Sierra’s “The ImagiNation Network” Revived!

In some more oldie gaming news, thanks to the Boring Beige Box podcast I recently found out that Sierra On-Line’s visionary (yet financially doomed) massively multiplayer online service of 1991, The ImagiNation Network, has been given new life thanks to the ImagiNation Network Revival Project!

If you’re not familiar with the INN, or (like myself) didn’t have the chance to sample the service during its relatively short tenure of 5 years, here’s a short history lesson. And if, like me, you thought that MMORPGs began with the advent of Ultima Online – you’re in for a big surprise.

A Bit of History

In 1991, according to Ken Williams, the INN (otherwise known as The Sierra Network in those days) was partly conceived as a medium for online multiplayer parlour games such as cribbage and blackjack (I suspect inspired by the success of Sierra’s casual game product of 1989, Hoyle’s Official Book of Games) — see Mike Wiener’s comment in the comments section. In a recent interview, Ken Williams himself says,

… [The Sierra Network] started because I had a grandmother who was getting older, and was bored. I asked myself one day, “Is there anything I could do where she could pick up a bridge game, without leaving home? 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?” No one remembers now, but TSN’s first name was “The Constant Companion”. It was meant to be a product targeting seniors…

As you can imagine, in 1991 the notion of playing graphical multiplayer games on the Internet (keep in mind that the World Wide Web was barely in its infancy) was beyond imagination. At that time, dialing up to local Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and for-pay private network services such as Prodigy and Compuserve was the rule, and connections to the Internet were often limited to those who had access through participating universities. Since Prodigy and Compuserve were more geared to the business consumer, the on-line games these services offered were rudimentary at best.

While The Sierra Network was still based on a for-pay private dial-up service much like the aforementioned companies, its target audience would come to define a completely different experience. Instead of dialing-up to read news articles and read discussion groups in a web-like interface, TSN presented the caller with an interface much like many of the Sierra games available at the time (ie. The Adventures of Willy Beamish). Instead of navigating through text menus and drop-down lists to reach a discussion board, TSN users simply clicked on “The Town Hall” or “The Arena” and were directly taken to a new area. For example, if users clicked on the Clubhouse, they would be taken to a parlour where they could chat with other users and set up a chess or card game.

Online Gaming

Above: Screenshot of the Shadows of Yserbius town interface – borrowed from Wikipedia.

Thankfully, The Sierra Network quickly progressed beyond simple parlour games. While casual games such as chess and bridge catered to a wide variety of audiences for the first couple of years TSN was on-line, more contemporary games such a multiplayer edition of Red Baron appeared. It is difficult to express how awestruck a child or adult would be – in 1993 – seeing hundreds of players flying biplanes around in a graphical dog-fight simulation simultaneously! Given that the average modem connection speed in that era was around 2400 baud, the technical feats behind the scenes of TSN must have been staggering.¹

The service also introduced a graphical MUD known as Shadows of Yserbius, reminiscent of games such as Ultima Underworld and Eye of the Beholder. Unlike those games, however, Shadows of Yserbius offered an MMO experience supporting up to 30 (and later 60) players in each room. If you’ve played any of the nascent MMO’s such as Ultima Online or Dark Sun Online in their early days, you can appreciate how much lag and chaos 30 players create in a single room. While Neverwinter Nights (1991) is given official recognition as the world’s first graphical MMORPG, Shadows of Yserbius clearly demonstrated that complex and fun role-playing games could become the future of online gaming, a full 5 years before Ultima Online reached the mass market.

Modern Relevance

While none of these games alone might sound very impressive to the modern gamer, I needn’t remind you that all of these games were delivered through a completely graphical online portal using a modem and VGA graphics in DOS, over 15 years ago. Contemporary gaming portals such as Pogo.com are all fundamentally based on The ImagiNation Network’s visionary approach of centralizing the player’s experience through a portal catering to different genres.

Furthermore since the games were developed at Sierra, each were cleverly integrated into areas of the user interface in such a way that the INN “town” was artistically thematic. Even now, few UI designers have mastered the kind of simplicity that the INN offered children and beginner users. Even user-friendly interfaces such as the Nintendo Wii’s front-end still rely upon a degree of gaming and Internet savvyness (even if we don’t notice it these days)… the INN had no such prerequisites for budding gamers other than moving a mouse around the screen.

Other innovations such as changing the interface to fit the current season (ie. from Fall to Winter) lended the INN a kind of aesthetic realism that I’ve only seen in one other game since: Animal Crossing. While this kind of feature might seem hokey or unimportant at first, imagine the child whose primary understanding of the world is of their immediate environment: their family, their home, their town, their school, and the different activities that each season affords them. By thematizing the INN town in terms of seasonal art, Sierra managed to turn the whole (abstract) idea of 1000 users on dial-up connecting to servers and networked together, into a very real community of people all busily exploring a theme park or town.

In the same way, the INN was one of the first games to allow players to customize their avatar’s face that would appear to all other users on the system. Again, the educational/immersive value of a simple technique such as this for a child (and for adults!) is unimaginable – rather than leaving users with just an abstract and anonymous handle or alias, the INN environment gave rise to the whole idea of a human presence and human persona online. Features like this gave freer expression to those who wanted a more personal experience online, and again wouldn’t be pick up for another decade until games such as Tiger Woods PGA Tour (2005), The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and the Nintendo Wii made use of more advanced avatar generation technology.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with visionary works, financial bungling and mismanagement crippled the project, and resulted in the service being purchased by America On-Line and abruptly discontinued, and the INN became… history.²

The ImagiNation Network Revival

More than 10 years after the INN had been disconnected, some clever indie developers managed to magically reverse-engineer some of the INN Client routines and began work on a server emulator that used the original client. After reading the very simple instructions, I had a working copy of the INN client connected to their server emulator within about 15 minutes! The server seems to emulate MANY of the INN’s original services, including Shadows of Yserbius! And not only can you connect and play these games, but you can play with other folks of course. The server emulation seems to really capture the original look and feel of the INN, and I’m sure that continued development will eventually provide access to the fabled multiplayer version of multiplayer Red Baron was recently added by the INN Revival team! An opportunity to revisit one of the most foundational online gaming services of the decade is something not to squander. And while you’re at it – toss a little feedback to the INN Revival developers – I’m sure they’d be thrilled to hear some responses to their game.

If you’re having trouble getting the INN to run using the installation instructions, I highly suggest downloading the Windows INN Revival Installer which includes both a copy of the INN client and the latest DOSBox. Mac users should download a copy of DOSBox for OS X, and follow the aforementioned instructions on the INN Revival site. Mac users can go to Infinite Lives for an excellent tutorial on how to get INN working in Mac OS X!

Update: March 19, 2010

I recently noticed that the INN Revival Project has a broken link to the Imagination Network software. I’ve decided to archive the INN client file here for safe keeping – feel free to download it!

Update: June 30, 2010

Richard Cobbett has an excellent review of both INN and the Revival Project on his blog. Even if I don’t agree with his assessment, I think it’s a great review!