An Interview
The French Gaming News website Chroniques D'Azeroth reached out to do a very in depth interview, with deep discussions and dozens of questions about The Syndicate as we reached our 30th anniversary as The Syndicate name and our 35th as a gaming community. That interview is located here: https://leschroniquesdazeroth.fr/actualite/30-ans-de-guildes-la-grande-interview. Raydjahs, the interviewer has a quality that is great to see which is boundless curiosity and a penchant for looking for evidence and facts. He dug deep. He questioned answers. He sought understanding. And he compiled a very nice article that I encourage you to check out and give his website a regular visit. Here is a short excerpt from it:
Facing off against an elite monster with millions of health points, braving the dangers of dungeons, pulling off the feat of completing a quest chain deemed impossible, or enlisting the help of your companions to craft the piece of armor of your dreams... These achievements are much harder to accomplish if you aren’t a member of a guild in your favorite massively multiplayer online game. A guild is often structured around a hierarchy and rules, and every player must contribute to it in their own way.
While their names vary depending on the type of MMO (a corporation in a space opera or a clan in a medieval fantasy setting), their purpose remains the same: to bring together players who share the same interests so they can progress together and complete the challenges designed by the developers more easily.
Since the first titles of this genre, millions of guilds have come and gone, some spanning multiple games (i.e., not limited to a single franchise). However, few have endured as long as The Syndicate.
Present in these vast persistent worlds since the 1990s, many games have made their mark, and thousands of players have joined their ranks. While the first traces its origins to Neverwinter Nights (a video game released on June 26, 1991, on American Online, where it would later be hosted), its current form emerged on February 1, 1996, on Meridian 59, which was then in alpha.
