TheEmpires

For those of you who enjoy keeping track of these sorts of things, The Empire was officially formed on 11/21/01 as a game guild called The Empire on the Igraine server of Dark Age of Camelot.

Now, years later, The Empire has evolved into a multigame community capable of supporting guilds in several games simultaneously and surviving the collapse of any game world. To date we have been in eleven different games as a community.

This is the fourth generation of our website and if you total the posts of all of them The Empire is nearing 90,000 posts by its members and is nearing approximately its 2,000th member (it is hard to tell exactly because of the overlap of members from one website edition to another).

Our members have come from *at least* 15 countries and just about every state in the United States... I do not recall any Emp ever being from Rhode Island (so we have something to improve upon!).

The Empire has had a long list of active and retired officers that have allowed it to prosper and evolve to suit the needs of its members. Those officers carry a wide variety of ages, ethnicities, genders, political viewpoints, occupational backgrounds, socioeconomic standings... and in some cases differ so radically that one would think in any other circumstance they would barely be able to speak to each other. Yet, for the sake of our Empire and our Members they work together and remain both polite and constructive at all times.

You will never see me beating my chest and shouting with pride about an item my character picked up or an amount of gold I have in a game bank. There is no quest in any game that I lust to complete, no game reward ever worth bickering over.

For me, and obviously for many of you, the only thing that warrants a sense of pride and accomplishment is The Empire Community and its lasting reminder that given the right environment, the right leadership and an awfully large amount of effort.... anyone can get along with anyone else for months, or years or even decades.

When The Empire began Id ask to recruit someone and they would ask how long we had been around. I'd reply "so far a few months but we plan to be here in 20 years." Most of them would laugh at me, some of you may even have been some of the ones who had laughed. Well, as we close in on our 5th Birthday as a Community, I think 20 years may actually have been setting the bar a bit too low.

Happy Birthday Emps!