Monday Memories: The Story of the Second Life Beanstalk, Featured in The Wall Street Journal's New Podcast

One of the highlights in the Wall Street Journal's new podcast series on the founding of Second Life is when the reporter visits Steller Sunshine's beanstalk, the oldest user-made object in Second Life. And you can still visit and try to claim it yourself:

[Click here to teleport]

Created on March 13, 2002, over a year before Second Life even existed, it was imported from the pre-Beta Linden World. I told the story of its creation in my first book, The Making of Second Life:

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.

More here, and listen to the WSJ's podcast above. (Beanstalk part at around 29 minutes in.)

Comments

[Valentina Kendal]

https://www.flickr.com/photos/valentinakendal/5608759330/in/photolist-9xCmK5-a4b97e

Hope I won't get in trouble for quoting from your book on Flickr Hamlet, but it was 11 years ago :)

[Wagner James Au]

Love it! Thanks for quoting the book!

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