Massively OP’s holiday gift guide for the MMO hipster

December 4, 2015 11:00 AM

Copenhagen, Denmark

I say this with nothing but love in my heart: Some of you guys are serious MMO hipsters. Heck, some of you guys were MMOs hipsters before the word hipster was popular again. World of Warcraft was the first MMO? Pff! You were there for the worst MMO launch of all time. You once camped jboots for 30 hours straight. You played Ultima Online on dial-up, for god’s sake. And now, you back only true indies on Kickstarter.

Oh no wait, that was me.

In celebration of MMO hipsters old and new, today I present you Massively OP’s holiday gift guide for that most discerning of indie hipster snob in your life – because you can’t just plop down a WoW gametime card on some people and expect gratitude!

1. Star Wars Galaxies’ box set

Um, Bree, you’re thinking. Star Wars Galaxies was sunsetted years ago. You can’t even log into the old servers. And you’re right! A box set for a sunsetted MMORPG is usually the most worthless thing on the market (and so you should expect to find stacks of them for sale in your local Gamestop).

But some of the most epic MMOs carry on in the grey territory of emulators, and one of the ways emu-runners try to buff up the legal cliff they’re standing on is by insisting all players possess original game CDs to install the base game from, which might be the only option for folks who aren’t skilled at torrenting. SWG is among them. Amazon to the rescue!

Granted, a true hipster would still have his or her original SWG discs, but maybe you ran over them with your vegan electric bicycle. I don’t know.

2. Camelot Unchained t-shirts

Don’t get Camelot Unchained’s duck in-jokes but do want to support old-school dev Mark Jacobs and crew as they build the spiritual successor to 2001’s Dark Age of Camelot? Boom, here you go: t-shirts and hoodies with stylish logos that are not ducks, straight from the studio itself. I mean, an MMO that dumps traditional PvE overboard and in favor of RvR and a hardcore crafting economy? That’s pretty damn subversive in a genre obsessed with monster-slaying themeparks.

3. The Glitch artbook

In its short lifetime, Glitch epitomized hipster. You might have thought it was a cheap, kid-oriented Flash-game, and if you thought that, you were flat wrong. It had serious artistry, secret spots, abandoned buildings, sarcastic quests, snarky jokes, tree-hugging, zen gods, and energy drugs. For those who missed out, the studio-approved, 160-page digital art book – which was itself funded on the indie-est of all crowdfunding platforms, Indiegogo – is available for $15. Print it out on sustainable paper with organic ink and put it on your reclaimed-wood industrial-chic coffee table.

4. Shroud of the Avatar’s novelization

All old-school MMO hipsters should have Richard Garriott and Starr Long’s Shroud of the Avatar sandbox on their radars. But did you know it’s got a novel? Well, it doesn’t — but it will soon. The Sword of Midras: A Shroud of the Avatar Novel is the first in the anticipated Blade of the Avatar series by prolific fantasy author Tracy Hickman alongside Lord British himself. The book is due out by summer of 2016, but you can preorder it on Amazon already. In hardcover. Like a true hipster.

5. Crowfall’s soundtrack

Unlike many MMOs that have never released their soundtracks at any price, Crowfall hasn’t forgotten that fans love video game music and will pay for it. The up-and-coming indie “throne war” MMO vends a digital copy of its soundtrack — complete with an “audio interview […] discussing the influences and approach to building the Crowfall audio experience” — right from its website. Maybe you can petition for an LP version as the next stretch goal because every good hipster knows digital is mush.

6. Todd McFarlane statues

These are not statues of Todd McFarlane, no. They are Ultima Online statues created by Todd McFarlane. Ultima Online’s fourth expansion, Lord Blackthorn’s Revenge, was bolstered by the creation of 30 new characters for the game, many of which — all of which? — were memorialized as statuette action figures back in 2002. I was astonished to find that a number of them are still available through Amazon all these years later. I found one of an ancient wyrm, one of Warlord Kabur, and one of some bad guy named Adranath. I should know who that is, but I don’t. Minus hipster cred for me. Still, they are pretty cool. Not every MMO gets obscure figurines.

Bonus idea: A WoW gametime card

Yeah, you can still gift it, but only ironically.

Image credit: Tony Webster via WMC

Some links included within this article may be part of MOP’s Amazon affiliate program, income from which goes entirely to funding our operational budget. MOP’s writers have selected products based on their own opinions and receive no direct commission or profit from the affiliate program. We have not been sponsored or coerced to mention any product. Stay tuned for more of our holiday gift guides for MMO players throughout the winter holiday season, and feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments!

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