My creation of a Onelife/NoRespawn Survival Game.

Boy making a new Idea for a server is tough. Good thing I brought backup.

Three years ago I was asked to help host an online server for the game DayZ. My friends I met on another DayZ server wanted my help creating an RPG style server where the admins were acting as the NPC’s arching story being told by the staff. Since this was an RP server at its core, I was thrilled with the idea.

Months of work go by and we are hosting a fairly successful server. With about 30 players. One day while taking a shift as an “NCP” character, I got an idea of how to deal with players who died. What if we banned them for a while, and forced them to create a whole new character when they come back? I suggested the idea to the rest of the admin team, but they really hated the idea.

This idea would not leave me alone, it intrigued me to the point that I could not sleep at night. It was no longer about the roleplay aspect of it all, it became a matter of human experience.

I went to the internet to research the idea. Had it been done before? Could it be done?

While I brainstormed the concept with chatroom and forms I was met with lots of criticism. “This will never take off!”, “DayZ players would never play something like that.”, “You should just shut up and kill yourself!” Funny how there is always one guy who uses the internet you promote suicide.

After a while, I decided that I would make this idea of mine a reality. There was only one issue. There was no way I could do this on my own. Luckily I had gamer family members who were more or less required to support my dreams. Because that’s what family is all about. Even if the rest of the world thinks it’s stupid.

I would first go to my cousin, Jeffrey. A master of the network, an artisan of ports and forwarding. He will craft the vessel that will host this server.

Next, I need a hacker. My cousin Colton. He has a computer science degree. Like, from a real collage.

And lastly, Taylor. My beholder of the written word. He helps charge our ideals to the Web and Discord. He reads a ton of Anime. And he is also in fact, MY COUSIN.

Now that I have my team assembled we will spend the next year creating my vision.

It did not go well. Because we still needed people to play this server that we created. And I was still just receiving death threats and pointless jargon from our haters. We gained a little traction by promoting the DayZ server everywhere on the internet within my reach. But I had only gained about 10 players. Not exactly “popp’n” with activity.

That all changed. I woke up feeling like shutting down the server for good. Despite my determination, maybe the haters were right. But when I got on our community discord, there were over 2,000 new members. I about fell over in my seat. Where did they come from? I skimmed through the chat to discover that they all joined because some relatively successful gamer YouTube channel had played my server while I was sleeping. And the flood of influenced gamers poured in.

The server has now been alive for almost two years and it is very successful. At least in regards to what I was attempting to accomplish. I no longer receive hurtful criticism, but It has truly evolved to a new loved game mode within the DayZ community. I love reading the testimonies of community members after they died and were banned from our server.

“I not going to lie, I played this game for 5 years, but this server made it feel like day one all over again” ~NikTissy

“Didn’t know dying could be so emotional. I’m going through all the stages of grief right now” ~Anky

“My sister died in the server today, We don’t see each other IRL, I am fighting to survive because that is what she would have wanted.” ~JellyVonJeffey

My whole goal with this idea was to promote human emotion in the video games we play. Enforcing life-changing consequences through our actions and understanding of ourselves. I am in love with this new style of experiencing a video game. And now I just want to extend it to even more games and communities.

If you enjoyed this story, let us know in the comments what you liked.

If you want to play on our DayZ Server go join the Memento Mori Discord to learn how to join.

check out my other Substack post and become a subsciber.