Historical note: having seen what MUD2 had done to "Island of Kesmai" on NVN, Kesmai asked to put it on their nascent Aries system. Unfortunately, its being nascent, their software wasn't entirely functional. Despite dire warnings that we hadn't flood-tested the game, they opened it up to the eager GEnie gaming fraternity in what turned out to be the most disastrous launch in MUD2's history. The players saw that it crashed; they went away, and they didn't come back. The fact that the game was available on Delphi and CRIS too meant we did get some newbies eventually, and, thankfully, there were a few members of the GEnie community who gave us a second chance. There were other problems, though. It was so hard to update the game's software (using some weird mechanism of one-time-pad passwords and 3 different firewalls) that new versions did not arrive as quickly as they did on other incarnations, if at all. That said, the game did manage to reach the necessary critical mass of players to ensure its survival, whereupon Kesmai closed it down (and all its other "DOS" games(!)) with a whole day's warning.