Habitat
IIs Graceville was so popular, that Fujitsu decided
to bring the software to America.. and that they did!
Graceville was redesigned by Fujitsu America and the
finished product was a fairly large virtual world
which they renamed to The Dreamscape. The Habitat
II software had now been given english menus, cheeky
smileys and a stylish new name - Worldsaway!
This service was decided to be made exclusive to the
no. 1 ISP of the time, Compuserve. Very soon,
Worldsaways Dreamscape was given a definite launch
date and the Compuserve community drooled in anticipation
for the service to open. A rolling
demo of Dreamscape, was put up for download on
the Compuserve website. Pretty soon, this world had
everyones attention, including the press!
The browser software, Worldsaway 1.0, was distributed
to homes of Compuserve members around the country,
on a small CD:
A
few long months later, the flood gates opened, and
the crowd poured into Dreamscape like a starving mob.
In its primitive stage, Dreamscape had no turfs, painting,
or luxuries like we have today.
When
the turfs finally opened to the public, you
were unable to glue items down or use advanced features
such as avatar/ghost limiting.
Locale
openings were made into huge social events, where
the crowd would wait patiently for, sometimes hours,
in antipation for that certain door or gate to unlock.
This tradition is still part of todays worlds.
The
opening of Kymers jungle was perhaps the most anticipated
locale opening to-date. The oracles of Dreamscape
put on a hilarious rendition of 'In the Jungle'. As
you can see from the screen shot above, the lions
certainly didnt get any sleep that night <g>.
Still
going strong after many, many years, the Dreamscape
has been the most successful and well-balanced of
all the VZ worlds. Heavily based on mythology and
storytelling, it became addictive to fans of Role
Playing and adventuring.
In
Dreamscapes history, it has experienced everything
from two complete server wipes, to duped tokens.
We hope that Dreamscape will still be as popular as
it is today, in the many years to come.
