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By N2H
Welcome to Raph Koster's personal website: MMOs, gaming, writing, art, music, books.

Club Marian launches

September 20th, 2007

Gene Endrody wrote to let me know that MaidMarian.com has launched Club Marian.

A massive multiplayer social hangout where users from around the world can chat, dance, drive and create music in a fun 3d environment. Club Marian features three islands to explore, a cool music maker, emotes, customizable avatars and a sports car to drive.

Like Sherwood Dungeon, it’s a full-screen 3d Shockwave experience.

Gene specifically says, “check out the dance floor by the Tiki Statues with disco lights on.” :)

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8 Responses to “Club Marian launches”

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  1. Morgan Ramsay said on

    That’s pretty cool. Metaplace better provide the ability reconfigure controls though…

  2. Terry Pack said on

    I think its interesting that they laughed at SWG because of the singers and dancers in the cantina. Now we have a game that the focus of the game is hanging out at the club.

  3. Gene Endrody said on

    “I don’t get it” is the response I’ve been getting from certain camps as Club Marian has no gameplay in the traditional sense. I did a “game” a few years back called Marian’s World that still does almost the same numbers as Sherwood. Club Marian is the intended successor to it. Basically the idea was throw a few toys into a world, don’t give the players any goals or guidance other than “It’s a party!” and let them figure what to do. Works with a teen audience – not so well with adults. The way the numbers are looking and based on previous launches, it will be the most popular game on the site within 2 to 3 months.

  4. Raph said on

    Wait, you mean Marian’s World ALSO gets over a million monthly uniques?

  5. Gene Endrody said on

    Shouldn’t have been to hasty in that statement. According to Statcounter, yesterday I got 79,301 plays of Marian’s World relative to 94,938 plays of Sherwood. That’s what I based my statement on, but I checked Google Analytics today and yesterday I got 142,000 unique visitors – 30% of those played Sherwood and 13% played Marian’s World. The Google numbers are usually what I base stats on, so I’m going to retract what I said. I still continue to be shocked by Marian’s World numbers, considering it’s three years old and was my intial early experiment in Shockwave based 3d chat.

    Yesterday Sherwood won two PopVox Awards at Vancouver’s Vidfest. Best Game and Homegrown: Best of British Columbia. It’s a vote in, popularity contest so you’re fan base and players determine the winner. The field included games like Need For Speed Carbon, NHL 07, Company of Heroes, Scarface: The World is Yours and Mario Strikers. It felt a little like the high school geek running for class president – so I’m a little light headed today.

  6. Gene Endrody said on

    I should add that most players play 1.7 games in thier visit to MaidMarian.com, so their is always overlap in counting uniques. Having multiple games with different mechanics supporting each other has always been part of the strategy.

  7. Gene Endrody said on

    Yup, it was a StatCounter configuration problem – 39,063 plays of Marian’s World yesterday. Sorry, nothing to see here.

  8. Sir Maro said on

    Yorng! Amazing game, Gene, simply amazing. It’s all good, with the car (That handles like “your mom” As some people would say, lol) and the wide variety of cuztimization along with the music, the disco lights, the track around the island, lol, 3 islands. I only have one tiny small complaint. Why did you remove the glicthes? During the closed beta when the game wasn’t on the site, they few of us players loved getting into the ramps, the trees, the rocks, floating, menu glicthes, car in objects glicthes and all that stuff. It was what gave the game really fun-ess-ness… If you ever got bored, go to a different room and entertain yourself with the game that USED to be a glicthfest. oookaayy…That wasn’t a small complaint, but still good game!

    And I am VERY VERY VERY surprized at uterly shocked that you won those awards. It was open to the public around the WHOLE freaking world! That shows that MILLIONS of people like the Underdog Sherwood Dungeon to Mario, Need for Speed and all those other great games. (Well, Mario is just getting old and ridiculous now).

    And I saw your Latest Developer Diary entry, And I am so excited for the new skins, the male, skelley, Dragon and Spiders look completeley awesome. The Female one is….weird, The female looks like a Cave women, maybe just alter it’s mouth and eyes a tiny bit and there, perfect I’ll say! I can’t wait for the Dark Knight, two. The Avatars are awesome right now, I can’t wait for the new ones. Also I’m glad that you have more colors like Yellow, Light Blue and Purple! We defiantly need new colors, the old ones are getting…well old! lol

    Well, that’s my two Cents, great everything basically.

    ~Sencerly, Sir-Maro

    P.S: Un-patch those Club Marian glicthes and work on the female avatar :) :P

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