Project 1999 - Dev stories about Cracktusk, Allizewsaur, etc.

https://web.archive.org/web/20021207...s.jsp?id=50163

Quote:

Why's there an elephant in that birdhouse?

GG: I remember when you guys first let out Cracktusk. You had him on zone-wide aggro.

JB: Nothing was funnier than Cracktusk.

GG: He'd come running across the whole zone just to get you. Cracktusk was this elephant in South Karana and he had this zone-wide aggro. I remember talking about this when we were guides. Like what're we supposed to do? They were like "nothing, he's content." Okay, fine. My job, when it got slow-which wasn't often-would be to follow Cracktusk and see what he was doing. He was getting 30 or 40 heads a night.

JB: The most hilarious thing was, that people would step across the South Karana zone border and stand on the bridge. Well Cracktusk would make a beeline right for them. And invariably Cracktusk would jump in the river. They'd be looking straight out and Cracktusk would be swimming through the river underneath the bridge, and as soon as he got to the player, he would pop up on top of the bridge and kill them.

GG: I love the guys who would go seek refuge in the top of the aviak camp, and Cracktusk would go "boom boom boom" all the way up to the top. And when he was done he would just jump off.

JB: I never saw that.

SC: I saw him go up. All the players are running up to the top, figuring there's no way he's coming up the ramps. Then he runs off after somebody else clear across the zone. It was great.

GW: That's where you know you're getting people who immerse themselves in the game. When they go up and look at this tower and say, "No way would that tower support an elephant. Why would the aviaks build a tower that would support an elephant's weight?"

GG: The only [way] he would get up there, which was so beautiful and poetic justice, if he tried to go through the towers he'd get stuck. But what was happening, on both of the towers, there was someone exploiting the aviaks there. So what he would do is, he would go up, see the guy exploiting the aviaks, kill that guy and go around. This was before they put in the exploit code. So he'd hit the one guy, go around and go all the way up to the top and jump off and away he went.

SC: There used to be dead people all the way up the ramps.

Quote:

Where'd that Allizewsaur go?

MB: The Allizewsaur story with the boat. You've got to tell that story. It was a little while after release.

JB: No one has ever done anything to the Allizewsaur as far as changing his pathing. He's Godzilla. He's out on an island in the middle of the Ocean of Tears; he's a huge lizard that's colored differently from everyone else. One day a party was fighting it. And when he got down low on life, he turned around and ran, and rather than run away on the island he swam out into the middle of the ocean. It had something to do with where they pulled him, fighting him. And they're like what are we going to do now? We can't kill him. So they leave. And instead of coming back to the island once he heals, he swam around in the middle of the ocean and got onto the boat path. He went to the nearest pathing point and that was the path of the boat.

SC: He got onto a path he wasn't supposed to be on at all.

JB: So he goes over to Sisters Isle on the boat path and parks himself at the dock. But the thing is, at the end of the dock, it's really deep for the boat. So he's sitting there, like the Lochness Monster, with just his eyes and Allizewsaur above him. And by this time we've got a gang of people around the computer, and everyone's looking around wondering what's going to happen when the boat comes. And everyone's speculating is the boat going to pop on top of the Allizewsaur's head and make some ridiculous like boat out of the water thing, or is the Allizewsaur's going to pop up on top of the boat. And we looked and here comes the boat... loaded with people, because back in the day people couldn't teleport around. All of the spells were in after retail, but no one was high enough yet to have them. So we're sitting there, and I'm thinking the Allizewsaur is going to pop up on top of the boat, that's what's going to happen. Sure enough, the boat stately pulls up to the dock and stops. The Allizewsaur immediately jumps up on the deck with the players, just going *smash* and they're just dying instantly. He's huge, and players are all low level. People are like "Alli"... "Alizza"... and a bunch of letters and then die.

MB: We all sat there and rolled on the floor. We really weren't supposed to interfere with it. We really tried never to interfere. We sat around the computer going, what're we going to do?

JB: So the Marie Celeste takes off, everyone dead onboard, and the Allizewsaur drops back down off [the boat] and swims back to his island.

Quote:

Of Early Bugs and Bind Anomalies...

JC: Remember when I went KOS in Qeynos?

JB: Who was that that you were killing? Oh that was Chanda Miller's boyfriend. He kept killing Chanda Miller's boyfriend, that gnoll, and turned KOS in Qeynos where he was bound.

JC: Back in the day, your bind point was South Qeynos right where you started the game, in the city.

SC: You were the one who actually made it so we put in the alternate bind points.

GW: The day that you guys enabled faction, everyone who was bound in the city-you know trolls and ogres started characters in the city, they'd die, pop in, die....

RE: There were people who would get bound in the air. I guess your bind point would get corrupted or something...

LP: Yeah...

RE: I remember one of the petitions I got from a guy, "I'm falling." And I'm like, "well you'll die...there's nothing I can do." He said, "no you don't get it, I'm continually falling."

GW: You know some of the bugs we had in beta were just really, really funny. One of the first ways I killed myself was with a damage shield, O'Keils radiation with a wizard. I'm like a level 12 wizard that I was playing for a while, and the way damage shields work, they would damage whoever damaged you by whatever means, so I'd cast O'Keils on myself and melee gnolls. So, inevitably, one day I finally cast a damaging spell on myself while O'Keils is on me. So, I cast a spell and it damaged me for casting a spell on myself, so 2 pts of damage. But then it damaged me again for damaging myself with the damage shield. It turned into a loop.

LP: One time I cast O'Keils on the thing you were fighting. I was like, "Ooops, sorry!"

JB: We're fighting goblins, and not only are these goblins tearing into us, we're losing huge amounts of hit points every time we hit them.

GW: Yeah, you could actually buff and heal NPCs back in the day.

DN: One time Kendrick was going to show me how to fight gnolls, and of course inside the tunnel they were just too tough, so we're fighting the one that's outside of Blackburrow. And we get him down real close, there were actually 3 of us fighting this one gnoll, and I hit lay on hands.

GW: I think it was your first day in game that we found that bug where you could kill other players.

LP: Oh you mean whenever they went link dead?

GW: Yeah, whenever anyone went LD it was like open season on them.

LP: That was mean though, he was like, "ok pull your plug." And I'm like, "I'm not pulling my plug!"

GW: I was trying to convince you, help me test something here real quick.

More old roundtable developer interviews can be found here, for anyone interested. If anyone has or happens to find screenshots of these occurrences, please post them here. Will add screenshots if/when any can be found.