8: PSO

Back in the day before MMORPGS all looked after your precious player data with these new-fangled ’servers’, budding adventurers looked after their own character by keeping their progress saved on the VMU memory card proudly slotted into their gloriously chunky Dreamcast controller. Whilst this did make the characters feel more important to an extent (no doubt this was also enhanced by the somewhat irritating inability to keep more than one character on each memory card) it did leave the game slightly more susceptible to hackers.

Alright, so that was probably an understatement; Phantasy Star Online was hacked to the max. It wasn’t all bad though, this often helped forge a tighter sense of community for those of us who wanted to avoid cheating (although the same could be said for those who wanted to cheat their tits off, i’d imagine). The problem was that often you’d not know if you were playing with hackers, and the result of somehow displeasing one of these individuals could well result in disastrous consequences.

DRAGON!!!1!

As well as the hackers’ seemingly effortless ability to duplicate items and create level 100 characters within a matter of minutes, some also had the ability to manipulate your character. Considering this was back in a time when it was trickier to find hard reliable facts on the internet, the known abilities of these hackers were passed around like Chinese whispers: Gamers trading cautionary tales which told of the terrible fates that had befallen other less fortunate players.

With these tales in mind pangs of fear could strike at any point; the game would often crash for various reasons - gracing gamers with only a blank screen – leaving you then unsure of whether your character would even exist anymore once you’d booted up the console again. Whilst total deletion was a pretty frightening prospect, there was always a seemingly worse fate: getting NOL’d.

To the right: Nol herself. Imagine being like that, FOREVER.

Rather than simply having your character fade into the ether, he or she would be permanently transformed into a low level NPC from the single player game known as NOL. With the fear of having all your hard work so ruthlessly wiped away without warning, with every server glitch or game crash a PSO player’s heart would sink to their ankles for fear of what they might return to find after hitting reset.