As online role-playing-games are becoming ever more extravagant with 3D graphics and gruesome combat, many old-school RPG fans have found refuge in The Kingdom of Loathing. This web-based, multi-player RPG relies on text and doodles to convey its adventures, and not a little humor at the expense of Dungeons & Dragons conventions. Character classes include the muscular “Seal Clubbers” and the crafty “Accordion Thieves.” You can visit locations such as “The Misspelled Cemetary” and “The Orcish Frat House.” Enemies consist of fearsome creatures like “the menacing Booze Giant” and “hordes of fierce Ninja Snowmen.” Created by Zack Johnson, with current designing and writing duties shared with Josh Knight, Kingdom of Loathing has become a growing phenomenon with 150,000 active players. We talked with Zack about his inspiration for the game and how it differs from most online RPGs today.

What is Kingdom of Loathing?

It’s a web-based multi-player role-playing game. It’s free, nothing to download, no software; it’s all played in a browser. It’s kind of a parody of the traditional high fantasy role-playing genre. All the art is just stick figures and little line drawings done by me, and I’m really not an artist, so it kind of shows through but I think that’s also part of the charm. That’s pretty much it – it’s relatively straightforward. The biggest difference between it and other stuff like it is that there’s lots of single-player content and that it’s designed to be funny – it doesn’t take itself seriously at all.

What’s the game's setting like?

The setting is the Kingdom of Loathing, a kingdom which has no king because we never put one in there. We never thought about it. It’s got areas in it that you move around in that are parodies of the typical area in other RPGs – there’s the dungeon full of dungeons where you randomly wander through dungeons, there’s the Spooky Forest and the Mountain Newb where the tutorial starts. The setting is really random because we just sort of threw stuff together as it got started. The game was released to the public when there were only a couple of places to go, there wasn’t really even a map or anything – it was just a store where you could buy stuff and a place where you could go kill goblins and that was it. So everything organically got tacked on, there’s really no overall theme other than making fun of hippies and frat boys and Dungeons and Dragons conventions.

What inspired you to create this?

I had worked on a couple of games before that were more serious in tone, and I had gotten them to the point where they were able to be tested by my friends. But I never really felt good enough about any of them to put them out there and release them to the public. So to just give myself a kick in the ass, I decided that I was going to work on something for a week, make sure it was playable at the end of that week in some form, and just post it to some message boards and actually get some people playing it. Turns out the secret was to do something that wasn’t serious – that allows me to get stuff done and not over-think it and worry about it too much and get shy about it. And that’s kind of how it got started – people liked it and requested features, and it just organically grew into this monster that it is now.

Were you surprised that it took off like this?

Absolutely, yeah. I remember thinking at some point about the database structure: “Well, what are the most players I could ever, ever conceivably have?” And I thought, ehhhh, say 10,000. And now like 30,000 individual accounts are logged into per day. There have been close to 300,000 accounts created over time, though a lot of people aren’t playing anymore, didn’t get into it or whatever. But there are about 150,000 active accounts now. It’s grown much more than I ever expected, definitely.

Has the game taken up your life at this point?

It really has. It’s supported by donations, and luckily at about the time when the game started taking up almost all of my time, donations reached the point where I was able to start paying myself my day-job salary. So I was able to quit and just work at this full-time now. Even then, it’s more than I can really do; it’s really getting to the point where I’m having to get some more people involved to help me out just because of the shear bulk of stuff that has to be done.

Have people perceived Kingdom of Loathing as a reaction to how grandiose RPGs have become these days?

I think a lot of people think of it like that. But I hesitate to say that it’s really any kind of statement about anything because it was just kind of a joke. I guess in every joke there’s a kernel of truth, but I didn’t set out to stick it to the Man by making a successful game that isn’t flashy – it just happened. I personally don’t have any problem with the way games are going, other than this move towards what the movie industry is: Games don’t have to be good, they just have to make a lot of money the first weekend they come out. So you get nothing but sequels to established franchises that aren’t necessarily really great – a lot of junk gets pushed out the door.

There have been some articles holding us up as the Blair Witch Project or El Mariachi of the gaming industry, and it’s cool if people see us like that and if we can act as a proof-of-concept for independent gaming. There’s a lot of neat stuff out there – there’s a GameCube game coming out called Alien Hominid that was started by a couple of guys in a back room somewhere, who put it together and got it released on a major console. There’s going to be some neat stuff as a reaction to the state of the industry, but the game was never meant to be serious satire. It’s just kind of goofy fun.

What do you foresee for the future of Kingdom of Loathing?

It’s so hard to gauge because I just didn’t see this coming at all, so it’s impossible for me to say where it’s going go. I keep thinking that it can’t possibly grow any more than it has, that it can’t possibly get any bigger. We’re experiencing a lot of growing pains now just because we don’t have an IT staff, we don’t have system administrators and database administrators that are keeping stuff in line to handle the growth. And so we get an influx of players when we get linked from another site, and everything starts to crawl until we figure out how to get it working again. For that reason, it’s kind of nice that it’s low-budget -- people aren’t expecting 100 percent up-time because they know it’s just a couple of guys above the garage.