Koster in 2017 | |
Born | September 7, 1971 (age 48) Long Island, New York, U.S. |
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Occupation | Game designer |
Spouse(s) | |
Children | Elena Koster David Koster |
UO set new standards in virtual environment design. Its visionary lead designer, Raph Koster, introduced many innovations [...]
At the 2002 Game Developer's Conference, an audience member asked the panel on 'Building the Next-Generation PW' how he, as a writer, could ensure the integrity of his story in a PW. The reply came from panel member Raph Koster, the creative director on Star Wars Galaxies and former lead designer of UO: 'Get over yourselves; the rest of the world is coming. Okay? People value self-expression. Is 'story' going to go away? No. Is careful crafting going to go away? No. Are the professionals engaged in that going to go away? No. Well, except that IP—the concept of intellectual property—may, but that's a whole other side discussion. The thing is that people want to express themselves and they don't really care that 99% of everything is crap, because they are positive that the 1% they made isn't. Okay? And fundamentally, they get ecstatic as soon as five people see it, right?'
That people did play is a tribute to the game's design team, led by Raph Koster. Raph had a background in virtual world design, having worked on 1992's Worlds of Carnage (the first DikuMUD to have an embedded scripting language) before moving on to found LegendMUD in 1994 with Kristen Koster (his wife), Rick Delashmit, and others. [...] LegendMUD was itself an innovative game, boasting a number of features to promote role-playing that had never been implemented before. For example, unlike other DikuMUD derivatives, LegendMUD was classless (players don't elect to be fighters, magic-users, healers, thieves, or whatever); this concept was to shape the design of Ultima Online powerfully. The wide-ranging playing experience of the designers meant that they could draw on ideas from many other codebases, too.
1994: The award-winning LegendMUD, codesigned by Koster, launches (www.legendmud.org—still active today).
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