In response to the recent coverage in Washington Post and Waxy Links, I wanted to post what I remembered about Kings of Chaos and its predecessors.

One of the primary reasons that Kings of Chaos got so popular so quickly is that it originally “featured” copyrighted images of Lord of the Rings characters, right in the midst of their theatrical releases. This was before KoC’s “Age 1″, which I suppose could be considered a beta period? In any case, they soon disappeared, but not before most of my personal friends had signed up and begun linkspamming the thing around.

See Vigo Mortensen for yourself here through a Jan 18th cache at archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20030118181556/http://www.kingsofchaos.com/. Unfortunately, it looks like the rest of the images may be broken, but Vigo does appear, and I clearly remember the rest of the images being LotR characters.

I believe they were present for a couple of weeks while the linkspamming was rampant enough to generate critical mass, then they switched to generic ‘flags’, as you can see here from another cache on Jan 26th: http://web.archive.org/web/20030126121826/http://www.kingsofchaos.com/

There were several other website-based MMORPG’s going strong before that point (anyone remember the name of that gangster-based one? i can’t recall at the time and don’t have my chat logs around).

For each of these services, the value of the game is caused by a large, active player base. Getting to that critical mass determines whether it is destined to suceed or fail. I don’t blame them for using LotR imagery to get started, because it was no doubt very important for generating interest and participation in their particular fantasy world. However, I think the use of these characters to get people registering for the game was a strong factor in the unique success of KoC.