Over the years I’ve played a lot of MMOs, and with a couple of notable exceptions such as World of Warcraft, they’ve all become inoperable relics in my game collection. For example, I was looking for something to write about and decided on a random grab from the dead MMO shelf…
And so I present 2007’s “Tabula Rasa”.
If you’re above a certain age, you probably recognize the name attached to this title; Richard Garriott of Ultima fame… AKA “Lord British” himself.
And here’s the back of the box which talks about some of the game’s features:
Now, while I found Tabula Rasa to be engaging and fun – one might even say I liked it – it was the swirl of events, rumors, and stories surrounding the game, Richard Garriott, and NCSoft that were probably more entertaining.
See, Richard Garriott had teamed up with NCSoft to make the game, and somewhere in the middle of development he fucked off to space for a while which wasn’t super helpful. Then NCSoft concocted some story about him leaving the company to tank the game so they wouldn’t have to pay him, which only partially worked… The game did tank, but Lord British sued the crap out of NCSoft for this and won like $30 million in settlement.
Either way the game only ran for like a year before being boarded up and eventually bulldozed to make way for other NCSoft titles.
I think I got my money’s worth out of it though. The box was like $50, and I paid for 8-9 months of the game before it became a ghost town. But during that time I probably sunk a couple hundred hours into the game.
Speaking of boxes, this was late 2007 – back when we still bought games in boxes off of store shelves… Which is something I really miss.
Game stores were a cool place to get your games, because they tended to be full of other gamers and you could be among your people for a bit. That and the physical boxes usually contained a bunch of goodies that went with the game – like maps, books, pins, etc, etc.
Here’s what came in the basic box for Tabula Rasa – along with the receipt from the now long-gone neighborhood Game Stop just because I left it in the box:
The booklet in the lower right is about a half an inch thick and contains lots of artwork, lore, tricks and tips for game mechanics, and other useful items for the game.
So, that was the rise and fall of Tabula Rasa. It was only around for like a year, but it was fun and turned out to be an interesting footnote in gaming history.
Listening to "Distress Signal" by Lazerhawk