History intrinsically influences the development of every contemporary game, in some form or another. It is impossible to find a game that isn’t in some way – heavily or lightly – affected by gaming history itself.

One reason why we find it valuable and relevant to speak on the history of video games is the very fact it isn’t usual for a developer to speak in such depth on history. This point alone, that it is so uncommon to publicize a title within a historical lens, is not insignificant, especially when it’s a matter of an indie MMO that exists totally outside the industry.

Chaoscraft stems from particular generational waves, or subsets of history. In some ways, it also is influenced by the entirety of gaming history itself. This webpage is written both to discuss past eras and what place this new MMO holds in the big picture.

Chaoscraft stems from particular generational waves, or subsets of history. In some ways, it also is influenced by the entirety of gaming history itself. This webpage is written both to discuss past eras and what place this new MMO holds in the big picture.

1970s

In 1972, Pong was published. This became one of the first major video game industry hits, in essence being widely seen as the first popular video game.

Pong was, as an early simplistic game, extremely basic and one-dimensional. Despite this, it was extremely popular, with many people to this day remembering when it was first released and first played.

Atari was one of the first big companies to invest strongly in the video game market. They recognized soon into the market’s advent people will play any game that tickles their fancies, no matter the textural quality.

In fact, since this time, it’s become a recognized phenomenon many people actually prefer retro games and retro textures, so much so these classics and styles boast very passionate communities of all ages. Atari is a great example of an early publisher whose titles were remarkably original, memorable, and colorful, and whose graphics are not a negative.

Later in the 1970s, we saw the release of other games, a number of which are now household names even among youth of today who’ve never played them. This era was one of the most magical in history. People began to see what joy and challenge there was in the digital otherworlds of arcade-style games. Leaderboards appeared, and so the earliest gaming competitions.

Now, at this stage, we’d like to invite the reader to consider the thesis Pong itself is, despite its rudimentary nature, one of the most historically significant games of all time, specifically on the level of what it illustrates.

What does Pong show us?

Well… Examine the events surrounding Pong then.

A Pong home console was released in 1975, allowing people to play a table tennis style game on their TV screens right at home. How neat. It took the world by storm, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and spawning other versions. Youth especially were abuzz about this new game they’d never seen.

This is recorded history. This actually happened.

Now, it is common to look back at Pong and sort of laugh at how popular it was. If Pong was released for the first time today, it would likely languish in obscurity in some far-off corner of Steam, barely played at all. This is for obvious reasons.

Yet, in 1975, Pong was all the rage. There is one very clear, powerful reason for this.

Pong was, at that time in the world, one of the only home video game systems available. This was the very, very early days of video games. There wasn’t much of a market. There weren’t many companies. Not even Mario Bros. existed yet. It was, more or less, practically just Pong. This was the game back then.

From an objective standpoint, Pong was and is one of the most dry, one-dimensional, rudimentary games ever. This does not inherently make it bad. In fact, Pong was and is quite fun, if you make it fun. Still, it is a fact that Pong is extremely simplistic, with very little flavor, depth, or story. Once again: Not a bad game. It’s just nowhere near a number of other titles that have since taken video games to another level of richness.

This can be termed the Pong Principle, or the Pong Phenomenon. The Pong Principle can be stated thus:

1. People will play dry, one-dimensional games if they are the only major games in existence, especially if their friends and family play them. Pong proved this. It illustrated directly how millions will play a game that is, for all intents and purposes, one of the dullest to ever exist.
2. People will find ways to have fun with any game, even ones like Pong. Fun is not innately tied to the textures, depth, or quality of a game. Fun exists independently. It is wholly subjective.

What the Pong Principle shows us, in 2026, is that, if a company or set of companies can present a game or sphere of games in a light that makes them appear as if “there is nothing else to play” – people will play them. It doesn’t matter if those games are, from an objective standpoint, hollow, shallow games without much depth, variability, or customization in comparison to what they could be if the same company invested greater resources and expertise in the same title.

Entertain the logic here. Games today are not innately bad. None of them, in fact. “Bad” is a very oversimplified and highly subjective term without much meaning. It’s basically meaningless now, it gets flung around so much like so much mud.

We can, yet, honestly evaluate the artistic expansiveness, story depth, customization level, and other qualities of any game. We can look at a game and say, “This is shallower than it could be. This could feature X, Y, and Z artistic styles and it doesn’t. This could have a deeper story. This only lets you customize A, B, and C but it could be more.” This is objectivity.

Another way to state the Pong Principle is: Just because a game is popular does not mean it isn’t a hunk of junk.

Just because the company that made Pong knew they could make millions selling copies of this 2D table tennis game does not mean they had to settle for Pong. They could have taken the tech they’d built and continued to evolve it, to make something far more interesting with greater lasting replayability. Instead, for the sole reason they had no real competitor, they wanted to strike gold and so settled for Pong. This does not in any way mean Pong is all they were capable of. In that same decade, devs proved as much themselves. Atari itself went on to develop much deeper games, showing modern devs that just because you only have the tech for X game now doesn’t mean you can’t develop the tech for even greater games in the future.

On the same token, Atari made a smart business play to earn revenue where they could and then use that revenue to develop games with broader appeal. This point about Atari settling is a way of saying there is a trend by which developers/publishers settle for what they can safely make money on now rather than reach for the stars and rock your world. Perhaps back then, it wasn’t as easy to do this. But today, with the internet, pre-orders, crowdfunds, and social media, you absolutely can seek to go beyond commercial limits.

What the Pong Principle signifies is that, ultimately, even if a game is “bad” or has whatever limitations, problems, or flaws, people will still play it, for various reasons. One of the most prominent reasons is what can be called, for simplicity, market pull.

Over time, as players play and share games, and play with friends, the biggest games gain a kind of “aura” in the same way individuals have an “aura”. What happens over time, then, is that this aura itself becomes a kind of market pull. It is such a popular game, backed by such a well-equipped company, with so much engagement and advertisement, this aura itself pulls people in, so much so that, even if some other, smaller game were to emerge that, to use an old saying, “blows the big game out of the water”, people will still play the big game because it’s the big game, just like people – millions – played Pong solely because it was the big game in 1975.

Further, if a new, smaller game doesn’t even exist, and is only in prototype state, this makes it doubly likely to be mentally discarded in favor of an existing franchise, even if – key point, here – even if many of the same players would enjoy the new game ten times more.

This can be considered a central axiom of the industry.

1. Big games have an aura/market pull. They keep this aura/pull even if they become shitty.
2. Even if other titles – existing or otherwise – would be ones the same players enjoy and feel far more interested in on a deep level, aura pull itself clouds interest and willingness to entertain novelties far outside comfortable norms. Market aura itself functions as a form of peer pressure. If a player begins to entertain weird indie games none of their friends play, they may slowly slip outside their friend circle, especially if friends don’t share their interest.
3. If a franchise can be positioned in a light that makes it appear hot or new, even if, again, it is actually quite limited, half-hearted, or flawed in comparison to what it could be if its developer made a far greater investment, its position is, from a business standpoint, all that really matters.

Pong is not just the first major video game. It is a lesson about the world itself. It doesn’t matter if you publish a game that’s as dry and one-dimensional as a table tennis simulator. If it’s seen as what’s hot, so much so there’s “nothing else to play”, people will buy it and play it.

1980s

Learning from the technological progress and market shifts of the previous decade, companies saw gold in video games, and made it big. Along with Atari, Nintendo and Sega became household names. These two companies in particular set the stage for the emergence of the modern industry.

It is the creator of Chaoscraft’s opinion Nintendo is the greatest game developer of all time. Many Nintendo fans now feel the company has fallen from grace, a common sentiment about other game companies now. However, from a purely artistic standpoint, Nintendo’s iconic stories and universes are so enchanted, musically genius, and original, this level of fantasy depth is in some ways unrivaled even today.

On a brief note about Nintendo, Pokémon’s derivative inspiration from Dragon Quest is a great example of how artists of all walks widely evolve material from past artists. In the case of Pokémon, Nintendo was clearly inspired by Dragon Quest. What they did, however, was take the same types of creature templates and create a whole new universe that in itself is phenomenally unique. Some of our first games were Gen 1 Pokémon cartridges on the Game Boy Color. Pokémon imaginatively evolved the pantheon of Dragon Quest, making a massive mark on history. In the same way, artists today, ourselves included, take direct inspiration from beautiful universes whose traditions can be preserved and given new life in new forms.

There is a difference between cheaply copying an existing work, and paying respects to a source of inspiration whose legacy continues in one’s own work. While it is debatable which form of this Nintendo followed, what speaks most is whether a work has its own lasting, impactful originality, regardless of which parts of it stem from past eras.

Bethesda can be considered the singular greatest first-person open-world single-player developer. Bethesda’s anthology has a far deeper influence on Chaoscraft and our other games than Nintendo’s verse. They pioneered the emotional motif of permanence, where your decisions have real lasting material effects. In other words, Bethesda was one of the first developers to set out on a no-bullshit path. Their games don’t really hold your hand. If someone dies, they stay dead. Where it can be said Bethesda erred is in giving minimal attention to true permadeath and modes that prevent immersion-breaking save scumming, fast travel, etc. Their universes would be picture perfect if you couldn’t just load up a save after making a fatal mistake.

Aside from cocaine and metal, the 1980s saw Mario himself lead the way into the future. Jumping over floating platforms and koopa shells to save the princess from the villain, he carried with him a burning spirit driven by one singular overarching force: Fun.

1990s

In the 90s, games became much more centered around home consoles. Arcades began to become vintage. The N64 and PS1 were released, with many in or around their 30s keeping memories of these original consoles.

What stands out most about the 90s is twofold: Games underwent a complexity revolution, seeding the advent of three-dimensional worlds with a distinctive vivid originality. There is something about these games that glows in the collective memory with a lasting feeling of pure imagination without any stringent regard for formal corporate metrics or anything but enchanted magic.

“The 1990s were such a cool time.” This is a very common sentiment among those who played back then. It doesn’t seem this is like every other generational sentiment about the golden days of whatever era.

The 1990s were actually special. This was the era when video games took on a nature that reflects life itself, contrasting sharply with the 2D default of the 70s/80s. What was created then was a widely known instance of the total opposite of what is now called the phenomenon of enshitification. A better term for this, perhaps, is artistic devolution, a phenomenon covered later in this essay.

So much nostalgia exists around the 1990s because of the artistic purity and originality that flourished then. This is not some lofty, gooey thinking. Examination of popular and even less popular franchises of that era shows clearly a signature romantic charm, like a digital antique untouched by whatever it is that exists today.

Games then were built different. This has been said before by others and will be said again. You could see it visually before you, hear it in the atmosphere, and feel it in your heart. Some say we’ll never see that era again.

2000s

As publishers progressed in clever development of new consoles, new releases, and market psychology, we saw the appearance of high-definition immersive singleplayer and multiplayer with a far more cinematic bend. A few of the singleplayer titles that stand out most include Fallout 3, BioShock, Shadow of the Colossus, Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill 2, and Dead Space, among many others. This is the era when developers first began to see what game design is truly capable of, and how dramatic and compelling virtual worlds can actually be.

In 2004, World of Warcraft released to global appeal. It quickly became the most popular MMO of all time, now commonly seen around the world as the greatest MMO ever. There’s now, over the past two decades, spawned a schism in the WoW community between diehard classic fans of the original game and other groups in the community who often find modern WoW more engaging. For all the debate over World of Warcraft, its expansions, and vanilla, what can be said about WoW with certainty is that there is something very charming, old school, and timeless about vanilla WoW.

This was the first time in history a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game captured a high-definition, fluid world that felt vast, immersive, and texturally sophisticated in a way far beyond 1990s standards.

WoW set the new standard, and has remained it ever since. So much so, just about every single MMO that came after it is influenced by it, including Chaoscraft. World of Warcraft, in turn, was influenced directly by Dungeons & Dragons, EverQuest, the mythos of Lovecraft, and, like the near-entirety of modern fantasy itself, The Lord of the Rings.

WoW captured certain themes and energies very well in particular. Movement felt very fluid. Ambience was stellar and universally familiar. Progression felt meaningful, with determination and patience paid off by that final satisfaction of grasping the epic you want. Guilds became community centers, making WoW itself a kind of society. And dragons… Dragons felt, then, and still do in some ways, like real flesh-and-blood dragons, some of whom could be spotted in the open world. This set the stage for a revolution in MMOs.

RuneScape also became popular around this time. This is a dramatically different MMO from WoW in terms of textures, movement, POV, gameplay, and progression. It is widely agreed in both the RuneScape community and among many in the WoW community RuneScape’s 1990s/2000s era textures do not represent a negative quality whatsoever, but are part of the game’s beauty and nostalgia. There are a few interesting notes to make about OSRS in comparison to WoW.

For one, OSRS was the first major MMO to take loot risk to such a high level. You could – and can to this day – travel into the Wilderness and risk an inventory full of valuable gear, weapons, and supplies, even your entire bank. This was never a feature WoW supported. Even in HC WoW, you do not actually lose your gear or supplies to someone who defeats you in HC combat. Instead you can simply transfer the character off realm.

RuneScape didn’t fuck around with risk. It set the standard for what risk and risk fighting is all about. It gave loot a very finite and precious quality, where just about anything can be traded or lost.

That OSRS looks like it was made in a messy basement on an analog computer in 2001 doesn’t mean it isn’t a kickass game. It’s one of the best. Jagex, for all the debate over it and its game, had the balls to make a game where, if you die, you actually lose your gear.

This is historically significant in its own right. Risk… Death… Gear that can be lost… This is an echo of The Lord of the Rings itself. It is widely recognized that World of Warcraft essentially adapted the core of The Lord of the Rings, in the same way successors adapted World of Warcraft. This is the artistic market cycle.

What WoW always refused to do is embrace Middle-earth’s gritty, bloody nature, where mortals live and die, and keep and lose rings, swords, and friends.

RuneScape kept this tradition alive. Yet, comically, RuneScape also didn’t fully adapt the spiritual core of Middle-earth, instead opting to use wacky medieval models, which no fan would have any other way.

Chaoscraft, as we’ll discuss soon, embraces both parts of Middle-earth: its lifelike quality, and its mortality. Risk is as much a reality in Otherworld as beings with physiques and styles as potently eclectic as nature itself.

It is also the opinion of Chaoscraft’s creator circa 2004-2008 was the golden age of gaming. This is when both console classics like Fallout 3 and BioShock went mainstream and superb original MMOs like World of Warcraft and RuneScape were around their peaks.

This is a unique time when developers were making high-quality cinematic creations and were doing so with a clear eye for art. Art itself drove their business and global popularity. This is the time when vanilla was still vanilla, and its first expansion, The Burning Crusade, ushered adventurers into an outlandish parallel dimension as captivating as old Azeroth. And the time when people were still trading in Varrock Square, before the Grand Exchange turned the RuneScape economy into an impersonal numbers game. This era – this is when we were closest to what gaming can actually be, if developers give a damn.

2010s

This is the first era when we began to see a decline in the fundamental quality, integrity, and originality of modern video games, despite the production of technological advancements. While this can certainly be debated and involves a degree of subjectivity, when examined closely in historical context, the 2010s reveal an age characterized foremost by a deceptively corporatist slime that employed actual psychologists in an effort to better understand how to push the right buttons in the market and manufacture profitable products. As time went on, developers more and more saw their games as “products” specifically, even using this exact term at points. The essential pattern is that, the more money gets involved in the industry, the more focused developers/publishers become on making money by creating games designed to make money – in stark contrast to an artist who creates from the heart without regard to whether their creation is lucrative.

This pattern is somewhat abstract and amorphous. It is not the kind of issue you can physically put your finger on and say, “See? That right there!”

It is faceless, soulless, and driven by one singular end. There was always going to come a point in gaming history a developer decides to state the obvious. That elephant in the room… It stinks… quite a damn bit…

There is no pragmatic point in just calling any mainstream games “bad”. You have to be more specific. What is it some find so poor about them?

It’s a topic that merits extended open discourse. We also don’t find it’s very worthwhile or constructive to trash talk any franchises or publishers in particular. We don’t only say this for professional reasons. It is far too black-and-white to say any one particular publisher is all good or all bad. Some of the best games have been made by what are now some of the slimiest publishers.

In all seriousness, as much as many find the industry began to decline around this era, there is still hope for big studios to evolve with the times. They probably will eventually. It’s how the eras tend to unfold.

So the 2010s can be classified as an era of technological advancement that coincides with what some see as a slow artistic decline. More and more, characters have moved away from personal individual beings toward preset, predesigned, prenamed “heroes” who play clones of each other. Developers began to copy each other, making similar games with similar styles. Why? Because this is how they calculated the highest profit.

This is boring. It’s a straight-up boring paradigm. If you’re making a game just to make money, your game is artistically dead on arrival. Without fail, games like this will not ever embrace experimental freeform art so long as they retain a philosophy of sole profit focus.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money. Every company has a right to pursue their own ends. However, there is nothing wrong with wanting nothing to do with games driven solely by this hollow purpose. You can feel in their aura what it is they are at core.

Apex Legends, to be fair, is one of the only games to do the hero shooter model well. Its movement, mechanics, zany atmosphere, rawness, verticality, and flavor stand apart from some of the more generic hero shooter styles. Apex could be argued the best overall hero shooter of all time, and will probably be forever. They’ve got a really good formula, for all the complaints about parts like the game’s microtransactions.

There is also a lot of money to be made making a game that appeals to the finer points. A game that stands apart from the industry itself is bound to hold very high potential for high profit, ironically finding popularity in a deviation from paradigms with popular bases.

The 2010s also brought with it a global wave of a now mainstream art style that can be classified as a glossy hypermodern style. This glossy hypermodern is everywhere now. Everywhere. It’s tempting to call it “teeny-bopper” but it isn’t only played by teens. Frankly, there is nothing wrong with being critical of the overuse of a generic, copy/paste art style. It’s far more aligned to universal appeal to allow a range of styles and textures, rather than forcing a single set one. There is something about the glossy hypermodern style that can be felt as loathsome, eventually. It presents itself like a “hot new game” when all these studios are straight copying each other, point for point and style for style.

The 2010s are a mixed bag. What is most remarkable about them, it could be argued, is how blatantly companies began to copy each other’s core models. They became obsessed with this cardboard cutout hero model. It’s blasé at best. This model will eventually be seen one day as profoundly creatively limiting on the player level. Who would rather play a prenamed figure than their own custom character, if given the choice? In the long run in particular, we mean, and not just for the two-week boom/bust cycles new releases follow.

Maybe some would, to be fair, but it seems clear the vast majority would, if given the choice, prefer to play their own. Why, then, is this not the standard? Well, one probable reason, as a final note to this section, is that, when you center your game around prenamed copyrighted figures, you can sell merchandise of those figures. It’s sort of genius, when you think about it.

This is not a coincidence. We’ve gone from the likes of World of Warcraft and RuneScape, where you can make your own character with your own style, to games where you’re basically playing someone else’s character. And why? So they can sell you T-shirts and hats and shit. It’s just a straight-up mundane model.

Chaoscraft is going to make a big statement about how badass and personal characters can be. Their stories, their personas, their life and death. There does come a point just about anyone finds it a touch more intriguing to make one with your own personal flavor.

2020s

We come at last to the present era. The 2020s can be defined as a period in gaming history when developers finally reached the territory of an infinite kaleidoscope of potential. Engines have grown so advanced, eyes can now be rendered to fluidly reflect their surroundings. This is a far, far cry from Space Invaders, Super Mario Bros., and Crystal Castles.

In the current year, engines have become a proverbial Pandora’s box. It is no longer a question of what engines can do. It is a question of what devs are willing to do with engines.

This is the overriding theme of the 2020s:

What are you, as a developer, willing to do with an engine? What is your vision?

It’s not about technological progression anymore. We are, in practical terms, at the gaming singularity. This is it. This is the era when eyes can reflect like mirrors. Engines – and AI – have become so powerful, they can, with patience, channel imagination itself 1 for 1.

What does this mean? Well…

It means the cat’s out of the bag. Developers can’t claim they don’t have the tech anymore. We can make any kind of game we want, with any rules – or none.

Thus we come to this odd new indie MMO, Chaoscraft.

Currently, Chaoscraft is as abstract and conceptual as World of Warcraft was years before 2004, when it was first released. Before 2004, WoW was not an official live MMO. When it was first conceived, it was done so in the psychedelic ether of imagination, the mind itself.

This is the origin of all games. Every single one.

How did WoW become a reality? Devs made it. They made it with resources, skill, and organization. This applies equally to Chaoscraft. Except, the difference is, we aren’t an established developer. We’re out here in an obscure corner of the internet, right where this game belongs. It does not belong on Steam, or anywhere else. Its launcher will be published here, and it’ll go live.

As much as one might expect this piece to talk about Chaoscraft in depth, the game speaks for itself, in the abstract form it exists. Engines are a Pandora’s box. We’re ready to open it, with or without support.

See the site for yourself, and peruse the history of games, and ask yourself if it would make history. This has always been what history is about. One day, someone reviews existing selections and decides to make something that opens a yet unopened door.

Recurring Themes

History repeats itself, or so they say. Another take, for you: History repeats itself until some get tired of all the repetitions and want something fresh. How about that?

If it sounds jaded, maybe that’s because it’s a widespread feeling now. Does no one else feel this way? How do you break the cycle? It’s really very direct.

You make a new damn game. That’s not the problem. It seems the real problem is that so much faith has been lost in the industry, and in some ways in indie devs in particular given their status and resources, it becomes hard to believe someone could make a game like this. It’s not about whether the game would be popular. It’s an issue of thinking it must not be real because it doesn’t follow the expected standard, and so must only be a dream. It seems clear to us, even with popular creator reacts to this content, there is bound to be doubt about the sincerity, legitimacy, or feasibility of a project this epic and boundless in scope and scale.

It is going to take gamers seeing the reality of this game, what it is, and what it symbolizes for it to receive the support it needs to realize its fullest potential. For this purpose, as we do anticipate eventual reacts, we’d like to state this publicly so this project’s feasibility is clear:

When you buy an Chaoscraft pre-order, or donate to the crowdfund, the money is deposited directly into the company’s business account. Once we make a few hundred thousand dollars, we can pay for the levels of developer salaries we find suitable. None of the three devs who currently work on the game need extra money for personal expenses. We want to hire skilled pros, especially 3D modelers and similar pros, who can channel this vision and their own imagination into being. When you support us, you fund developers. Sharing this website with your circle and social media is a way to get it off the ground and further development.

We’re very patient. However long it takes, we’ll be here keeping it real. If you have an eye for history and see what’s in the making on this oddball site, it’s just a matter of time before we can show you a playable game.

In the years after our flagship game’s launch, we’re going to build a team to explore making a retro home console that uses its own cartridges in the style of the N64. This console will feature its own original titles made solely using 1990s technology. When folks look back at that era, we often think it’s lost forever, never to be seen again. All it takes to rekindle that nostalgia is a quest to make a console like the ones back then, a console that runs similar games of varying ratings. We’re certain this retro division is going to be a big hit one day, among gamers of all backgrounds.

History, then, is destined to be a story that cannot be written well by strangers sitting around a table, trying to come up with something catchy.

You’ll write it yourselves. That’s real entertainment.

– Dev Team