Centaur, I kind of remember you, but it's been almost 10 years and it's kind of fuzzy.

I spent probably 2-3 years active (on and off) on the project. I was active on the original forums when Te'ja first brought up the idea and we were still calling it Quest for Glory 6. My brother, TheBlueNinja, was I think the first, at least one of the first, heads of the plot department, before he passed it on to Angus who passed it on to me before I passed it back to Angus or Ianfe or Erasmus or somebody. I met my first girlfriend in a Hero6 developer chat that we had with Lori and Corey Cole back in 2000 or 2001; we had a long distance relationship for like 8-9 months or so that eventually fell apart. Needless to say, this project was a big part of my life for quite a while, and the number of people who had a bigger impact on the project, or for whom the project had a bigger impact on them, is maybe a dozen at most.

A lot of the problem was that we had a lot more people contributing ideas than actually fleshing them out and working on them. This was true just in the plot department, let alone trying to find people to actually contribute art and code and music. I can remember accepting at least half a dozen applications for the plot department after making the applicants submit writing samples, only to have them post multiple ideas for new characters or quests, write maybe one dialogue or contribute to one screen worth of descriptions, and then disappear. It got to the point where we stopped letting people submit new characters and quests, which just took away their incentive to contribute.

I can remember having to sort through dozens of posts of possible side quests and having to try to rework each of them to require as little work for as much actual game time reward as possible, and cut those that couldn't be saved. I can remember having at least a couple of heated discussions with SirElethil, one of the art mods, because I was trying to rescue too much of the content and include too many characters (and in the end SirE was right), and as time went by I think we did start to realize just how much work we had cut out for ourselves, and I can remember on multiple occasions going back to look at old threads about quests that I had fought to keep and realizing that they needed to be cut because we just had too much content to actually produce it.

I think the final straw that made me stop coming back was one quest that I wanted to save because most of the necessary artwork had already been done for it. It required a ghost girl character, and I remember offering to not only revamp the quest write up, but also write the dialogues for the quest and even finish the sprites for the eye and mouth movements for the dialogue picture, despite not being on the art team. I can't remember how much of that I finished. I remember doing the sprites for the eyes, and I'm pretty sure I finished the dialogues but I might be wrong. I don't think I ever finished the mouth sprites and I don't know for sure if I even posted the last of it on the forums. I know for a while I had a bunch of pages in HTML of a database of something for plot, I think for the text descriptions from looking and interacting with various objects on screen since that was probably the area I contributed to the most (and if I could access that part of the forums, I remember thinking that I even wrote some pretty funny lines). I don't think I still have them, the free hosting site I was using at the time probably doesn't even exist anymore and the only hard drive I might have backed them up on got thrown away over a year ago, if it even still had anything hero6 related.

That wasn't the whole story, of course. There's a lot I don't remember. I do remember that for the last 9 months or so that I was active, it seemed like I was the only active person in the plot department, trying desperately to get whatever work I could out of whoever was still posting and trying to do the rest of it myself. I was getting burnt out. For all the hopes we had for the game in 1999-2000, and for all the progress we made in 2000-2002, by the time I stopped posting in late 2002 or early 2003 or so the writing was already on the wall, and I think a lot of the people who were still posting and contributing were doing so as much out of habit and because of the friendships they had made on the team as because they were actually focused on finishing the game. From what I can see when I log in, it looks like the last breath of real productivity on this site was in 2006-7; other than the general forum, most of the forums haven't been posted in since. If a few people are still working on it underground, if the recent posts about the project being revived are true, great! I would still love to play the game - hell, I'd probably even contribute again, but for me, a small part of me died some 7-8 years ago along with my hopes that this game would ever be done, and despite my occasional nostalgia trip every few years since I'm not really expecting much, and I don't think we could ever make the game we all thought we would have finished years ago.

I'm surprised I could remember my password.

I really, really hope that this project can finally get completed somehow, although at this point I really have no idea how useful I would be in that process.