Latest revision as of 13:18, 20 February 2023

Brian & Sean were developers of Utopia using New Code and owners of Arcadia Games.

Brian McDonnell

Education: Trinity College Dublin

A true software engineer with experience in technical management and software consultancy in financial services. A strong grounding in startup environments. Specialties

Software development, high performance scalable web architectures, social gaming.

Sean Blanchfield

Education: Trinity College Dublin & Greenshills Comprehensive College

Technology entrepreneur and games industry survivor, based in Dublin, Ireland.

New Code

New Code is a new game engine, used from July 2009.

Engine is written by Brian & Sean on Python with the Django web framework. It is run with the Apache webserver on Linux with MySQL.

User interface is based on HTML 4, CSS and Java Scripts.

First Age used New Code of World of Legends Utopian server was Age of Change. Ages before was used Old Code.

Utopia

In February 2017, Brian & Sean sold Utopia to Dave & Jeff at Muga Gaming.

Here is the official announcement from the Utopia Blog:

"Dear Utopians,

We have a very big announcement today. We have finalized a deal with Muga Gaming LLC to acquire Utopia. This is effective immediately, and Utopia is now running on their servers. Dave and Jeff, the founders of Muga Gaming, are long-time players of Utopia, and are committed to modernising and growing the game. Under their ownership, we know Utopia will have a great future.

We took over stewardship of Utopia from OMAC/Jolt in early 2009. After they acquired both Earth:2025 and Utopia from their original creator, Mehul Patel, OMAC found both pieces of software difficult to operate, and shut down Earth:2025. Although it was too late for Earth, we were drawn to the deep complexity and unique social fabric of Utopia. We did a deal to take control of Utopia and relaunch it with new code that would serve as a foundation for future development. Rewriting everything from scratch, while attempting to perfectly emulate the original game logic, took much longer than expected. In September 2009, a prolonged denial-of-service attack forced OMAC to shut down the old game server, and it was into that fire that our new codebase was born.

In the seven years that followed, we spent countless weeks and weekends working to fix issues, tackle cheating, speed up the server and build new features. The opportunity to run Utopia has been a rewarding challenge, which we were privileged to share with many staff members and volunteers along the way. A huge thanks to Bishop, Neil, Róisín, Thundergore, Simon, Vlad, Rob, Eman, Palem, all the tools developers, wiki contributors, forum community members and everyone who spends their own time and money developing content, running IRC servers and generally making Utopia a better community for everyone.

During the last four years, we did what we could to keep Utopia fresh, despite having full time jobs in a completely different company. All the while, we knew the game deserved more. Many people have expressed interest in taking over Utopia over the years, but only Dave and Jeff have shown the passion and acumen required to be successful. Having had the opportunity over the last 10 months to get to know them, we are confident that they are the Lords of Utopia that the World’s longest running MMORPG deserves. We wish Lord Dave, Lord Jeff and all Utopians a very bright future!

Deepest regards,

Sean and Brian"