Unfortunately, not all of it has survived to this day. Websites were taken down, hosting services collapsed, and people simply neglected to make sure their work remained for the Wyvern community to enjoy after moving on from the game. Some of it has been preserved thanks to services such as the Way Back Machine, but it didn't all make it into those archives and those things that did can be pretty hard to locate unless you know what you're looking for.
As a result, I decided to put together a series of blog posts that celebrate that lost creativity. However, even my ability to dig these things up is somewhat limited. So if you have access to anything that I wasn't able to include or can contact someone who does, let me know and I'll put it up in a future posting.
Wyvern Art Board
Arisu is a great talent whose art has helped to beautify Wyvern over the years. Among her many contributions to our little community, was an Art Board that, sadly, wasn't promoted a whole lot, (it really deserved a mention on the Wyvern homepage) but it did receive a fair amount of attention around 2004 and 2005. Basically, she would post some drawing or graphic she had created, usually with Wyvern in mind, (though not always) and people followed suit.
I'm not really sure what happened with it. I think there was some problem with existing accounts and then some time later you stopped being able to visit the site at all. Of course, it didn't help that there eventually became less players around to do art but, regardless, I would love to see a day where Wyvern is active again and a new art board is able to flourish. In the meantime, here are some high points from the old one:
For many more images you can have a glance through the archives. Just be warned that it would be rather difficult to see everything as it's all fragmented throughout various save dates. To compile the above slideshow I had to literally go through every save date of every page the Way Back Machine had for the art board and even then, there are some things that are hard to view/not saved at all. Ideally, all the data is sitting somewhere, waiting for Arisu to properly find a place to archive it so that it can be easily viewed. But failing the realization of that hopeful fantasy, you'll just have to make do with the Way Back Machine.
If you can manage it, try to see if you can follow the story about the Shoggoth invasion. It was told by multiple people through various pictures and comments. Needless to say, it was a rather inventive use of the board and it's a shame that people never got to do more things like that when that particular storyline concluded.
Epilogue
The above was written and compiled several years ago and saved as a draft along with a number of other posts that I was storing up. Originally, I was planning to release daily blogs for a (roughly) one month period after we reached the stage of my three part development plan that was to involve trying to grow the playerbase. Then, after the game went down, I continued to store and (for a few month period) write additional drafts with the intent to start releasing them when Wyvern returned.
Looking back on those drafts now there's a lot I probably won't ever release since they talk about then future plans for Wyvern and particular ideas of mine. However, I recently thought of this particular post and given its focus on community work I thought it would appropriate to finally make it live. I hope you all enjoyed it. As mentioned above, it did indeed take me quite awhile to put this altogether way back when but that's nothing compared the work that talented Wyvern artists put into enhancing the imagination behind our little 2d pixel world.
Cheers from your friend and tormentor,
Arilou Lalee'lay.
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