Thirteen1

MMORPG Tibia turns 15 this year. In January 1997 Tibia went online for the first time and never stopped running ever since.

CipSoft, the developer of Tibia, prepared many different events for their players in order to celebrate this special day. The party has just begun and offers a lot of activities for all players, for example:

• Each day, another well known member of CipSoft appears as a NPC in-game and hands out rare presents.
• The capital city of Thais is completely decorated in order to celebrate “Kings Day”.
• A new island called “Nostalgia” has been created and is open to the public. It is filled with items and weapons which still sport the graphics style of the early days.
• The oldest player guilds of Tibia receive some special recognition as well.

What started as a student’s project at the University of Regensburg soon became one of the most popular MMORPGs worldwide. At a time, when Google was still one year from release, 4 former high school class mates decided to create a graphical interface for their beloved text MUDs and therefore invented Tibia. The first player logged in only 3 days after launch of Tibia on a University server.

Today, more than 300,000 players log in on a regular basis. Some of them have accounts of over 10 years of age. According to mmorpg.com, Tibia is the oldest, constantly running and commercially successful MMORPG in the world.

In order to keep the game interesting for so many years, CipSoft, the developer of Tibia, releases two major content updates per year. In addition, Tibia experienced many technical and design upgrades. Just recently CipSoft released a flash client for Tibia which is currently in Beta stage.