EG Core: What gave you the idea to do A Tale in the Desert?

Teppy: Around 1995-96 or so wrote a text game called Laissez-Faire, based on a stock market where real people could play together. It allowed for things like loaning money among players, and basic stock trades. People who played started doing things like leveraged takeovers, greenmail, zero coupon bonds. Most were kids that didn't know the names for what they were doing, but this sort of emergent behavior was fascinating to me, and let them be truly creative, even in this narrowly focused game. I always felt that MMORPG’s were almost like single player games with chat rooms that you and your
friends could play together. I wanted a game where the gameplay was driven by the fact that the world was multiplayer, not incidental to it. So that was the motivation for A Tale in the Desert.