Click to embiggen -- Hamlet for scale (in silhouette on the platform at left)
If you're still in the 18th anniversary spirit, why not take a trip to see (and explore) the oldest user-created content in Second Life: The looming beanstalk of Steller Sunshine.
The beanstalk's goal is to reach by leaping the top of the beanstalk without flying, which requires some serious fancy Super Mario platformer-type skills.
It was created, as it happens, on March 13, 2002 -- over a year before Second Life even exited. During some pre-show chitchat with Philip Rosedale at yesterday's metaverse fireside, he reminded me that it was actually created by Steller in Linden World, SL's experimental predecessor, then migrated over to the SL grid when that was set up.
I told the story of its creation in my first book:
Linden World was opened to a trickle of Beta users in March 2002; the first to register chose the dubious name “Steller Sunshine” for her avatar. As the Linden staff exited the warehouse office for the night, they left Steller alone to wander the world, which was still a scarcely developed countryside with a small, modern town the team had built, as a content creation demo.
The next day, they got a chance to see what their first citizen had made.
“We came to work,” Robin Harper remembers, “and there on the top of a hill, she had built a cabin with smoke coming out of the chimney, and next to it, a beanstalk that grew right up into the clouds …”
Somehow, overnight, Steller had created not just a thatched thatched-roof home, but a narrative, and a game. The object, she announced in a sign she’d left at the beanstalk’s base, was to get to the top—not by flying, but by hopping, from leaf to leaf. At the top, Steller had created a Cloud 9, her miniature version of heaven for those with the patience and ability to make it there.
It was the first instance of user-created content in their system, and to Robin Harper, it laid the theme of everything that would come after. “I think it set the tone of the way Second Life is now,” as she puts it, “with the expected juxtapositioned with the unexpected.”
Much more, I should add self-promotionally, over here.
What a wonderful excerpt for the SL18 celebrations. Thanks for sharing ♥
Posted by: WingsBell | Sunday, June 27, 2021 at 06:58 AM
Even after all these years I have still not managed to get over the third leaf - platformers in 2D I never got the hang of so still fail at this =^^=
Posted by: sirhc desantis | Monday, June 28, 2021 at 04:24 AM