When the virtual city of Cybertown went dark, its citizens rebuilt it

Illustration by Melissa Mathieson / The Verge

It can be difficult to return to your hometown when you can't find a link to a website.

The experience of members of Cybertown was for nearly a decade. A group of former citizens have devoted themselves to resurrecting their old home. Cybertown Revival launched a pre-Alpha version of a new Cybertown earlier this year. Hundreds of former residents banded together to rebuild the digital city, using everything from former users' posts to their hard drives.

The original Cybertown was launched in the early days of online games, a few years before the likes of Ultima Online and Everquest became second homes for millions of players. It followed a formula pioneered by multi- user dungeons, which are mostly text-based worlds composed of rooms, objects, and avatars, designed as much for social interaction as structured gaming. The city echoed real life in a way that many digital spaces of the time did not.

Cybertown was a digital metropolis that players could experience through text-based descriptions but also by entering a 3D world inside their web browser. Once they moved to the city, they could choose the location of a virtual house that they could fill with virtual possessions. They could spend their time zipping around cafés, shops, a town plaza, and earning digital money called CityCash by selling self-coded digital objects or holding jobs. The homes of former residents were deactivating by higher-level Mods. There was a jail for rulebreakers.

Some people were baffled by the world. A writer from the Orlando Sentinel got banned after going on a robbery spree spurred by falling into Cybertown's virtual pool. It was an incredible discovery for many others. The project participants were asked to give their first names or pseudonyms. The platform supported the import of custom avatars that looked like ordinary humans, as well as Christmas trees. Signing up could feel like joining a real community in a digital world years before that. The developer Blaxxun Interactive maintained the lion's share of power through a semi-mythical figure called the founder.

Image: Cybertown Revival

Along with platforms like Onlive! There was a gap between text-based worlds and 3D virtual ones. The city is full of bright, sharp-angled rooms with minimal decoration and low-poly graphics from the 1990s. Even people who were too young to remember Cybertown can find its influence in newer projects like the game, which was inspired partly by Blaxxun's glossy promotional spreads.

Cybertown lasted into the next decade. In the early 2000s, cyber-ethnographer Nadezhda Kaneva said Blaxxun boasted over a million residents, but only 350 to 500 people were online at any given time. It never made it to the attention of Second Life. After being sold by Blaxxun in 2003 and implementing a monthly fee, the platform went dark in 2012

Cybertown was a place for many people to meet up for the first time.

Rayken started searching the web for anyone who remembered Blaxxun or Cybertown, from small Facebook enclaves to random commenters. He started with a group of five or six people. A few members with coding skills were allowed to pitch in as the group grew. It has around five core developers and a slightly larger group that contributes technical help. Many more users have contributed assets to the internet or their offline collections.

Virtual worlds can produce memories as meaningful as physical ones, with people meeting new friends, learning new skills, finding businesses and even getting married in them. They are more fragile than real-world spaces. Many are controlled by the companies that created them. Code can be lost as players drop off.

Fans of these worlds have gone to great lengths to keep their communities alive. There was a migration from the game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst to the official relaunched version of World of Warcraft. The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) have fought for legal exemptions to get around locks on old software. Habitat, one of the first graphical virtual worlds, was re-launched by MADE as Neohabitat.

CTR isn't working with a larger initiative like MADE, but it has two things working in its favor. There is a group of residents who are dedicated to its revival. The second is Blaxxun's choice to develop the world with Virtual Reality Modeling Language, an early attempt at a standard that could do for 3D graphics what ubiquitous, interoperable browser code had done for text. The fact that objects made with it can be rendered in modern web browsers via Javascript makes it possible for us to drop the original files into the world.

The 3D spaces were only part of the experience. The source code that powered some of Cybertown's most vital features, like its chat client and CityCash, is not accessible by CTR. While members of the team have had sporadic contact with Blaxxun employees, they had to rebuild the back-end systems from scratch, and many of the features haven't yet been added to the pre-Alpha version.

The CTR pre-Alpha has a small online footprint. If you visit today, you will find mostly empty environments. Many of Cybertown's original areas can be explored through a portal on your browser. Residents reminiscing about the long-lost spaces and saying hello to fellow citizens they haven't seen in years can be found in chat messages beneath the 3D rendering.

Three years before Cybertown launched, author Neal Stephenson came up with the term metaverse, which is what CTR is doing now. Black Sun was the name of a metaverse club in Snow Crash. Cybertown's creators and users explored digital real estate and a virtual economy decades ago.

Cybertown's new iteration isn't trying to compete with newer virtual worlds. The pre-Alpha is open to anyone who clicks the blue link on the Cybertown Revival login page.