A ’90s digital community comes back from the dead.
, for instance, recounts getting banned after going on a frustrated robbery spree spurred by falling into Cybertown’s virtual pool. But for many others, it was an incredible discovery. “Cybertown was personal,” says CTR’s founder Lord Rayken. Among other things, the platform supported importing custom avatars that looked like anything from ordinary humans to animated Christmas trees.
Cybertown’s death never sat right with some former citizens, though. “Cybertown was a place for so many people to meet up in a virtual world really for the first time,” says Rayken. “Coming back again many years later, I was surprised to find that no one had any concentrated efforts for reviving the website.”
Rayken says he started searching the web for anyone who remembered Blaxxun or Cybertown, from small Facebook enclaves to random commenters on Twitter and Reddit. And starting with a group of five or six people, he founded adedicated to bringing it back. Slowly, the group grew to over 300 people, including a handful of members with coding skills that let them pitch in. Today, it operates with around five core developers and a slightly larger group that regularly contributes technical help.
Virtual worlds can produce memories as meaningful as physical ones: people meet new friends, learn new skills, found businesses, even find love and get married in them. Yet they’re far more fragile than real-world spaces. Many are controlled by the companies that created them or dependent on fleeting hardware and software standards. As players drop off and code becomes obsolete, they can be lost forever.
For years, though, fans of these worlds have gone to tremendous lengths to keep their communities alive. MMO players flocked to servers for an