So I need to make one last There.com post just to say goodbye.  The pic above is the first screenshot I took in There.  Most of the people in the screenshot, especially Twiddler, Marykins, and Emilia are people I knew in The Sims Online, and they encouraged me to sign up for beta.

Our primary activity in The Sims Online was making gnome statues to the point we were getting pretty sick of it.  The first item I submitted (and got approved) was a shirt with a gnome on it.  (Don’t tell anyone, I stole the gnome image from the TSO load files)

I never became a big developer in There, I sold enough stuff to get by. I lucked out and got a funzone (Ebony Rock) and made enough money to pay the rent on the thing. I left the funzone open for anyone to schedule events, because I was mad that There sold them off and left it up to the owners to decide who gets to use the funzones.  There was much more fun when they were all open and anyone could schedule an event.  So I was able to buy one that I could save and leave open.  Eventually, I stopped playing There and was running short of therebucks needed to keep up the rent so I sold it via auction. The thing sold for T$300,000 (about $150 US), and never had to buy Therebux again.  I think I still had around T$220,000 left when There closed.  When all the gains and losses are added up, I basically played for free, so Makena can keep my left over Therebucks if they want.

A community as large as There is going to attract some troublemakers, and no one was as notorious as Jopy. He got into There in early beta and took to heart the beta mantra of testing everything.  In the early days before port-a-zones, we could drop stuff anywhere we wanted, Jopy purposely ruined every scenic location in There with gigantic signs and lots of other crap.  He was well hated, but after a while many of us just started laughing at his exploits. A ton of improvements were made thanks to Jopy.  Anyways, one day I found Jopy left his custom buggy out for me to steal, and I hid it in the last place he would ever look… the egyptian sarcophagus.  It was very Jopy of me.

My first day in there, I got a “try it” hoverboard and liked it so much, I bought a jet black advanced hoverboard and rode that thing everywhere.  From day 1 until my very last day in There, I was on that board wandering around the countryside.  Somehow I never achieved “Legendary” status on that thing, but came damn close. I never achieved legendary status in any activity, but ended up as “renowned” in most of them.  Hoverboarding was my favorite activity…

… with underwear parties coming in a close second. 🙂

One of the There newspapers had a contest for a There version of a famous painting and I submitted a There version of “Nighthawks” by Edward Hopper.  I came in second if I remember.

One of the bigger There independent developers Kittenkat came up with a way to change all the graphic files in There and turn There into a winter wonderland.  The idea of a wintery landscape eventually was added to the game in the form of “frosty” island.

Nudity was not allowed in There of course, but there were plenty of ways to fake it.  All you had to do was replace one of the shirt files with a skin tone file.

In the early days of There, I created a “nude patch” replacing the lame reward shirts with female bare chest shirts.  The reward shirt for hoverboarding “Ride” was the female bare chest for caramel skin, the most popular skin tone.  Eventually, they replaced the reward shirts with better prizes.  Months later hoverboarding “Ride” shirts became rare and were selling for ridiculously high prices.  The culprit was my nude patch which somehow became an underground sensation, especially at dance clubs.  If you had carmel skin, and wore a “ride” shirt, everyone with my nude patch would see you topless.

I preferred the Latte skin color which used the much less expensive “Host” shirt.

That is not all that I was famous for. I created the first ever “picture quest”.  Quests that tell stories were all the rage, but one of the things you could do with the quest kits was link to a web page.  So I took screen shots of me at 10 nearby locations, and in each quest clue I would give you a general direction to follow and a link to one of the screenshots.  The next clue would be located wherever I was standing in the shot.

I only did one, but the concept was popular enough that dozens of other picture quests appeared around There. The most popular variation on the theme, however, was the cross country buggy races. I loved those events, and won at least twice.

I mentioned before that the first ever official live concert in a virtual world by a signed band was held in There by British band Steadman.  You can listen to the concert here.  After the concert I was caught ass grabbing one of the band members 🙂

So many memories, but it is now over 😦  One last pic to post.

Wish I was too!