RoK Nostalgia

RoK has been online now for over 6 years, and many people have been playing for a large portion of that time. Over the years, as we've seen the Realms change and grow, we often reminisce about the old times, and how it used to be. Here are a few images and comments from older players taking a trip down memory lane...

Through the magic of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, we can get a peek at what the RoK website looked like from back in 1999-2001. This site required prospective players to submit an application before being allowed to download the game (even though the password was always just automatically emailed to you...we don't even know if anyone looked at the applications!). The username and password to access the "restricted" portion of the site were alphatest and izotu, words that bring up instant nostalgia for those of us who were around for "closed alpha." You can even access some of the old message boards through Archive.org's site.

Screenshot #1
A very old screenshot of a previous client layout, one of many it went through before evolving into the current look which replaced this one in early Spring of 2000. (It also shows Lan, an ex-Administrator, warping into the room.) Both this screenshot and the one below show the old character images with white backgrounds. Only the first few images for male and female were available at that time, and it was a major treat for the players when we got more options on character images.

Screenshot #2
A screenshot of the client showing the mouse navigation that was eliminated with the addition of the AutoMap in May 2002. It's a little hard to read in the text, but the System News shows the Race Update that downed Goblins, upped Saurians, and changed several other races to the max stats they have today. At that time every character was reset to level 1 and given gold to level back up. It was such a problem for these low level characters to get to the next town without getting pked (at that time you lost divine protection at level 8) that staff introduced a one-use "warp ticket to trollheim" that would take you from Terra to the gates of Trollheim. The ticket sold in the Terra supply shop for 1 gold and disappeared if you tried to walk out of Terra with it in hand.

Old Hallowed Woods and Ruins of Abistoril Map
Sargon's website and maps were the ultimate resource for RoKers back in 1999/2000. His site was located at KaosHelp.Hypermart.net but is no longer available. This is one of his old maps showing the original Hallowed Woods and Ruins of Abistoril. Almost all ne/nw/se/sw directions were removed from the game when the "New Movement" system was thought to be the way movement was going for RoK. The system never got the bugs worked out and was removed in favor of the AutoMap system.