History
At its creation, the core of Dragon's Gate was based on the AUSI-entitled game Aradath, which was programmed and designed in 1985 by Mark Jacobs. Dragon's Gate was originally developed by Mark Jacobs and Darrin Hyrup, who had joined AUSI from Simutronics where he had been a programmer on GemStone II and lead programmer on Orb Wars. Dragon's Gate was launched on GEnie in late 1989 and was eventually taken up by AOL as an online product.
Hyrup's initial work on the game was to help port the game to GEnie's Mark III operating system, though in the end, the resulting game was more of a new creation than a port. That partnership led to Hyrup becoming an integral part of AUSI as well as the evolution of the game from Aradath to Dragon's Gate on GEnie and to its other homes.
Jacobs and Hyrup, along with partner Rob Denton, later formed a company in 1995 called Interworld Productions, which in 1997 was renamed as Mythic Entertainment. In 1997 Hyrup and Lori Silva (now Lori Hyrup) joined forces, Darrin as the Producer/Lead Programmer and Lori as an Associate Producer/Lead Game Designer. In 1998, programming was taken over by Roy Sutton, and in 1999 Lead Game Design was passed on to Colin Johanson. Mythic Entertainment is currently best known for the MMORPG Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot. On June 20, 2006 Mythic Entertainment was purchased by Electronic Arts.
On January 31, 2006, Mythic Entertainment dropped a number of games from its services and official sponsoring, including Dragon's Gate. After being rescued by Darrin and returned to service as a free game running from his basement, the game was taken back down again a year later after a lightning storm damaged the server equipment. Currently, the game server is offline entirely, and as such, Dragon's Gate is no longer accepting new members and can no longer be connected via telnet to play what was formerly a MUD. Recently, as said per the official message boards, the game has been "closed... at least for now."
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