virtual world!", which was a tie in for the 1998 US godzilla movie. It got me into Active worlds, and kept me there for a few years. I learned how to type, interact with people, how to use a computer (through file browsing and DOS) and how to just explore the internet in the late and early 00's, learned about bots and programming, windows 98-00, to website coding and to more personal things like different Anime, movies and cultures. It's a big part of my early teens when i look back, and im glad/scared that it still exists today (We need to back it up somehow!). Sadly, i built a lot of stuff outside normal "ranges" in the AW world. i was in the thousands somewhere, and i lost those coordinates long ago, but i still think my creative works still exist out there somewhere.
I remember using this program back in the day. I could jump to multiple worlds, some of which had restricted access. I met a user going by "Ren-chan" (short for "Ren-chan," according to them) who had a horse avatar. There were sexy mermaids. I used a poorly coded skateboard which didn't work right. I visited a user carefully constructed house, tried to copy it, but unfortunately the copy fused with original, ruining it. Also, alienware was there.
I also remember a user "shouting" about someone deleting their stuff and another saying that's what happens when you don't have a paid account.
Interesting, I use SL a lot but something that achieved this in 1995, WOWWW, Visionary
I was there 97-07 , made friends, built property, DJ for events, attended a few reunions. Fun Times.
world's chat actually DIDN'T suck back in 1995~ but they never really developed it further so yeah it is garbage.
I thought this was a fever dream. I was obsessed with this back in the day, and I didn't even really do too much except for roam around.
Glad to have found this. With all the discussions of the metaverse I keep thinking back to AW. I was a teen on this platform every day when it came out. I have several friends still from all over the world that I met there. I built an entire town and linked my photos to put in my homes there. I’m so happy this was around when I was growing up.
My internet girlfriend broke my widdle digital heart on Active Worlds when I was like 10.
it's because you didn't commit and put an o after your name to indicate digital marraige
I was 9 when i stepped foot here.. now i'm 37.. thanks for the vid :')
you should do a video on the topic of VRChat mute community its a topic that lot of people do ask n have lots of questions about and can be very interesting especially if you get some in the mute community to answer the questions too
I just found your channel and binged all your videos, i was instantly captivated. Your channel is so underrated!
First discovered AW when I was looking through the archived sites of it’s offshoots, and thought it also closed until a month or 2 later when I discovered its modern website while searching for WorldsChat communities. I’ve read up in AWs history, but it’s really nice having the perspective of someone who was there during its golden age. Definitely learned a lot from this video that I otherwise wouldn’t have known until I had asked around enough or seen the forum or some obscure fan site (except for that Gor stuff, which I’ve seen mentioned and seems like a really fun flame war to kill time looking at). Good video.
In AlphaWorld (AW) in the world list a good place to visit it Panne's Interactive Map, located at 15461.82N 23500.05E 5.13a 1 those numerical sets are coordinates to teleport to in their respective worlds for anyone who's not familiar.
Nice video though and I was glad to see it.!!
Drop by Avalon Galactic in cofmeta (Metatropolis) in AW, there are some newer builds to be found..
at coords 101.65S 52.57E 9.49a 155 and feel like it should be mentioned that in any of the public worlds you have to get further out from the central zones to see newer creations. In some ways it's like the rings of a tree with the oldest in the center which, of course, gives the impression that the whole thing is what you see throughout which is definitely not the case. Enjoy!
This is a blast from the past. I remember building cities on AWTeen and Mars that never grew with oversized event venues that never got used, and by the time I could reliably maintain a citizenship, it was already dying. Cobra Village on Alpha is one I'm still proud of because of the detail I put in to the park that made up the tiny town center.
Regarding people thinking of Active Worlds as "haunted" or "cursed" or whatever: honestly, that just happens in reality, too. I watch urban exploration videos from time to time and my Mom was way into ghost hunting shows and more often than not people are afraid of things that signify the loss of life. A "haunted doll" is often just an abandoned doll, its original owner now long dead. It's a reminder that our material possessions often outlive our mortal forms, and thus a reminder of our mortality. I'm not saying that's great, abandoned things still deserve to be loved, and can serve as monuments to great things, but that's the way it is.
you had me at "3d version of irc"
also, alpha world kinda reminds me of the late minecraft server, megacitycraft. its just kinda a haven for building and people doing whatever and it even has a similar land claim system and how theres a whole buncha chaos near spawn.. and because of the land claim stuff, the buildings were always left standing, you could walk through cities and people's marks on the world could be seen even if they hadn't been on for years
vids like this makes me really wish i was able to properly experience the golden age of the internet. theres still things that have a semblance to it nowadays but its never the same. theres never gonna be as many people on pesterchum as there was on the old ircs, and thats just sad
I used to explore this in the 90's and my pc couldn't run it very well, but it was still an amazing slide-show adventure lol plus it didnt look quite as good as it does in this video. everything was sprites for the most part in the beginning.
Great video! Virtual social hubs like these where a dream for me when I was younger, but unfortunatelly I lacked the hardware to access them at the time.
I hope that the algorithm gods shine their light on your content, you deserve it!
I remember playing this in 00s, this one of the games/platforms I built things in as a kid before the age of minecraft came
nice use of the soundtrack from Armitage! Loved that Anime.
Great video Straz!
I wasn't aware of this site. Need to check it out.
Thanks for this video. I was an active user of Worlds Chat when it was in the Beta stage 1995-1996. It was a vibrant community of chatters. I'd heard mention of AlphaWorlds (which became ActiveWorlds) at that time, where you could construct things. However, I never visited it. Now I know a lot more about it. Cheers!
I'm really happy to see someone else making connections between AW and the modern socialVR apps. Right after getting my first headset (Rift) back in 2017, I looked to find something that would give me that same feeling as good ole AW. I did find a bit of that in VRchat, RecRoom, and probably most similarly the early AltspaceVR. I used to talk to people in Altspace about how it reminded me of AW, and no-one, including the people developing the app had any idea what I was talking about. It felt like we were doing all the same things again, in a new more immersive way (game shows, community meetups, virtual malls, etc.). Heck, people were implementing the same games we had in AW for the same reasons in these new platforms. That said, none of the new platforms have the build permanence of AW. There are already huge parts of Altspace that are gone forever, and only captured in a handful of videos. VRchat is better preserved, and may have a better fate relative to digital rot given that it is pretty close to raw Unity. Alpha World could and should persist indefinitely somewhere. I really hope when its current keeper gets tired of keeping the lights on, they allow interested former users to find a way to preserve it somewhere. I know the client is eventually going to become a problem, but I can't image the database is very large relative to modern games of this sort.
Thanks for opening up to tell us a bit more about yourself and younger years in this one. This whole virtual world blows my mind considering it was made nearly 30 years ago. I wonder if we'll look back at VR chat worlds or Minecraft worlds like this in 30 or 40 years.
Also, when is the Patreon coming :)
2004/2011 Roblox was exactly like this once.
Those were the good days man
This looks like the embodiment of 90's and early 00's internet. A virtual metaverse existing then? It was hard enough to even get a broadband internet back then. We had dial-up in the beginning, and it was a paaaaain, but I knew I would love the internet back in the late 90's. Believing I could just "copy the internet" to a floppy disk, and take it to my elementary school to cheat my way into thinking "I just brought the internet to school on floppy!" or some shit, even though in truth, the computers were connected to the internet anyways, but removed the shortcuts to access the browsers.
I was probably too young for something like Active Worlds, so I never really heard of it. My first into any virtual world was the MMORPG: Runescape (classic), and I was probably too young for that at the time too lol. I had played the game during a time players could PVP anywhere. It was pure chaos, but also very new at the time. Playing with players across the world and doing npc quests, or making friends with complete strangers... or getting your account hacked. It was a unique era. It's not one I'd want to go back to either, but I'm happy with how far we've come since then. Now I can make my own 3D models/avatars, and bring it into virtual reality to BE the character I have always envisioned.
A lifelong friend and I met at the ages of 11 & 12 on ActiveWorlds. I remember before we had cits, we made a cool build in the sky together and some jerk named Twister came and griefed the whole thing. We bonded over that, along with our similar sense of humor and music taste, and are best friends to this day. Never would have met him without AW!!
Does anyone else remember AWGate, with that repetitive whistling tune, the "wall of china" around it, and the hidden underground face with lots of gears and stuff? Nostalgia!
Spent most of my time on AW as SaberMage/SabreMage, and always used the Cedric avatar. I remember being fond of Mutation, building mostly in AWTeen and a bit in an old world called Broadway. All of my friend and I's old builds in AWTeen are still there. It's wild to be able to revisit them to this day!
I found out about it because I was trying to find the history of virtual worlds like Second Life and when I looked at there web page and I saw they had an SDK and that it looked like they have the server software available, I was like: WOW this looks so cool!
If you go to the edges of Alphaworld (32750 as one or both of the coordinates), you'll often find objects from disparate points in time. People from 1997 and 20?? all posting that they were there
I am 30 years old. This is exactly what made computers interesting back in the day. Although I didn't have the opportunity to experience this myself at the time, thanks for the reminder. Active Worlds gets one brand new user today.
I always like learning about things like this, the old internet and other things like that. I wasn't around (at least on the internet) when it all happened, but it still gives me a weird, detached sort of nostalgia. I obviously never personally experienced it, but I wish I could. I think that's why I like VRChat so much. Like you said in another one of your videos, VRChat has that same sort of feel as the old internet. No corporate influence or governing bodies or anything, just a bunch of random people finding their way through a no man's land, if that makes sense. There's something beautiful about the chaos and everything that happens when you toss a bunch of people together on a platform and let them do whatever.
I was on active worlds from the mid 90s to very early 2000s. I went by PILMAN and my brother was Blaine. We ran the world Flood which was based on a Pokemon RPG. Lots of fond memories.
wow crazy this is still around! i played it maybe a decade ago now and it seemed kinda dead but soo fun
I played back from 1997-2001! I was also in a few Pokémon RP towns, and I feel like I'm the only one who remembers how to find them. People also usually built along memorable coords, like 8888n 7777e.
Aha, I used to play those back in AWTeen. fun times
my brother and I ran a pokemon rpg world called flood, my un was pilman and my brother blaine. We programmed the prof oak bot, was around the later 90s early 2000s. I actually won that world from Bingo.
@@PILMAN I think I might have known Blaine. I was Charmander87 back in the day.
yep heard about it through vinesauce haha. neat retro stuff
Second Life had one thing over Active Worlds. Multi-platform client. AW is windows only. No Mac or Linux users allowed.
I'd like to see something like Second Life, but using the Unreal engine. Now that would be something. Something close to The Oasis from Ready Player One. VR is getting really good these days, we're close.
About 7 years ago, I picked up the early Oculous devkit and was thrilled to discover a hacked version of Second Life that supported it. Wandering around in Second Life in VR was amazing. And possible for me, being a linux user.
Some day soon, someone is going to create a virtual world on something like unreal and it's going to be the big win.
Thanks for psoting this I was a citizen on Alphaworld for quite a while as a kid. This brings back so many memories. Everytime after school i would get on and spend hours on there playing. Went back on the other day to try and find my house, unfortunately i coudnt. Used to have some friends on there, to this day would only just like to meet them again and see wat they are up to.
I built a lot of buildings and city infrastructure (mostly in Alpha World) from 1996. until the end of the century. Great memories 👍
Duskbat was one of my best friends in AW! I was Artillo, I was the city administrator for Nexus City
🤩
Hello, fellow cyber-explorer. I miss the early internet very much. Watching people roam through these old worlds and websites feel like exploring abandoned buildings or ghost towns. They have an almost haunted, aged quality.
It's things like this game that I consider the cave paintings of the digital age. I'm incredibly jealous, I would have loved to be a part of something like the community of this game.
But when you think about it, in a decade or two, I'll be feeling old when referencing my youth with games like spore, or Lego racers.
Quoting you, everything will be crushed into sand eventually, flowing through one of the many hourglasses.
Great video, I love your style of narrating.
I've been reading about this on Shamus's blog and I had no idea that this was still up!
I spent so much of my childhood exploring Active Worlds' Mutations world. I also spent a lot of time on Dogz websites! Thanks for this video :)
Mutation was a wonderful game in Active Worlds, it's gone now, and has been gone since 2005 ;(
Any idea what happened to Ombre and Miles?
It's like old-school web pages turned into a 3D environment! Look at all the creativity!
These days everything looks so similar with that pervasive "professional" look. Old web pages didn't have that, and neither do the environments in this.
I didn’t play AW but I played Cybernet Worlds often as a child. I miss those times.
I grew up playing on active worlds, was the first virtual worlds program I ever saw. Built a lot of stuff in AWTeen as well as small things in other worlds.
maaan I remember trying my hardest as a kid to develop a game on AW. I remember chatting and messing around in mutation too which was arguably the best polished game there.
I just want to comment I got recommended your channel and now I binged through almost all of your videos. Wow it is quite interesting stuff. The whole vr chat thing doesn't seem like something for me, past just not having the tech to play it but its very interesting to look at the community from the outside and to see what virtual worlds are...
So yeah please keep it up dude this is fascinating
Activeworlds (awteen specifically) was where i straight up LIVED as a homeschooled kid in 08-11.. no one i ever meet knows about AW but I always went by Lusie if anyone remembers me!
My ears did a double take when the UT music kicked in about halfway in
Wow I didn’t know if alphaworld still worked or not. I first started building there about 96 or 97 I believe. I built my first place pretty close to town, where I found an empty lot close to some other people, but then decided I wanted to do a new place out in the country with more room, so I went out where there was nothing around. But remember how you had to have one object to begin with, and then you could just copy and paste? Well there was nothing out there to use for my first object. So I had to fly back towards town until I finally saw something, and then I copied it, and then I would fly back as far away from it as I could and still see it, then I copied and pasted a new one where I was at, and then turned it into the tallest column they had (something I could see better from a distance) then I kept doing the same thing over and over until I had finally brought an item out to my new place in the boonies. Hahahahaha. Then I had an object to start building with. Those were good times back then. I had an internet girlfriend from another state, and I turned her onto aw about 97 or 98 and she really got into even more than I was and she built a lot of neat houses. I went by (soggy doggie) and she went by (wet pet). We must have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours there over the years. It was pretty fun.
Sometimes I would get bored and go to ground zero because there was always a group of newbies there wandering around and one night I decided to mess with them. Remember if you held down the shift key and down arrow at the same time, how you would go through the floor and drop til you finally hit the bottom? (I think the bottom was like 30 meters down). Well I spoke to all of them as a group and said “hey you guys, if you hit shift and down arrow, it will drop down a list of different avatars you can use!!”. I about died laughing as I watched them all sink through the floor and disappear!! Hahahahaha. I told my girlfriend about it and she went down to the bottom to see. She said Chris I felt sorry for them!! She goes, they were all down there wandering around talking to each other and didn’t know what to do!!!
Hahahahaha
Another wonderful essay. Great job!!
I loved Active Worlds. I had so much fun on that client in the 90s.
ActiveWorlds was literally one of the first online things I ever became addicted to when my family first got the internet. If anyone out there remembers Lanstan, hello!
Me and my friends have FOND memories of Active Worlds. Somewhere out there is a nightclub my best friend built. We lost our coordinates and will never see it again.
You can find it again if you have the citnumber. There's still a working property search.
i left SecondLife a few years before just getting started in AW in 2019-2020 and left a few weeks later. My shitty laptop couldn't run SL. Was a little awkward learning to build stuff. I ended up in Twinity and stayed there for a while. Ishould go back and check on my stuff.
I met my future wife on Active Worlds when we were 13. Met and got married 13 years later. So much nostalgia watching this.
your voice is so soothing. (also you make great videos)
I had an account on this back in the day. I headed a small team of builders that worked on a virtual mall that ActiveWorlds was trying to set up. The head developer had a change of mind at some point though and undid everything my team did in it. I thought they'd reset the world entirely, but I found our notes to each other under the floor and I had to contact the business I'd manage to convince to set up shop in the mall and apologize to them that they wouldn't be able to have a shopfront there. I gave them the email address of my contact on the AW team and deleted that email. Somewhere in AlphaWorld, I'd been building Angkor Wat. I remember finding it again awhile ago and it was still there years after I built it. No idea if it's there still though.
Did you know that Wells Fargo Bank worked with ActiveWorlds to make a short lived StageCoach Island? I had an account on SI for a little while. It was mostly to teach kids about banking.
Was this AWmart?
Those were the days, had so much fun on AW. I was Burn-Ice back then.
I had a P40 world in AW from around 2009 to 2013. I finally left because I was not happy the direction they were taking AW. It does amaze me it is still running, but I was told by someone not long after I started that they would never let AW die. It seems they were serious 🙂. I made many friends and had a good time in AW. I do commend you on your presentation of AW; I thought it was well balanced, and I learned a few things.
cofmeta (Metatropolis) has some fun things still.. I suggest Destinations and Rest Area1 and the micro-grid area near gz. Destinations is at .. 86.71N 75.93W 2.13a 5
It would be really neat to see AW rise again with whatever could be done to enhance and improve on it without any further losses of the past.!
I did ActiveWorlds when it was Beta
Hi. ;)
AW was amazing..I had read about it in the mid-90s but did not finally get access to it until my laptop was powerful enough to run it in 2001. There are many other amazing metaverse style places of that time like Cybertown and Digitalspace (OnLive) Traveler that should also be re-assessed.
I lived this world for so long. Going to scrapyards to find code builds... Fever dreams
Used to be able to do this during math classes in 6th and 7th grade. Had to make a report of some kind. Spent my time building in the free practice world, hoping no one could demolish it or the world got cleaned up. No idea how I did it without knowing English or Google.
I built highways and bridges all over the place for this back in the day in the AWTeen world. I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I turned on my Quest 2 headset a while back and saw a new program called Horizon Worlds. Its almost an exact copy of Active Worlds, complete with the 1995 era graphics! And wasn't there a city in Alpha World called Horizon City?! I loved Active Worlds back in the day but a new from-scratch program developed by a huge company like Meta surely can produce better graphics than we had been in the ca. 2000 era?
They had moving objects back in 1999 in active worlds. Do you remember a world called bbworld?
Hi, I'm a user of Active Worlds since 2007. I'd like to talk to you more about Active Worlds.
i remember a funny skull underground in the main hub area i found on accident flying through the floor or something
I don’t think I’ve seen Active Worlds in 20 years but I remember it fondly. This is a trip down memory lane, and it just looks so… empty.
This was a truly wonderful video.
Hipster Second Life seems like a very apt description xD
Linden Labs should buy it and save it. I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to integrate onto SL SIMS. A virtual World museum.