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Jim Bumgardner |
We caught up with Jbum recently in his native Los Angeles, where we spoke about the history of the Palace, the phenomenon of "masking," and life in a fishtank.
JB: I created the Palace when I worked for Time Warner Interactive (a division of Time Warner which was disbanded in 1995). I had experimented with programming text-based virtual environments (MUDs) in the 80s, and had been thinking about creating one that used graphics in a simplistic way. In 1994, Time Warner Cable was looking for a game to run on Interactive TV, so I quickly made a proposal that was essentially a visual chat room with gambling (I added the gambling in an attempt to please the business folks at TWC). My motivation for submitting the proposal was simply that I wanted to do some of this type of programming. The original proposal and graphic can be found on my website. The Time Warner Cable folks (wisely) rejected my proposal, realizing that it wasn't really a game (they wanted a simple game like an arcade game) but an environment to play games in. However, some business folks at TWI (wisely) encouraged me to develop a demo for the Macintosh anyway. So I started programming away, and I got Damon Williams who was toiling away in the product testing dept. to make some 3D graphics for room backgrounds. In about 3 weeks we had the first demo, which had an early version of Harry's Bar, smiley heads, and a limited set of props (you couldn't made your own props yet). It ran on Macintoshes over the Appletalk network. At this point my exposure to working Internet MUDs and other virtual worlds was minimal (I hadn't heard of Habitat yet, for example) so I re-invented a lot of wheels and did some things which might have struck seasoned virtual world makers as wrong or odd. I think this helped me to come up with some new ideas, but it also helped me do some stupid things. On the plus side, for example, I used round smiley heads for the Avatars. On the negative side; in my original design, I assumed the "camera" would be on the ceiling, looking down on the room (I believe I was unconciously copying the Nintendo NES game "Zelda" - my son played that game a lot). In the first few weeks, Damon gradually moved the camera down to eye level, which was much better. The history of the Palace from that time to it's initial public release October 15 1995 is convoluted. It underwent a lot of change. Mark Jeffrey had a big impact on focusing it on the Internet. Prior to his arrival it was going to be a dual CD-ROM / Internet system - largely due to TWI’s history as a CD-ROM company.
JB: Hmmm... Why'd I do it? I did it because I wanted to. Why did I want to make a visual chat world? I knew that I could make an interesting experience that people hadn't experienced before. Like an artist, musician or tree house builder, I wanted to make it, and I wanted to share it with people. I looked forward to the time when I could sit in my new tree house and invite friends and strangers to join me inside. That time finally arrived in October of '95.
JB: And the rest is history.
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t's been over five years since Jim Bumgardner wrote "Sparky"
(the in-house demo that would eventually become The Palace software), and
almost two years since he left The Palace Inc. -- but not before making
contributions to the first version of "InstantPalace"; the Java-based
system which paved the way for the new wave of Web-Palace hybrid
designs.
You
are, of course, best known as the inventor of "The Palace" software; the
virtual world / graphical chat system that currently consumes the lives of
millions of people worldwide. Let's get right to the tough question:
Why'd ya do it, Jim?
