Hello, friends. After three-and-a-half years, we are trying to wake up the SpiritWars spirits. I would like to provide you with the background and events that brought us to this point.
SpiritWars, an online strategy game, was designed, developed and published by my late husband, Randy Chase in 1998. It appeared originally on Sierra’s WON (World Opponent Network) but a few years later, we took control and ran it on our own servers. I never played a game of SpiritWars—I don’t really like games unless they’re Tetris—but in the early years, I was often present in the SpiritWars chat rooms as Mom. Randy spent time in the chat rooms daily. He loved the game he had created but, more importantly, he loved the players.
Randy had his 56th birthday on February 9, 2009. Eleven days later he died suddenly and unexpectedly. He was alone at the time of his death. Although those who found him attempted CPR and the paramedics tried absolutely everything they could, he could not be saved. The medical examiner and his doctor felt that his poorly controlled diabetes and his smoking caused heart disease. Randy had no symptoms and no diagnosis of heart disease or high blood pressure. At the time of Randy’s death our children Jonathan and Eric were 25 and 14 respectively.
I took SpiritWars offline because I didn’t know how to run it. (I also took Randy’s other game offline for the same reason.) The boys and I have decided to attempt to get SpiritWars up and running again as we regularly receive e-mails from former players expressing their enthusiasm for the game.
Here is the challenge: Randy was a brilliant game designer but a self-taught programmer. The game needs to be re-written to address some (okay, many) programming issues. And because the technology has changed in the last 14 years, there are options that were not available at the outset. I would like to see it rewritten in a language that would allow it to be played on mobile devices or, perhaps, become a Facebook game. But I am a nurse, not a programmer. We would like to get your input on how to proceed. We have no funds to hire programmers, so we want to explore options.
Please use this forum to give us your ideas, your feelings about the game and to reconnect with players you used to know. We had a wonderful SpiritWars community, a group of people who cared about each other, played with honor and treated each other with respect. I will look forward to reading your posts and planning—with you—how to get the game up and running again. Thank you for your help.
Lyn, Eric and Jonathan
