AdventureQuest Worlds
Browser-based RPG chalks up most ever simultaneous players during Friday the 13th event.
LAND O’LAKES, FLORIDA – August 24, 2010 – Artix Entertainment, the small, independent game development studio that runs browser-based and download-free RPGS, is pleased to report that the MMO AdventureQuest Worlds survived its biggest and craziest event in the game’s history. Hosting its highly anticipated Friday the 13th Event last week, the MMO with over 17 Million registered users broke a new record of logged-in players… and consequently broke the entire gaming network.
Never have we released something this big. Which is saying a lot considering we have held more than 20 epic server-melting events. This time around, the combined efforts of 3 spooky ghost stories, a crazy boss battle, 4 brand new zones, 30 quests, 10 cutscenes, 11 new monsters, 30 items, the never-before-heard “BattleOn Song” from One-Eyed Doll, and a bonus ultra boss zone for members did the trick. And with 2 weeks to complete it all… what could possibly go wrong?
Ah, those legendary last words.
Famous voice actor George Lowe made his grand appearance as the main NPC for the event, telling creepy campfire ghost stories with the help of rock musicians Voltaire and Kimberly from One-Eyed Doll. Nearly 90% of the event was voiceovered by these talented celebs, allowing the players more time to battle on and less time spent on reading. Yeah, we know what gamers like.
Getting to work with a professional voice actor was something AQWorlds has never done before. Despite our scripts flooded with blatant typos and run-on sentences and cheesy puns… George Lowe worked his +10 magic and narrated his own version that, of course, owned the original and allowed for much funnier dialogue and hilarious outtakes.
Members of the AQWorlds Team even lent their voices for the greater cause. One of the cutscenes featured Beleen, the pretty Pink-o-mancer, laughing as her army of pink Undead minions attempted to take the world over. Her victorious “Teeheeeheee!” speech bubble needed more oomph other than black arial text; it had to be voice acted by the NPC herself… and it had to be a genuine laugh.
Beleen’s natural weakness: her ticklish armpits. Yes, the chaotic laugh in one of the cutscenes was recorded when Beleen sacrificed herself to tickle torture. There is even video evidence proving this to be true. Youtube or it didn’t happen!
When the fabled day finally arrived, everyone got into work early and manned their coffee mugs. With 3 days of work left to be done — and only 8 hours to meet the deadline — the team wasted no time and feverishly began typing away. 6pm loomed ahead; the closer it came to sundown, the more work we realized had to get done before release. ...how is that… even… never mind.
It was a dark and stormy night… in the middle of a haunted forest… on Friday the 13th…. with one minute left until release. Tens of thousands of players had already signed on to witness history in the making. As the Team rushed to get everything in game during the most hectic moment to date, Artix logged-in to entertain the hoards.
That brave paladin stalled for 2 hours. No one knows how he did it. Sacrificing his keyboard to 34,000 PMs, Artix held off the masses until the Event went live at 8pm EST.
Success! All of our hard work was finally launched as every player /joined the event... and a literal 20 seconds later, our 11 servers crashed. No problem — we can just restart the servers and fix it.
Oh but this was Friday the 13th, and having each server offline just was not unlucky enough. When trying to issue that server restart, we realized that not only did AQWorlds crash their servers, but also brought down the entire gaming network. So not only was the MMO offline, but also our 5 other games.
Needless to say… that was pretty epic.
Once our programmers got the network back up and running, massive amounts of players flooded back in game to experience a Friday the 13th Event unlike any other. Although we had our fair share of bad luck and fearful moments, we are readily looking forward until the next one.
May 13th, 2011. Prepare yourself now.
This Event is still going on for all players of all levels at www.AQ.com. Don’t miss it!
Other Games from Artix Entertainment
Artix Entertainment offers many other RPG titles in addition to AdventureQuest Worlds, ranging from the fantasy realms of the original AdventureQuest and DragonFable to the sci-fi galaxies of MechQuest, WarpForce, and EpicDuel. Artix has enjoyed a high success rate in the past eight years with over 100 million accounts created for their games.
For more information about this Friday the 13th Event, please visit http://www.aq.com/events/spooky/ and: AdventureQuest Worlds at www.AQ.com
EpicDuel at www.EpicDuel.com
DragonFable at www.DragonFable.com
MechQuest at www.MechQuest.com
AdventureQuest at www.BattleOn.com
Artix Entertainment games at www.ArtixEntertainment.com
You can follow or friend Artix on…
Twitter: http://twitter.com/artixkrieger/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/artix
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/artixkrieger
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About Artix Entertainment
Artix Entertainment LLC, is a privately held, game development and publishing studio that specializes in creating online, browser-based, anime-style, role-playing Flash games with a distinctive visual style and high-quality game play. Artix has developed a range of games with storylines that are based in the fantasy, sci-fi, and adventure genre. Content within the games is updated on a weekly basis creating a compelling experience which keeps users coming back frequently for new content and story lines. Artix core offerings are three online RPG games: AdventureQuest, DragonFable, and MechQuest, and two MMORPGs: AdventureQuest Worlds and EpicDuel. Players can visit www.artixentertainment.com for more information.
Media Contacts
Daniel Vasile, Artix Entertainment, at dan@battleon.com.
Doug Mealy, Online Marketing and Public Relations, at dmealy@om-pr.com.