Wyvern in Game Informer
A full right-side column in the “Mod World” feature, on p. 153 of the 2002 issue. The original scan and a complete transcription — in case the photo of a twenty-three-year-old magazine page is hard to read.
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Transcription
Maybe you don’t like the time investment required for EverQuest, or superheroes aren’t your bag and you’ve no inclination to live in a city of them. And if you think about it, paying twelve to fifteen bucks a month to play a game can be a lot of money. Well, if these statements echo your own feelings and Kingdom of Loathing is too sarcastic for you, Wyvern might tickle your fancybone. With a style very reminiscent of the delightful Exile series (if you don’t know about Exile, it’s your loss), this completely free MMORPG has a lot to offer. And there are even MacOS and Linux clients available!
Wyvern is classic western fantasy to the core. It’s also tiny and can probably even run on your grandma’s Pentium-60. It’s got deep character customization, plenty of dungeons to adventure through, and a welcoming online community. The only downside is that it looks an awful lot like an NES game. But we guarantee that shiny $50 bill you didn’t spend will help ease the pain of these primitive graphics (although the creators would surely appreciate any support you give them, since they’re paying for the bandwidth costs out of their own pockets).
Though Wyvern is very clearly rooted in the glory days of text MUDing (you can play it just like a MUD, simply typing in commands and moving with the arrow keys), it also has a surprisingly easy to use graphical interface. Anyone who’s familiar with the concept of right clicking to open a contextual menu should pick it up pretty quickly. Wyvern is still in beta, but the plan is to keep it free even when it becomes final (or as final as an online game ever is, what with updates and content additions and such). And at that price, it’s definitely worth the 18MB download.
See also: the cover of the issue, and back to the Wyvern project page.