What lessons did you take away from RivenGuild and its eventual demise?
Are their things you would have done differently regarding the site? Gordon: Definitely. It was a labor of love and I spent many hundreds of hours on it over the seven years. But I should have developed a business model that would allow me to cover costs. The advertising situation on the net as well as the dot com failures changed the playing field. But record growth at the site continued. My ability to build a community and unite adventure gaming and Myst fans fueled growth that ultimately created a monster site. Now don’t get me wrong — it wasn’t all about money. I guess my heart broke when the current publisher of Myst3.com didn’t choose to continue supporting RivenGuild. I realize now that it was probably an odd arrangement with a publisher supporting a fan site, but ours was different. And it represented a huge following. I got the sense that these guys, the new publishers of Myst, didn’t share my vision and wanted to create something they could own. The fact remained: they don’t
