About Reign Of Blood - The History Of This Vampire Game
Reign Of Blood was founded in the United Kingdom and opened to the world by DarkAsh on April 27th, 2006 - over 20 years ago. There are many cheap copies of text-based games online using leaked code from years ago, but you can be assured that Reign Of Blood is 100% unique and all the code was written using my own hands. It took around two years to create, with development starting while I was at college. Development has never stopped since launching in 2006.
How Reign Of Blood Started
At college in the mid-2000s, a few friends and I were playing a couple of online text-based games, and we were completely addicted to them. We logged on each morning when we loaded up the computers before class started. As time went on, a couple of my friends quit the games to focus on studying. One of the games in particular had an owner who was overall doing a bad job at running it. I thought to myself, 'I bet I could do better', so I set out to learn about creating one. I was studying computing at college at the time, but what I needed to know in order to create a game I was not being taught. We were learning basic HTML, but we were barely touching languages like PHP and MySQL databases at that time.
So, I learned how to do it in my spare time. Over the course of a year, I taught myself the basics needed to create a game. I didn't have some grand goal of what I wanted to make or what I wanted to achieve, yet I created a simple text-based game and called it "The Core". I put it online and passed it around to my friends. As you can imagine, it was very buggy and a complete mess - but there was potential! After "The Core", I created a more sophisticated game (while continuing to learn) called "Imperial Empires". I released that game and actually got a small community going.
The Happy Accident
Reign Of Blood was actually an accident. "Imperial Empires" was having some server issues as it was being hosted by three guys at my college who wanted to start their own hosting company, and just like me, weren't particularly experienced. While I was waiting for those issues to be sorted, I took the scripts of "Imperial Empires" and quickly changed a few things and created a version which was vampire-themed for a bit of a giggle, as I always had a love for vampires. I temporarily hosted it elsewhere while they were sorting out the "Imperial Empires" hosting issues, so the small community I built up didn't just leave.
It turned out to be a huge hit. The community of "Imperial Empires" actually preferred the idea of a vampire-themed game. So, as I had no personal attachment to "Imperial Empires" - and everyone preferred the vampire theme - I scrapped the other theming and concentrated on building Reign Of Blood. I worked through all the core structure and changed the theme and features to focus on vampires and built upon that. After a further 10 months or so of work, it was at a position to be fully out of beta and released to the world.
Coming Up With: Reign Of Blood
The name "Reign Of Blood" was partially thought up by one of my close friends at college, who sadly died a couple of years after. I am not particularly inventive when it comes to naming things, but I've always loved the name Reign Of Blood. He also designed the first logo/banner using Paint Shop Pro when that was a thing. We made good use of college resources.
On April 27th 2006, it was ready and released to the public.
Following the news of the release, players of other vampire games - some I had never even heard of at the time - came flocking to Reign Of Blood. The secret to Reign Of Blood's continued success is simple. It has my complete dedication; I listen to the community, I constantly update and improve the game, and people find it refreshing that there is a game they can devote their time to, knowing it won't be abandoned or that this is some soul-sucking corporation slaved to quarterly profit growth. Other online text games have crumbled away over the years, even ones trying to mimic Reign Of Blood in some ways, but none match the dedication and endurance this has had.
Still Going Strong
I've been dedicated to the development of the game for 20+ years, with updates being made at least weekly. 5,624 game updates and additions have been made since opening in 2006. There are not many text-based games out there that operate with that much dedication. This results in trust people have to put their time into something that isn't going to just go away.
Other games have risen and fallen, but people have seen Reign Of Blood continue to stick around and still get cared for after all these years. I have created a game where it's worth spending your time, and you know that it will be worked on for a long time to come and not abandoned like many other games on the web, as I have no-one to answer to but myself, and don't have corporate targets to hit.
As Reign Of Blood expands, it also keeps up with current technologies. Mobile devices are being used more, so Reign Of Blood Mobile was created for players to be able to play using their phones without being disadvantaged. Even with the gaming industry constantly changing, there will always be a desire for text-based games. They have longevity, you don't need the most up-to-date GPUs, and they allow your imagination and creativity to run wild. As the internet gets filled with AI slop, people yearn for websites and experiences that remind them of the web's golden age, and Reign Of Blood is here to fill that need.