Furcadia
12/7/2023
The previous article posted on this website discussed FurryMUCK, one of the many, many MUD (multi-user dungeon) games that populated the early Internet. In this article, I will be discussing Furcadia, an early Internet MMO (massively multiplayer online) game that in many ways was a natural extension and continuation of FurryMUCK and its other text-based predecessors; in fact, the genre that Furcadia belongs to is also quite literally known as the graphical MUD genre. The most glaring difference between Furcadia and the MUDs that inspired it was that Furcadia has fully illustrated, animated visuals and avatars — as with FurryMUCK, Furcadia is still fully functional and playable today. It even holds the Guinness World Record for longest-running social MMORPG!
The experience of playing Furcadia also contrasts to other similar games of the time with its built-in creative toolkit for players to use to make custom worlds and maps, which are known as Dreams. The process of creating these Dreams is called Dreamweaving (Lukas Stormskull, 2020). Players can both create environments from pre-existing objects or make their own custom pixel art to use as in-game elements, and the game's scripting language, DragonSpeak, is known for being highly accessible. In a 2003 interview with some of Furcadia's developers, the creator of the game stated that it was "designed specifically to be very, very easy for players to learn, use, and have fun with." (Drew Sikora, 2003.)
This creator goes by a few different names; he is most well-known as Mr. Cat, but he often went by Felorin in the heyday of the game. He began programming at age 14, entered the video game industry professionally at just 17 (Dogpatch Press, 2021), and went on to work for Origin. While working on the Ultima games in the late 1980s, he met a fellow developer with similar interests, Manda (short for Amanda, but she is also known as Talzhemir on Furcadia and in other Internet spaces). They both departed from the company in 1991 to work for an online gaming company called Tangent Online, later renamed to Total Entertainment Network (TEN); however, this only lasted for a year. It was during this time that Dr. Cat and Manda founded Dragon's Eye Productions, an independent game studio (Zeos, 2001).
Shortly after, they began conceptualizing what would become the company's first game, DragonSpires. It was launched in 1994, making it one of the earliest graphical MUDs (Furcadia Timeline) — though far from the first, as Dr. Cat points out in a 2001 interview, mentioning Habitat (1985), which was produced by LucasFilm Games and is described on Wikipedia as "the first attempt at a large-scale commercial virtual community".
Above: the original UI of DragonSpires. (Via Scroll Wars Wiki.)
DragonSpires was not a furry game, but it did share elements with its anthro-centric descendant, most notably user interface and art style. (I speak of this game in past-tense because the original version was lost in the early 2000's; however, a Java version has been put together using the original's source code, which is still functional, to my knowledge.) Dr. Cat and Manda soon got the inspiration to remake the game with a fresh coat of paint, but decided to change the project into a different game entirely. Manda states: "At some point I turned to Dr. Cat and said, flat out, 'Let's make it furry.' And everything just seemed to 'click' into place, because we were both fans of that genre." (Zeos, 2001.) Work began on Furcadia in August of 1995 with a team of two and a budget of $50,000, Dr. Cat's life savings (Zeos, 2001)(Sikora, 2003). It launched on December 16 of the following year, 1996, and Dragonspeak was made fully functional in March of 1997 (Furcadia Timeline).
Above: an early Furcadia screenshot, circa 2001. (Via Furcadia.)
From the start, Furcadia was designed to be social and community-oriented, rather than gameplay-oriented. A system was implemented where users would volunteer to greet new users and show them around the map if they wished, and another group of volunteers were designated "question-answerers" to help people understand gameplay mechanics and find specific communities. These groups branched out into more specific categories, including the Masons, who helped with the Dreamweaving process; the Pixels, who helped with making art; the Scribes, who specialized in webpage design; the Bugge Hunters, who helped find bugs, glitches, and coding errors; and the Guardians, who enforced the game's rules. Dr. Cat was himself a Guardian at the start of the game, and wrote all of the initial rules for player interaction (Matt Barton, 2017).
But Dr. Cat was not the sole creator of these systems. In December of 1997, a user known as Emerald Flame joined the game after her eleven-year-old daughter expressed interest in it (Barton, 2017). Emerald Flame, also known as Emmy Katz, became so invested in creating and socializing within the Furcadia community that she became a member of the staff and was entrusted with creating the official volunteer system in October of 1998. The following year, the Beekin Council was created, a group in charge of managing these volunteers (Furcadia Timeline).
Despite not having human avatars ("hyoomans") until over a decade after release (GreenReaper, 2010), Furcadia's playerbase has always been comprised of both furries (or "furres", as they're called in-game) and non-furries. According to a commenter on Justin Olivetti's article about the game on Massively Overpowered, users who wanted a human avatar would use the feline avatar because its face was the flattest, and would simply adjust the colors to make it appear human. That being said, the game was, of course, very popular with furries, and played an important role in growing the online furry community and connecting people who otherwise would not have met. Dr. Cat believes that the game helped to bring more women into the furry fandom, which started out as heavily male (Dogpatch Press, 2021), and its influence is clear in more recent, widely known animal-centric MMOs such as Animal Jam and Ponyville, both of which are similarly built around roleplay, socializing, and player creativity.
Furcadia grew quickly, tripling in users each year for the first few years of its existence (Sikora, 2003), but by the 2010s, it was on the decline due to outdated software, a heavy reliance on the in-game shop, and a general lack of updates to keep players interested (Xephas Gracepaws, 2021). So in 2012, Dragon's Eye Productions launched a Kickstarter page to raise money for a new edition of the game, looking to massively overhaul the game's engine and creative tools. They hit their goal of $100,000 in a month. The update was released four years later, in 2016, entitled "Furcadia: The Second Dreaming". This update was meant to be the first part of a series, and many players felt it was not as monumental as it was promised to be. Progress updates on the Second Dreaming Kickstarter page ceased after 2017, and further development seems to have come to a halt for now.
Before I list my sources: here are a couple things that I didn't really end up using for this article, but would like to share anyway, because they're cool!
Sources:
"Furcadia - Tenth Year Timeline!" Furcadia, 2006. Webpage.
Justin Olivetti. "The Game Archaeologist: Furcadia." Massively Overpowered, 8/26/2017. Online article.
Lukas Stormskull. "Spotlight On Furcadia." MonsterBrainSoup, 4/10/2020. Online article.
Patch O'Furr. "History of Furcadia, the Guinness Record-winning furry MMO, and Q&A with co-creator Dr. Cat." Dogpatch Press, 6/7/2021. Online article.
"Furcadia - Screenshots." Last updated 9/24/2001. Webpage.
Zeos's interview with Dr. Cat, presumably conducted in 2001. I found this page through the previously listed source, the "Screenshots" page. Online text document.
Drew "Gaiiden" Sikora. "Interview with Dragon's Eye Productions." GameDev.net, 2003. Online article.
Matt Barton. "Matt Chat 368: Dr. Cat on Furcadia." YouTube, 2/20/2017. The fifth and final part of this interview; they are all on his YouTube channel. Online video.
Laurence Parry, AKA GreenReaper. "Furcadia adds "Hyooman", Rodent races." flayrah, 1/13/2010. Online article.
Xephas Gracepaws. "The Rise and Fall of Furcadia | The History of the World's Biggest Furry MMO." YouTube, 5/14/2021. Online video.