Ahoy there, visitors! Welcome to ol’ Cap’n Bear’s tropical retreat on the digital sea. Don’t mind the sketchy frigates with black flags sailing to and from the island’s sea cave. They simply like their privacy. I wouldn’t recommend nosing around there, though. The crewmen can be a touch rough with trespassers.
Colorful imagery aside, just what is this place, and why does it have a pirate theme? I’ll start with the simple bits first: Blackbear Cove is my personal website for technical and creative projects, blog posts, and gaming stuff. Some of the things I intend to post include:
- Information for the players in my D&D campaign.
- Pictures of RPG minis that I’m painting.
- Technical information for fellow IT professionals.
- Nifty web projects and experiments.
- Occasional blog posts about me, my life, and my interests.
Nobody should expect to see information on how to bootleg software or movies. This isn’t that kind of pirate site. However, I may occasionally post super old stuff (Apple ][, DOS, etc.) that isn’t under an active copyright.
But if this website isn’t one of “those” pirate sites, what the heck is it? Why does it have a huge bear skull and crossbones on the masthead? And what’s with all the fanciful narrative imagery? The answer to that question is both complicated and circuitous, so strap in for a brief(ish) history lesson first.
Once upon a time, there was an extremely fun and popular series of computer role-playing games. This series — Ultima — started in the early Eighties, and effectively dead-ended in the early Aughts. Its creator, Richard Garriott (AKA “Lord British”), was a young prodigy who started selling his games on 5.25″ floppy disks in Zip-Lock bags, but rapidly evolved into a highly-influential multimillionaire. Garriott initially released his titles for the Apple ][ platform, but soon ported them to IBM PC and Commodore 64 systems.
Ultima IV is widely regarded as the apex of this franchise, and Ultima IX as the nadir. Personally, I loved everything from Ultima I through Ultima V. My friends and I obsessively played through them, exchanging quest notes and spell recipes in notebooks emblazoned with ankhs and runic script. The graphics weren’t sophisticated, but our imaginations filled in the details. I still own copies of those games to this day, along with an ornately-decorated binder.
The Ultima series eventually moved to more complex IBM PC computers, and both the Apple ][ and Commodore 64 platforms were abandoned. This was also an era of increased bugginess, rising system requirements, and increasingly-gimmicky gameplay. Ultima XIII took the series in a “platformer” direction that few longtime players appreciated, and Ultima IX‘s bugs rendered it practically unplayable. That’s when Garriott came up with a new innovation: online-only, open-world roleplaying with a vast number of concurrent players. He created Ultima Online using this model, and it heralded the era of the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG).
I’d drifted away from Ultima when support for the Apple ][ platform ceased, but came back briefly to beta-test Ultima Online. The difference between the beta and the final product was minimal at best. Client desynchronization with the server happened with astounding regularity. One moment your character would be walking down a road with a pet, and the next moment your character would appear halfway across the landscape with said pet caught on a tree.
Wildlife populations suffered mass extinctions as hordes of players farmed them to excess. Unscrupulous players cheated UO’s shoddy security model with alarming regularity. And even when the game performed as designed, player “griefing” reached epidemic proportions due to an extremely permissive player-versus-player mechanic.
Ultima Online still runs to this day, and it’s certainly been patched and enhanced quite a bit over the decades, but it’s an artifact of a bygone time. Development on Ultima Online 2 tanked early in its conception, and Ultima X: Odyssey died in production as well. Electronic Arts had bought out Origin Systems — Garriott’s studio — long before this point, and decided that the era of his genius had passed. “Lord British” and EA parted ways on extremely hostile terms.
Years passed. NCSoft brought Garriott into the fold for Lineage II: The Blood Pledge. Lineage was an MMO series from Korea, and NCSoft hoped he could breathe some life into it. Shortly after he came aboard, Garriott worked on yet another original property of his own devising: Tabula Rasa. Like everything else he’d worked on recently, it was an MMO, only this time with a sci-fi theme. It launched replete with bugs and awkward gameplay, and never attracted much of a following. NCSoft shuttered it after a surprisingly short amount of time.
After Tabula Rasa failed, NCSoft terminated “Lord British” altogether. Garriott subsequently sued NCSoft for forcing him to dump his stock options in an unfavorable market, and made many millions more in settlement money than he ever earned in employment compensation. Once again, “Lord British” (briefly “General British” in Tabula Rasa) vanished from the scene for years.
In 2013, Garriott launched a Kickstarter for his next project, titled “Shroud of the Avatar.” Unsurprisingly, it was an MMO. However, he also promised offline modes, “friends-only” modes, and virtual property ownership. Many longtime Ultima fans, myself included, flocked to the fundraising campaign and dumped metaphorical buckets of money over his head. In hindsight, I should’ve kept his past failures in mind. As I’ve mentioned, he had more than a few of them.
During the early stages of development, Garriott and his team at Portalarium (his new company) announced another interesting concept: virtual town ownership. The idea was centered around themed community building and roleplaying, and I fell for this virtual land rush hook, line, and sinker. After some polling and pondering, I ultimately decided to buy two towns — one above-ground island layout, and one below-ground cavern layout — to create a pirate-themed community called “Blackbear Cove.” (See? There was a point to this ramble after all!) I intended to nest the cavern beneath the island, and create a hidden pirate port beneath a seemingly-respectable town.
I bought the towns. I bought property deeds. I bought various decorations. And I commissioned a bunch of art for banners, web portals, etc. Eventually, I’d spent around $4,000 on setting everything up. What happened next will surprise no one.
True to form, Garriott’s team started slipping on their development schedule to the tune of years. In fact, the game remained in “early access” purgatory for much, much longer after its soft launch. Bugs abounded. Portalarium ran monthly “telethons” to bring in more and more money. Features promised on Kickstarter suddenly vanished from the development roadmap. Others arrived in a half-baked, slap-dash form. And my dream of working with the devs to craft a nifty pirate island walked the plank.
Fortunately, at the time, Shroud of the Avatar had quite a robust secondary market. Everyone “invested” in the game as if their assets would only increase in value over time. But I saw the handwriting on the wall, and with the help of a game asset broker, unloaded all my pledge items, deeds, towns, and so forth. When the dust settled, I was only out hundreds of dollars instead of thousands. I stashed away all the graphic assets I’d commissioned for websites, and promised myself to one day find a use for them.
Quite a few years passed, and while setting up my identity verification on Mastodon, I noticed how horribly dated and basic my personal website looked. It needed a serious facelift and some more advanced functionality. So I resolved to create a new site using WordPress, and tailor a more modern theme for it in the process.
Since I’m a big fan of fantasy roleplaying games, I started off with a more basic “tavern” look, but it never really came together. It felt cliched and bland to me. So I wracked my brain for a new theme. I knew I still wanted to cultivate a “high fantasy” motif, but I also wanted something more distinctive and personal. And as I rummaged around in my Google Drive, I found some of the old assets for Blackbear Cove.
Reusing those assets has been both fun and cathartic for me. It’s deeply satisfying to transform the remains of a failed project into a successful one. I might even write up some Blackbear Cove campaign material for Dungeons and Dragons or the Cypher System. It’s a concept with a lot of applications!
As for Garriott and Shroud of the Avatar, he left Portalarium and abandoned the title. Now he’s working on his next game, Iron & Magic, which is an NFT-based fantasy game where you can buy virtual property. The less said about that venture, the better.
Meanwhile, I’m having a blast building something new and better for myself here. Sometimes it’s more fun to play with the concepts surrounding a game than the game itself!
So that’s the whole, long-winded story of how a WordPress site came to be inhabited with ursine corsairs. Ol’ Cap’n Bear hopes you’ll find some hidden treasure here to enjoy. Just don’t steal any of it, or I’ll grab the lash!