sugarvalves [1963573] —
Original article
Torn's founder speaks to us on 14 years of Torn. Read on to find out how it all began, what kind of player he'd be, and which former world leader might have played Torn.
Last Thursday Torn celebrated its 14th birthday, having been officially brought into this world on the 15th of November 2004 by a single teenage parent. I hear the birth was a struggle at first - mother asked for drugs of course - but from there the child grew from strength to strength, despite being raised almost single-handedly for much of its early life.
Pictured: Infant Torn City. Aww, isn't she a cutie?
Today, Torn City stands stronger than ever. But there was a time when this place was but a mere flicker of a thought in the mind of a 15-year old boy from the South West of England. A boy who wasn't satisfied with the text RPGs on offer at the time, and decided he could do better. That young slip of a lad was Chedburn, and today, he's going to tell us how Torn City came to be, where it's going, and what he himself is like in real life.
"I started playing text-based games in the late 90's. Alienaa, Neopets, Planetarion, Star Kingdoms and Dark-future were some of those I played religiously in the early days. While all of them offered unique gameplay, none were exactly what I was looking for. Over the years of playing such games, I built up a very good idea of my ideal game; a combination of the best gameplay from all of those I'd played, with the differences / twists that I craved."
"In my struggle to find my ideal game, I approached developers of the other games I played with ideas - features and changes that I personally wanted to see. I don't remember any of my ideas being accepted, and that's probably not surprising, but that then drove me to start my own. I remember sitting in my bedroom (yep, my parent's basement) in 2004, trying to come up with a name for it. I knew it was going to be *something* city. I had a little HTML experience and that was it, I learned PHP & MySQL step by step while building Torn City. At the start, it was literally just a simple table, something like..."
<table>
<tr><td colspan="2">Banner</td></tr>
<tr><td width="20%">Sidebar</td><td width="80%">Page</td></tr>
</table.
"...A blank canvas, I remember the thrill of slowly adding features one by one and then watching the database tables fill with the data of people playing them. It really was an unexplainable experience, euphoria."
One simple table soon became the gym, closely followed by a handful of crimes as the first features of Torn City began to emerge. Next up was the attacking engine, whose construction Chedburn remembers vividly.
"On all of the games I'd played before, you'd click 'Fight' and then get a simple report / list of the hits / result. I remember it feeling revolutionary building a 'step by step' attacking system, where players take actions one by one - which seems silly now as it feels so normal. At the time I wasn't aware of any games that had that."
"During the early development process (if you can call it that), there were no priorities. I was just a kid shoddily building whatever popped into my head next. It was a real breeze as the features were super simple and there were no coding standards - I would just quickly type something up, checking google for the PHP functions I needed... If it didn't work, I'd butcher it until it did, then move on to the next project."
This quickfire process meant that features like the gym could be completed within an hour, whereas today, every addition must be designed carefully, with balance, optimisation and future-proofing taken into consideration. As a result, Chedburn now finds himself busier than he's ever been, so don't get offended when he doesn't reply to your four-hour powerpoint on how warring could be improved.
"Back in the day, I had plenty of free time. I would work on 'Torn City' when I felt like it - then watch movies and play games. I slept when I wanted to, woke up when I wanted to, often I was totally nocturnal. I would play time-intensive online RPGs like World of Warcraft, FFXI and Eve Online."
"It was a pretty great life and I have very fond memories! Over the last few years, now that we have a fully established team that relies on me, Torn has truly turned into a career - a fixed schedule, working every day, pretty much all day. Someday I hope to have more free time to do more gaming, I have a growing backlog of games I need to play!"
Ironically, one game which Chedburn could never play is Torn itself - unless someone wants to bash him over the head, give him amnesia and set him up a restart account. Given Chedburn's knowledge of Torn's inner-workings coupled with an irremovable god-mode, he feels playing his own creation wouldn't be competitive or fun. Instead, Chedburn finds enjoyment watching others interact with the intricate systems he and his developers have worked to create.
But if he was a Torn player, what kind would he be?
"In every game I've played, I take an 'all or nothing' approach and try to be as unique as possible. I would choose the most unusual and hardcore playstyle I can find (or create my own) and own it to make sure I stick out and have an impact."
"I would likely be a level holder and have massively imbalanced stats. I'd probably be a 'nice guy' rather than a scammer / troll, but focus heavily on faction warring / conflict (as best I can in its current state). I'd likely focus on collecting Dirty Bombs - Torn's only 'Super weapon' (of sorts) to increase my e-peen. I'd certainly be looking forward to the reenabling of DBs and Raiding due in December."
Pictured: The type of humongous explosions we all eagerly await.
Without the need to engage in player activities like training, chaining and complaining, a typical day for our supreme overlord may involve anything from managing donation enquiries and monitoring Torn's overall health through to working on design docs for future updates, liaising with developers to discuss new features or fixes, and ensuring the staff team has everything they need. There are many advanced log requests and programming updates which only Chedburn can take care of, and this results in a constant stream of requests for his time and expertise.
"There's always some tedious obscure new issue / challenge that pops up every day which takes my focus away from more interesting things. Only once TORN is in a very good state, with a nice backlog of designed features for the developers, can I perhaps take some time off."
Chedburn to delegate some daily tasks and distractions to the new Community Manager when they are ready, allowing him to finish up projects and features that have been on his to-do list for years. He describes his ultimate goal as to "complete Torn", when all of its features are the best they can possibly be; where any new update would result in either the same quality or a downgrade of the previous version. He admits such a state is a long way off, but Chedburn believes that the forthcoming updates to faction warring and Crimes 2.0 represent a major step towards that goal.
Pictured: Crimes circa 2005
The construction of Torn City has been very much a gradual process, with tweaks and new features added gradually ever since Chedburn made his very first table. A similar trend has been noticed with regards to the growth of Torn's playerbase, and because of this, he cannot think of any one moment where his creation was said to have 'taken off', so to speak.
"Torn's players have always fluctuated, fairly slowly, and any big spikes in players are usually attributed to certain things, for example, a viral Imgur post two years ago, or our advertising. I don't remember ever feeling like it's taking off, because it didn't really take off - it's a fairly slow expansion over many years."
The viral imgur post Chedburn mentions caused Torn's daily user total to spike by around 2,000 more players compared to the previous month. 7,000 further daily users have been added in the two years since, and Chedburn is still surprised by how broadly appealing Torn City is, given the huge diversity of players it attracts from all ages, all over the world, each with hugely varied mentalities.
"...that's amazing, being able to connect people who are so different from one another...I remember the first Torn players were a very small but hardcore group of who were pretty much all intertwined with each other - as I suppose you'd expect with a small playerbase. Nowadays it feels more like many separate communities and big groups of friends, usually interacting within their factions."
"It's just an awesome feeling having this thing that started from nothing and is now this enormous, deep, expanding experience that continues to have a growing userbase even after 14 years. I'm most proud of the community we have; we've created and maintained tens of thousands of relationships by creating a platform which forces players to interact with each other in all kinds of unusual ways."
"It's really humbling to hear of the couples who've met over Torn, married each other, and even had children. Learning of the positive effects Torn has had on people's lives, especially those suffering from depression, is very warming."
Pictured: Torn's forums circa 2008 as seen by a jailbird, hence the orange tint.
Despite the game's broad popularity, it was nevertheless surprising when, in 2014, a newspaper article revealed that current British Prime Minister Theresa May was a potential Torn player. Back then, Mrs May was the Home Secretary, and it was reported that her Home Office staff had visited Torn 46,351 times between January and May of that year. So did Theresa ever sign up herself? Who knows, but the story definitely amused Chedburn.
"It was certainly fun seeing that story pop up. It feels like TORN lives in its own secret little pocket of the internet and it's very rare to see any news coverage or even discussion in the outside world - it's even totally missing from all relevant Wikipedia pages (some of the guys there get really distraught if we attempt to add stuff ourselves). So... when it is mentioned (in any context) elsewhere on the web or in any news stories it's quite rewarding for me."
"I think Theresa would quietly lurk in a HOF faction, keeping to herself, whoring Defense and amassing a small fortune, biding her time."
Pictured: Theresa's present fate.
But enough about the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (I'm future-proofing this article for next week); I and many others want to know what our own benevolent leader is like in real life. Chedburn doesn't seem to have much of a public web presence, as this reporter has discovered after googling him numerous times in search of nudes. So, in lieu of incriminating online profiles, let's see what Chedburn wrote when I asked him to tell us about himself.
"I'm 31 years old, I live with my partner of almost 7 years in our four-bed house in a small town in Somerset UK. We have a German Shepherd, marine fish, three tortoises and a female African Grey called Gordon."
"I swim 75 lengths twice a week, which in my head means I don't have to go to the gym. I have a small collection of wall-mounted deactivated firearms. I've watched the last 46 SpaceX launch live streams in a row, minus one while I was in North Korea. I have also been to Chernobyl in Ukraine. I drive a 2008 Audi S3. My circle of friends is small, which I like."
"When I was 16 I had a Saturday job in Greggs, which felt weird because at the time, 'Torn City' had more income per hour than they were paying me. I dropped out of college to work on Torn after the sudden and profound realisation that leaving education was actually an option - that may have been the best day of my life. Even though it's a lot of work, Torn continues to be my dream job, I do not take it for granted and I am very thankful."
Pictured: Greggs, for those of you who were wondering.
After nearly a decade and a half of Torn City, it is we who should be thankful that Chedburn still feels driven to coordinate and create for the community he's constructed. We all have ideas for creative projects we'd like to make, but few of us ever realise them, and even fewer are dedicated enough to continually seek improvements fourteen years later. To create such a place in adulthood would be an achievement in itself, but to do so aged 16 is remarkable.
On Monday 15th of November, 2004, Chedburn reset all the alpha accounts and set Torn City loose into the world. If Torn were a human being, it would now be stroppy teen battling puberty, struggling to come to terms with a raft of emotional changes and hair in brand new places. But Torn isn't struggling. Chedburn's baby is flourishing. And in ten years time, he predicts Torn and its community will still be here, chaining, training and complaining as they always were.
"Yes, she.. (he?) sure is growing up! I'm very proud! I think Torn's certainly proven the test of time, and that it can't die out or become old as long as we keep moving forwards and adapting. I've always attributed this positive to the unique long-term gameplay and the fact it doesn't require 3D graphics - which quickly become superseded by newer engines."
"I'm also comfortable that a competitor would have a very hard time actually competing with us - they're behind us by 14 years of continuous development. I've seen literally hundreds of cases of sites outright stealing Torn's ideas and mechanics which took months of careful design and years of play-testing, over several iterations. The earliest example being 'monocountry' in 2005 which later shutdown and became 'mccodes', which in-turn spawned hundreds of copycats. But without all the resources, development time, and knowledge we've accumulated, I really don't think there's a way."
"I see us continuing to be #1 long into the future unless we somehow drop the ball, but we're working very hard to cover all our bases - futurity / longevity of Torn is our primary goal. A decade is a very long time, but I'm absolutely certain we'll still be here no matter what, barring some kind of mass-extinction event."
"In terms of updates over the next 10 years, who knows? Maybe even Crimes 2.0 will be released by then? ;) All I can say is that we're all working really hard here, and will continue to do so into the future - I only want the best and greatest for Torn and its players."
"I look forward to the next interview when Torn hits 24!"
Pictured: Infant Torn City. Aww, isn't she a cutie?
Today, Torn City stands stronger than ever. But there was a time when this place was but a mere flicker of a thought in the mind of a 15-year old boy from the South West of England. A boy who wasn't satisfied with the text RPGs on offer at the time, and decided he could do better. That young slip of a lad was Chedburn, and today, he's going to tell us how Torn City came to be, where it's going, and what he himself is like in real life.
"I started playing text-based games in the late 90's. Alienaa, Neopets, Planetarion, Star Kingdoms and Dark-future were some of those I played religiously in the early days. While all of them offered unique gameplay, none were exactly what I was looking for. Over the years of playing such games, I built up a very good idea of my ideal game; a combination of the best gameplay from all of those I'd played, with the differences / twists that I craved."
"In my struggle to find my ideal game, I approached developers of the other games I played with ideas - features and changes that I personally wanted to see. I don't remember any of my ideas being accepted, and that's probably not surprising, but that then drove me to start my own. I remember sitting in my bedroom (yep, my parent's basement) in 2004, trying to come up with a name for it. I knew it was going to be *something* city. I had a little HTML experience and that was it, I learned PHP & MySQL step by step while building Torn City. At the start, it was literally just a simple table, something like..."
<table>
<tr><td colspan="2">Banner</td></tr>
<tr><td width="20%">Sidebar</td><td width="80%">Page</td></tr>
</table.
"...A blank canvas, I remember the thrill of slowly adding features one by one and then watching the database tables fill with the data of people playing them. It really was an unexplainable experience, euphoria."
One simple table soon became the gym, closely followed by a handful of crimes as the first features of Torn City began to emerge. Next up was the attacking engine, whose construction Chedburn remembers vividly.
"On all of the games I'd played before, you'd click 'Fight' and then get a simple report / list of the hits / result. I remember it feeling revolutionary building a 'step by step' attacking system, where players take actions one by one - which seems silly now as it feels so normal. At the time I wasn't aware of any games that had that."
"During the early development process (if you can call it that), there were no priorities. I was just a kid shoddily building whatever popped into my head next. It was a real breeze as the features were super simple and there were no coding standards - I would just quickly type something up, checking google for the PHP functions I needed... If it didn't work, I'd butcher it until it did, then move on to the next project."
This quickfire process meant that features like the gym could be completed within an hour, whereas today, every addition must be designed carefully, with balance, optimisation and future-proofing taken into consideration. As a result, Chedburn now finds himself busier than he's ever been, so don't get offended when he doesn't reply to your four-hour powerpoint on how warring could be improved.
"Back in the day, I had plenty of free time. I would work on 'Torn City' when I felt like it - then watch movies and play games. I slept when I wanted to, woke up when I wanted to, often I was totally nocturnal. I would play time-intensive online RPGs like World of Warcraft, FFXI and Eve Online."
"It was a pretty great life and I have very fond memories! Over the last few years, now that we have a fully established team that relies on me, Torn has truly turned into a career - a fixed schedule, working every day, pretty much all day. Someday I hope to have more free time to do more gaming, I have a growing backlog of games I need to play!"
Ironically, one game which Chedburn could never play is Torn itself - unless someone wants to bash him over the head, give him amnesia and set him up a restart account. Given Chedburn's knowledge of Torn's inner-workings coupled with an irremovable god-mode, he feels playing his own creation wouldn't be competitive or fun. Instead, Chedburn finds enjoyment watching others interact with the intricate systems he and his developers have worked to create.
But if he was a Torn player, what kind would he be?
"In every game I've played, I take an 'all or nothing' approach and try to be as unique as possible. I would choose the most unusual and hardcore playstyle I can find (or create my own) and own it to make sure I stick out and have an impact."
"I would likely be a level holder and have massively imbalanced stats. I'd probably be a 'nice guy' rather than a scammer / troll, but focus heavily on faction warring / conflict (as best I can in its current state). I'd likely focus on collecting Dirty Bombs - Torn's only 'Super weapon' (of sorts) to increase my e-peen. I'd certainly be looking forward to the reenabling of DBs and Raiding due in December."
Pictured: The type of humongous explosions we all eagerly await.
Without the need to engage in player activities like training, chaining and complaining, a typical day for our supreme overlord may involve anything from managing donation enquiries and monitoring Torn's overall health through to working on design docs for future updates, liaising with developers to discuss new features or fixes, and ensuring the staff team has everything they need. There are many advanced log requests and programming updates which only Chedburn can take care of, and this results in a constant stream of requests for his time and expertise.
"There's always some tedious obscure new issue / challenge that pops up every day which takes my focus away from more interesting things. Only once TORN is in a very good state, with a nice backlog of designed features for the developers, can I perhaps take some time off."
Chedburn to delegate some daily tasks and distractions to the new Community Manager when they are ready, allowing him to finish up projects and features that have been on his to-do list for years. He describes his ultimate goal as to "complete Torn", when all of its features are the best they can possibly be; where any new update would result in either the same quality or a downgrade of the previous version. He admits such a state is a long way off, but Chedburn believes that the forthcoming updates to faction warring and Crimes 2.0 represent a major step towards that goal.
Pictured: Crimes circa 2005
The construction of Torn City has been very much a gradual process, with tweaks and new features added gradually ever since Chedburn made his very first table. A similar trend has been noticed with regards to the growth of Torn's playerbase, and because of this, he cannot think of any one moment where his creation was said to have 'taken off', so to speak.
"Torn's players have always fluctuated, fairly slowly, and any big spikes in players are usually attributed to certain things, for example, a viral Imgur post two years ago, or our advertising. I don't remember ever feeling like it's taking off, because it didn't really take off - it's a fairly slow expansion over many years."
The viral imgur post Chedburn mentions caused Torn's daily user total to spike by around 2,000 more players compared to the previous month. 7,000 further daily users have been added in the two years since, and Chedburn is still surprised by how broadly appealing Torn City is, given the huge diversity of players it attracts from all ages, all over the world, each with hugely varied mentalities.
"...that's amazing, being able to connect people who are so different from one another...I remember the first Torn players were a very small but hardcore group of who were pretty much all intertwined with each other - as I suppose you'd expect with a small playerbase. Nowadays it feels more like many separate communities and big groups of friends, usually interacting within their factions."
"It's just an awesome feeling having this thing that started from nothing and is now this enormous, deep, expanding experience that continues to have a growing userbase even after 14 years. I'm most proud of the community we have; we've created and maintained tens of thousands of relationships by creating a platform which forces players to interact with each other in all kinds of unusual ways."
"It's really humbling to hear of the couples who've met over Torn, married each other, and even had children. Learning of the positive effects Torn has had on people's lives, especially those suffering from depression, is very warming."
Pictured: Torn's forums circa 2008 as seen by a jailbird, hence the orange tint.
Despite the game's broad popularity, it was nevertheless surprising when, in 2014, a newspaper article revealed that current British Prime Minister Theresa May was a potential Torn player. Back then, Mrs May was the Home Secretary, and it was reported that her Home Office staff had visited Torn 46,351 times between January and May of that year. So did Theresa ever sign up herself? Who knows, but the story definitely amused Chedburn.
"It was certainly fun seeing that story pop up. It feels like TORN lives in its own secret little pocket of the internet and it's very rare to see any news coverage or even discussion in the outside world - it's even totally missing from all relevant Wikipedia pages (some of the guys there get really distraught if we attempt to add stuff ourselves). So... when it is mentioned (in any context) elsewhere on the web or in any news stories it's quite rewarding for me."
"I think Theresa would quietly lurk in a HOF faction, keeping to herself, whoring Defense and amassing a small fortune, biding her time."
Pictured: Theresa's present fate.
But enough about the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (I'm future-proofing this article for next week); I and many others want to know what our own benevolent leader is like in real life. Chedburn doesn't seem to have much of a public web presence, as this reporter has discovered after googling him numerous times in search of nudes. So, in lieu of incriminating online profiles, let's see what Chedburn wrote when I asked him to tell us about himself.
"I'm 31 years old, I live with my partner of almost 7 years in our four-bed house in a small town in Somerset UK. We have a German Shepherd, marine fish, three tortoises and a female African Grey called Gordon."
"I swim 75 lengths twice a week, which in my head means I don't have to go to the gym. I have a small collection of wall-mounted deactivated firearms. I've watched the last 46 SpaceX launch live streams in a row, minus one while I was in North Korea. I have also been to Chernobyl in Ukraine. I drive a 2008 Audi S3. My circle of friends is small, which I like."
"When I was 16 I had a Saturday job in Greggs, which felt weird because at the time, 'Torn City' had more income per hour than they were paying me. I dropped out of college to work on Torn after the sudden and profound realisation that leaving education was actually an option - that may have been the best day of my life. Even though it's a lot of work, Torn continues to be my dream job, I do not take it for granted and I am very thankful."
Pictured: Greggs, for those of you who were wondering.
After nearly a decade and a half of Torn City, it is we who should be thankful that Chedburn still feels driven to coordinate and create for the community he's constructed. We all have ideas for creative projects we'd like to make, but few of us ever realise them, and even fewer are dedicated enough to continually seek improvements fourteen years later. To create such a place in adulthood would be an achievement in itself, but to do so aged 16 is remarkable.
On Monday 15th of November, 2004, Chedburn reset all the alpha accounts and set Torn City loose into the world. If Torn were a human being, it would now be stroppy teen battling puberty, struggling to come to terms with a raft of emotional changes and hair in brand new places. But Torn isn't struggling. Chedburn's baby is flourishing. And in ten years time, he predicts Torn and its community will still be here, chaining, training and complaining as they always were.
"Yes, she.. (he?) sure is growing up! I'm very proud! I think Torn's certainly proven the test of time, and that it can't die out or become old as long as we keep moving forwards and adapting. I've always attributed this positive to the unique long-term gameplay and the fact it doesn't require 3D graphics - which quickly become superseded by newer engines."
"I'm also comfortable that a competitor would have a very hard time actually competing with us - they're behind us by 14 years of continuous development. I've seen literally hundreds of cases of sites outright stealing Torn's ideas and mechanics which took months of careful design and years of play-testing, over several iterations. The earliest example being 'monocountry' in 2005 which later shutdown and became 'mccodes', which in-turn spawned hundreds of copycats. But without all the resources, development time, and knowledge we've accumulated, I really don't think there's a way."
"I see us continuing to be #1 long into the future unless we somehow drop the ball, but we're working very hard to cover all our bases - futurity / longevity of Torn is our primary goal. A decade is a very long time, but I'm absolutely certain we'll still be here no matter what, barring some kind of mass-extinction event."
"In terms of updates over the next 10 years, who knows? Maybe even Crimes 2.0 will be released by then? ;) All I can say is that we're all working really hard here, and will continue to do so into the future - I only want the best and greatest for Torn and its players."
"I look forward to the next interview when Torn hits 24!"
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