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Masquerade
Masquerade is the oldest WoD game out there. It started up in 1992, and why a game of supernaturals set in Albuquerque should still be attracting players after all this time is beyond me. It's got a history, good and bad, but the fact that it can still sustain itself does say something for it. Many of the people who ended up forming their own games got their start on Masq. The game closed in early 2007. Masquerade I (1992-1994) (Literally days before DarkMetal's creation.) Caine still walks the Earth, and does so in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And embraces people. But only if they give really hot TS. That's right, Caine (played as an NPC by the drunken, unfaithful God of the MUSH) embraced his TS, and quite possibly RL partner and makes the first 2nd generation vampire in 5000 years. Who then uses her new found powers to either create or join a biker gang. Caine also frequented one of the first popular bars in WoD-dom -- Tipitina's. This is from the game's cached website:Masquerade was one of the first Storyteller MUSHes developed and publicly released. Its initial development began in December, 1992, and it opened for public role-playing in April, 1993. The game was ICly set in Albuquerque, New Mexico and actually housed in RL Albuquerque by Gideon, the founder/God of the game, on phobos.unm.edu. In this first incarnation, the game stayed active until August, 1993, when it went down temporarily. When the MUSH reopened in October, 1993, it was with a mostly new staff, and a brand new database. Masquerade then stayed up for a few months before closing again sometime in January, 1994. When Masquerade reopened in April, 1994, the database was unaltered, but minor staff changes had been made. Masquerade then stayed open and stable until August, 1995, when it could no longer remain at unm.edu. The game re-opened on January 6, 1996, at Masquerade.org 4444, at an ISP that wanted to have MUSHes located at its site. This location lasted until April, 1996, when the individual offering Masquerade this space left the company. Masquerade subsequently moved to its masq.strange.com 9999 address; this site was located at Diablerie's account, where it had a home for several years. In August, 1996, Masquerade started experiencing some database corruption. So, a project was set up to lower the database size and "port" the game, copying the data to a "fresh" database. During the port, Gideon stepped down as God, and Diablerie became chief of staff. The port was quite successful, and Masq ran on that particular platform, TinyMUSH WhiteWolf version 2.2.2 #28, for a number of years. Masquerade moved once again in April of 1998. The database was transferred to our present server, which was more stable and easier for us to administer, and the domain name of masquerade.org was re-registered for the site. The game ran fairly smoothly, with only a few minor crashes, from 1998 until 2001. Unfortunately, in May, 2001, creeping corruption led to massive database crashes and the game became extremely unstable. A decision was made to do another database port and start over with a new platform. Over the next few months, a version of the game remained "live" for players, although no new apps were accepted during that time. In the meantime, Masquerade was being rebuilt and recoded from scratch. The grid was completely rewritten, while the platform was changed over to MUX 2.0.20.307p5 #5. The final "swap" was done on September 25, 2001, when the new database was set in and players were switched over to the brand new version of the game. In March of 2010, they re-re-opened at masq.org 9999 and established a Wiki (which they started to work on in January of the same year), with the game's spheres covering Vampire, Shifter, Mortal, and Mortal+ (under 2nd Edition Revised) and using the MUX 2.7.4.31 codebase.
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