While Mordor was a fun hobby project, Demise was the first project I undertook with some seriousness. Wanting to take the dungeon crawl gameplay behind Mordor and evolve it into a style that would be more enticing to gamers, I began working on Demise in 1997. Where Mordor cost well under $20,000 to build, Demise was closer to $200,000. I hired a C++ programmer to create the dungeon engine, artists, and people to do the data entry. I believe our team was seven people at its height. I approached Interplay about the game, and they were interested, but wanted to make it a multi-player focused multi-world game (Infinite Worlds). Unfortunately the relationship did not work out, so I continued with the core team and worked through 1998. During this time, Ultima Online came out and caught my attention, and in march of 1999, Everquest came out. This did have an affect on the development of Demise, which I added multi-player functionality to. At the same time, I realized Demise was a great dungeon romp, but it was not a full living “world” like UO and EQ, so in paralell I began to design the “next game” which was codenamed “HORIZONS”. I began work on HORIZONS as I was wrapping up DEMISE, which released in January of 2000.
