The Monkey and the Apple

Wyvern's coming-out post after five dark years offline, and a rare on-camera look at what running a one-man MMORPG actually involves: the game's best customer-service incident happens to the developer's own wife, and the rescue gets attempted live from a Jython prompt while she watches. Partway in, the monkey simply stops taking orders (Steve concedes he never figured out why), and the next remedy up carries a real chance of converting her hard-won treasure into the default monkey inventory, an outcome he reckons is "legal grounds for divorce" in most states. A quiet retcon hides further down: the celebrated language-hunting years of the mid-2000s turn out to have been a productivity crisis on this very game, a "Grail-like quest" Steve now rates unsuccessful except for the rants it produced.

The platform survey in the back half has aged into period grievance — Objective-C string handling, in-app-purchase sandbox miseries, Twitter's API quotas — and reads now mostly as the comedy of a solo developer negotiating with the App Store machine from his knees. The player material holds up better. When the game came back from its outage, a hundred or so old-timers materialized, some buying iPhones just to play, and the sixty-odd alpha regulars (Japan, Nigeria, New Zealand, Spain, Toronto) were logging eight-hour days around the clock. The post signs off promising a launch report in a few months. It never came; the blog's next entry, six months later, mentions only in passing that Wyvern reached the App Store that December, then spends its whole length on the one promise this post did keep, the vow to say more about Kotlin.