It was the Christmas of 2004, and Glen Frey was in his sophomore year in college when, from a friend, he received the original white box set of TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) boxed set from 1974 as a gift. It was the 2000s; they were all computer majors, and online gaming was in high gear. This semester was game theory, and their professor said this box set was the thing that allowed him to understand, and it was the premise of every epic video game ever. It did not take long for the friends and classmates to open and experience the depth of the game, where a couple of students in college studying game theory, just like they were now, overlaid it with Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' and created D&D that later became the basis for their thesis as well as a whole online gaming genre.
The intricate rules, the diverse races, the epic quests – it was all there. But what truly captivated Glen and his friends was the sense of possibility. In D&D, they could step outside the confines of their daily lives. They could be heroes, villains, or anything in between. They could explore ancient ruins, battle fearsome monsters, and shape the destiny of entire worlds. The game offered a chance to live their best selves, to embrace their true desires, whether it was to rescue the village from a dragon's wrath or to seize the treasure and walk away, consequences be damned. The idea of resurrection, whether granted by a temple's magic or a carefully guarded scroll, was particularly powerful. It offered a 'do-over,' a chance to learn from mistakes and continue the adventure.
Glen's journey into world-building began in the dim glow of his desktop monitor, surrounded by stacks of graph paper, dog-eared rulebooks, and scattered dice. What started as a simple passion for tabletop RPGs grew into something much greater—a living, breathing world crafted through years of gaming with close friends. Using the core races from classic fantasy settings as a foundation, he wove in his own twists, inspired by a lifetime of reading the genre and his deep love for TSR video games. With every campaign, every late-night session, the world of Gaida took on greater depth. His players weren’t just adventurers—they were architects of history, their choices shaping nations, wars, and myths. Glen recorded it all, refining the lore, adjusting mechanics, and letting the organic flow of player interaction guide the evolution of his world.
Every session was a laboratory of ideas. A random comment could evolve into an entire storyline; a failed dice roll could create an unexpected legend. Glen revealed in this aspect of tabletop RPGs—the sheer unpredictability, the shared creativity, the sense of immersion that no video game had ever fully captured. The difference, he knew, was that a human Dungeon Master could pivot, react, and build in real time. A video game, no matter how advanced, was always bound by the limitations of its programming.
By the time Glen and his tabletop crew graduated in 2006, he had already amassed a wealth of knowledge in game design, storytelling, and player psychology. He landed a job at Obsidian Games, stepping directly into the industry he had long admired. There, he worked on some of the most iconic RPGs of the early 2000s, gaining firsthand experience in crafting digital ecosystems and the complex infrastructure required for massive multiplayer online role-playing games. He spent years studying the intricacies of world-building in digital spaces, the challenges of balancing mechanics, and the nuances of player engagement.
In 2016, he decided it was time to take the plunge. Gathering a team of industry veterans and a few of his old college gaming friends, Glen founded Seroki Games. It was the culmination of years of experience, passion, and the dream of bringing Gaida from the tabletop to the digital realm.
Glen approached development like an architect, constructing Gaida in careful, deliberate layers. The foundation was simple: a turn-based interface, reminiscent of early Bioware titles. No graphics, just the game mechanics and rules. Using the d20 system and the 3.5 edition ruleset as their framework, the team spent the first two months building a functional, text-based RPG hosted on their internal server. They structured their workdays strategically—six hours of development, followed by four hours of in-game testing, ensuring that every element was refined through play.
As the game evolved, each challenge became a chance to innovate. The team meticulously analyzed every roadblock, bringing gameplay issues into their morning meetings. Replays were reviewed, bugs were addressed immediately, and new mechanics were debated and implemented. One of the first major tests of the system came with the 'Drive Out the Villagers' quest. The team explored multiple approaches: setting fire to the village, poisoning the water supply, launching a frontal assault. But here, the limitations of video games became clear—what a human Dungeon Master could adjust on the fly needed a concrete in-game solution. Could there be another faction working to counteract the destruction? Could an AI-driven storyteller simulate player creativity? These questions were too big to solve immediately, so they were added to the 'Parking Lot' board—a growing list of unresolved gameplay dilemmas. For the time being, the simplest fix was applied: villages were protected by core rules, and alternative quests were developed to preserve narrative cohesion.
Once the mechanics were solid, the world-building phase began in earnest. The graphics and environmental design teams painstakingly crafted every detail—castles with towering spires, ancient forests teeming with secrets, bustling city streets filled with market stalls, each corner of Gaida infused with life. Dungeon layouts were meticulously designed to be both visually immersive and mechanically engaging. Libraries housed shelves lined with lore-rich tomes, paintings hinted at long-lost history, and every item, from a simple candlestick to a legendary artifact, was given its own weight in the world.
Ten dedicated writers worked alongside seven city planners, ensuring that each location had a unique personality, history, and purpose. Quests ranged from everyday tasks, like gathering supplies for a struggling village, to Triple-S ranked epic sagas that could change the entire world. Many of these quests were drawn directly from the team’s own tabletop campaigns, carried over from their college years and refined into digital form. The balance between realism and fantasy was paramount. Even the most minor details, like how a tree’s texture blended into different terrain types, were painstakingly refined—a process that took an entire week just to ensure seamless integration across four distinct biomes.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t the core mechanics that delayed the game’s launch—it was the world itself. Technical hurdles like waypoints, free-walking zones, and environmental transitions became the real challenge. Ensuring that no player could fall off the map, preventing accidental soft locks, optimizing pathing logic—these were the invisible struggles that consumed months of work. Every dungeon, every castle wall, every open field had to be tested to ensure it functioned flawlessly.
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Throughout it all, Glen remained at the heart of the process. His personal workstation was a like a general’s battle station—four high-performance PCs linked through a KVM switch, and running multiple instances of the game across virtual machines. A corner of the office was dedicated to game-breaking stress tests, where Glen and his core team—Chris, Aaron, Carrie-Sue, and Jim—spent hours actively trying to shatter the latest builds. These four had gamed together since college, and even as life pulled them in different directions, they had never abandoned their monthly gaming sessions. Now, they weren’t just playing in a world—they were bringing their world to life.
Gamma testing gave way to an internal Beta for three weeks. Every PC in the company hummed with activity, not with spreadsheets or code compiling, but with the vibrant chaos of playtesting. Developers, artists, and even the marketing team dove into Gaida, their fingers flying across keyboards, their faces lit by the glow of the monitors as they explored the world they had helped create. For three intense weeks, Gaida was their playground, their battleground, and their puzzle box.
Then, the servers came online, a silent, powerful moment as the digital infrastructure roared to life, ready to face its first true test. The internal beta faded, and the real beta was brought online, opening the floodgates to a wave of external players eager to experience Gaida. And then, the real work began.
Players, it turned out, were masters of chaos. They stressed the system in ways the developers had never imagined, their creativity morphing into ingenious methods of virtual destruction and unexpected exploits. Beta testers became digital detectives, their relentless curiosity uncovering the tiniest flaws, the most minuscule cracks in Gaida's armor.
Some found ways to crash the whole system, bringing the virtual world to its knees with a single, ill-conceived action. Others discovered methods to supercharge their characters, pushing the boundaries of power in ways that the development team had never even considered.
A missing wall skin in a dungeon, a seemingly insignificant oversight, allowed one player to attack the boss from inside the wall. The mighty creature, designed to be a pinnacle of challenge, stood powerless as the player chipped away at its health, unable to retaliate.
Another player, venturing into a seemingly peaceful forest, decided to cut down a tree. The simple act, something seemingly innocuous, triggered a catastrophic chain reaction. The server froze, the world stuttered, and then, silence. The beta had to be closed for a day, the developers scrambling to diagnose the issue. The culprit? A defective tree skin had created an "infinity tear," a glitch in the matrix that had brought the game engine crashing down.
The placed object team, humbled and determined, began a four-week review of every item a player could interact with. Each object was meticulously examined, its code dissected, its textures scrutinized. They were determined to ensure that no more errant pixels could bring their world to its knees. In the end, their diligence paid off; six more bad skins were found and purged from the system.
The terrain teams faced similar challenges. Their meticulous work, stitching together the vast landscapes of Gaida, had inadvertently created seams in the world. Players, ever the explorers, discovered these flaws and exploited them to their advantage. They found ways to "Billy Goat" their way over mountain ranges, bypassing intended paths and shortcuts. These digital mountaineers scaled impossible heights, reaching endgame armor sets in a matter of hours. Then, they would teleport back to the starting cities, clad in powerful gear, becoming overpowered giants in the early stages of the game.
At every exploit, every bug report, every near-catastrophe, Glen and his core four would share a knowing smile. It was reminiscent of their tabletop days, when, as kids, they would work every loophole, argue rule interpretations, and misuse a spell in such a way that it became hilariously overpowered. Some attempts worked, others failed spectacularly, but it was all part of the shared experience, the joy of pushing boundaries and discovering the unexpected.
Amidst the chaos of bug hunts and exploit fixes, there was also room for intentional surprises. A few carefully placed Easter eggs, as the gaming world called them, were hidden in some of the team's favorite areas. Each person in the core team had the chance to leave their mark on the world. Glen's contribution was a subtle one: a picture of his mother tucked away in a random villager's house. If a player, driven by curiosity, inspected it, the picture would open to reveal a +2 silver sword, an elegant blade named "Wolf's Bane." The discovery would trigger a hidden quest, a personal touch from Glen to the players who explored deeply enough to find it. There was a catch, however. The quest had to be completed before the next lunar cycle, or the sword would vanish into mist, the opportunity lost forever.
Slowly but surely, the beta phase began to wind down. The "Panic Board," once overflowing with critical issues and urgent fixes, saw its collection of post-it notes dwindle to zero. The last restart of the beta had gone smoothly, garnering great reviews from the players. The server team, those diligent engineers who had worked tirelessly behind the scenes, set to work bringing up each individual server. They meticulously cloned the fresh environments, ensuring that every detail, every line of code, every digital tree and stone was replicated perfectly. The servers, now mirrors of each other, stood ready to be deployed across twenty-six countries, a testament to the global reach of Gaida. After a long and arduous journey, one year, two months, and four days behind the initial schedule, the virtual world of Gaida was finally opened for live gaming.
The launch was a resounding success. The game world came online at midnight GMT -7, a carefully chosen time to maximize player engagement across time zones. Gamer magazines and for-profit gamers, those digital prospectors hungry for content and new exploits, hit it hard. They sought to uncover every secret, to test every limit, and to find ways to monetize the in-game content. A few "red block" countries, those with stricter regulations or political tensions, were banned within the first few months, a decision made to protect the integrity and stability of the game world.
The development team, now veterans of the beta wars, shifted their focus. A third of the team transitioned to maintenance, becoming the guardians of Gaida's ongoing stability. A quarter of the rest became forum moderators, the voices of reason and order in the bustling digital agora, addressing player concerns and fostering a healthy community. Glen and the core crew, the architects of this digital world, finally had time to game.
Sern, Hernkull, Bartel, Grendor, and Uilly, in game names of the original tabletop gamers, took shape from the realm of imagination to the digital frontier. Within the character creation screen, their shared backstory, a tapestry woven from countless hours of campaigns and adventures, hints of which could be found scattered within the tomes across the world of Gaida. These were their histories that were now contained in these tombs of history; they were founders, the first to walk these paths during caffeine filled weekends with pizza boxes and Glen’s jelly beans , smoke of various origins, now again waiting to be rediscovered within tombs. As they completed their characters, settled their headsets, cracked a few knuckles and a neck, the crack and pop of a soda and the sound of jelly beans rattling on to the desk, a sense of camaraderie and shared history filled the air, but this while familiar was new to them all. They looked across to each other, and smiled, a silent acknowledgment of the journey they had undertaken together, and entered the game as one, spawning on the Wind’s Whisper as it was docking at the port city of Balkerteret. The adventure had begun anew.
