Happy TENth birthday, Entropia Universe!

Exactly 10 years ago Project Entropia went "Gold". To celebrate this MindArk announced TEN and Planet Arkadia announced the first event affiliated with TEN.

30th January shall be known as Gold Day.

Let's take a little look back at the way to Gold.

It all started back in 1995 with the initial design performed by two different groups, one in Sweden lead by Jan Welter Timkrans and one in Switzerland lead by Benny Iggland. In 1998 finally the company MindArk was registered to develop what became known as Project Entropia.

In 1999 the first interviews were released, for example the one with Patric Sundstöm at RPG vault. At that time MMOGs were a kind of hype topic, a broad variety of gaming media existed and there was a lot of interest in Project Entropia.

Then, in 2000 the first screenshots became available, one of which is this one:




The plans for Project Entropia were ambitious, as you can see from what MindArk stated in their business concept as of 2001: "One million users simultaneously logged on to our system 24 hours per day. This assumption is conservative."

In 2001 also major steps were taken to accomplish these plans: In May Phase I of Beta testing started with 50 selected participants. Phase II of the Beta was launched in September with 500 participants and expanded to 1000 participants in October.

By the end of 2001 MindArk representatives had probably given more interviews than in the years to come after Gold and a lot of different community websites did exist back then. Members of the Smith and Mining Corporation (SMC) society created the following mining map of the Beta area:



In May 2002 the "Commercial Open Trial" phase began with VU 3.4, which finally opened Project Entropia for a broader public. In 2002 there were also regular chat sessions with the developers and MindArk even published an official Entropia magazine called The Gate.

Everything seemed to be on course for success and in a rather abstract way MindArk's basic idea looked like this (drawing from the patent filed by Benny Iggland in 2002):




With VU 4.2 on 30th January 2003 the game was announced to be Gold and since never anything else was announed you can consider it still to be Gold today. Besides PVP and other features VU 4.2 also gave participants the chance to re-do their avatars, sounds familiar?

Our thanks go to everyone who contributed to the project in MindArk, Planet Partners, affiliated companies and last but not least the Entropian community.

We wish Entropia Universe including all current and future planets all the best for the coming 10 years.

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For much more information about Entropia Universe's history please refer to the EU History Project.

And to stay up-to-date with TEN events please refer to TEN.

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