A walk through the Wayback Machine

It wasn't just griefers that cost us the building interiors orignial - but the hit on loading when you zoomed by them.

In the "You never know when the past might become relevant again" department, meet Flashfire:



Prince Flashfire made his first appearance in 2003 before the game was even in beta test. He was created by the Cryptic Studios staff as part of a blaster archetype walkthrough that was intended to show prospective fans what the character creation and power assignment process would be like as well as what blasters would be like as an archetype.

What makes Flashfire more than just historically interesting? Well, if you've run SSA 2.1 (or you clicked through and read his bio already) then you might recognize someone new in town who is closely related to Prince Flashfire:



That's right: Wavelength is his mother! Suddenly after nearly nine years Flashfire gets promoted from obscure made-up example to hip and current modern day lore. One has to wonder what he's up to, these days.

There were other archetype walkthroughs back in the day. Herald for instance, whose bio has some interesting implications for the world of Paragon City if it could be considered canon.

Where are those "walkthrough" characters now, and what are they up to in 2012? Perhaps Wavelength is merely the first of several "long lost" characters that are primed to reappear in Paragon City after all of these years. Time will tell...

*EDIT*

For the curious, here is the "classic" Archetypes page with links to all of the original archetype walkthroughs. Sadly, the Wayback doesn't ever seem to have captured the tanker walkthrough. Thanks to First Contact, however, we do still have a record of his bio: Dreadnought.

Great Post.... I now know the name of one of the heros from "one" of the original log in screens. Maiden Justice was it. I always wondered what the names of some of those heros were.

I will be checking further into that web site.

Anaku

Holy Heavenly Curves Batman

Love the post, SlickRiptide. It reminds me a lot of my reactions when I watch the earliest trailers for the game versus what they have now.

(Like finding out War Witch was a villain.)

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

How about an early character select screen - it used to show origins and you could only have 8 per server back then. This was from my wife's account:

I kinda miss those origin icons.

Oh, I have some of those. I think these are from beta, so mid- to late-March 2004:





This is one from the headstart, so April '04:

Wow, Atlas used to bear some resemblance to Tokyo.

Neat thread.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thirty-Seven Some interesting stuff here! Especially the original name for the "Carnival of Shadows" was "Soul Scavengers."

I've seen it suggested (confirmed?) that Malta were originally known as the Twilight Men and that the Killing Crew became the Freakshow or the Sky Raiders (accounts I've seen vary). I notice that the Kings, the group from which Kings Row takes its name (or is it the other way around?) are listed as an active group rather than the historical one they are in current backstory. That still leaves several villain groups unaccounted for: the Horde (Rularuu, possibly?), the Soviet hero/antagonist group, Fear Factor, the Seraphim ... There's lots of material there for enterprising AE writers, I think.

Interestingly,* just before my gaming computer gave up the ghost a bit over a week ago, I was writing up a "reboot" of the game lore based on how I'd implement player preferences if I were a developer, which I called "If the Forums Wrote the Lore." In it, I went back to the early Rick Dakan era of story development, as seen in some of that old material, when Crey was the primary antagonist. I also added a "fanatical guys who want to wipe out magic" faction, since that kind of enemy seems to appeal to players ... and called it "the Seraphim" in honor of the old villain group list.

*Well, interesting to me, anyway.

Herding entire zones and nuking them

Seeing those "I'm too far away from my mentor" messages...

oh god the horror

Yeah, that's one "feature" Ye Olde CoH can keep.

Wow, I wish I was around in those days. Looks like great fun.