History of Shadowmere
Shadowmere has actually existed for many years and has had a few different names, owners, and versions. Here is it's history:
The game was originally created in late 1997 under the name of Forgotten World, by Dan Kavanagh. The game was originally hosted by a company named Def-Con, thus when you hear someone speak of Def-Con they are speaking of this time frame and not of another game. When they game was originally created it was based inside of a java applet with six basic races (humans, dwarves, high elves, dark elves, wood elves, ogres.)
As the game started to expand, Dan felt that the applet was too limiting. Dan started to expriment with converting the game from a java applet to running it based upon java servlettes. Also, Def-Con was unable to support this new kind of system that Dan wanted to run. One of the old players, known as Pathfinder or Crowz, came to Dan's aid and offered to allow Dan to use his server space as a means to keep the game running. Pathfinder found out that he did not like the new version of the game, and asked Dan if there was some way that he could have a copy of the old version of the game for himself. Dan decided to lease the old version of the game to Pathfinder for a fee, and he allowed Dan to keep the server space. This server with the old code was known as FW Classic for a while.
Come the winter of 1999 a new face had shown up within Forgotten World, Riva of Alorn. This was a dwarf who embodied the values of a dwarf in the game, economic superiority over the others as a means to keep himself in the lead. This worked fairly well for Riva, but he wanted more. Riva talked to Dan about purchasing the game. Dan made Riva set up a test server and run it for a while, so that he had proof that he was capable of running the game. Riva did this and it was known as Server2. Riva also changed his name to his real name, Eric.
Eventually, Dan sold all the rights of the name Forgotten World to Eric. Within this deal, that technically included the version of the game that Pathfinder was running, as he only leased it and never bought it. Eric through a fit about this and wanted to take over Pathfinder. After threat of lawsuit, Pathfinder changed a few things around in his game and changed the name to Narmir. Shortly after Eric got the idea of owning both the .net and .com to http://www.forgottenworld.com/ (though he already owned the .com part). We discovered that there was another game named Forgotten World that was already using the site http://www.forgottenworld.net/ and its copyright came through about the same time as Dan's did. Angered that he could not have both the .com and the .net for his site, Eric changed the name to Shadowmere.
As Recorded By Fubar
-More to be added as time permits.
