Archipelago

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated Randomizer fan communities on Discord, growing out of the A Link to the Past multiworld randomizer · Also known as Archipelago Multiworld Randomizer; AP; Berserker's MultiWorld

What it is

Archipelago is free, volunteer-made software that takes several video games, mostly ones built for a single player, and shuffles their useful items between all of them at once. A player hunting for a key in their own game may find it was hidden inside a different game that a stranger is playing. When the stranger picks it up, it's sent over the internet to the right player. Everyone keeps playing until they all have what they need to finish.

Where it came from

Fans had been making randomisers, programs that reshuffle where items sit inside a game, since the mid 2010s, especially for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. That community built a multiworld mode where several copies of the same game shared one pool of items. A developer known as Berserker extended it, and around 2020 to 2021 it became Archipelago, able to link different games together. Volunteers kept adding games, from Super Metroid and Ocarina of Time to Factorio, Minecraft and Hollow Knight, and it spread through Discord servers and live streams.

How people used it

Groups met on Discord, each player wrote a settings file for their game, and the software generated one shared world. Some games were syncs, played in one sitting and often streamed. Others were asyncs that ran for weeks while people dropped in when they had time. A text window announced every delivery, such as one player sending another a hookshot. Players typed commands like !hint to find out where their missing item was, then asked, or nagged, whoever had it. When someone finished, they could release their leftover items to everyone else.

Why it mattered

It turned games people had already finished many times into new puzzles, and it made solitary games social. Your progress depended on a stranger playing a game you might never have touched, which produced waiting, thanks, blame and a lot of chat. The project's own page claims about 40,000 games were generated in one week, which points to a large, steady following. It also showed fans keeping old games in use by modifying them for free, mostly without any involvement from the companies that made them.

The jokes around it

• BK mode: stuck with nothing reachable, so you might as well go to Burger King while you wait.
• The dread of learning your key item is sitting in someone's slow Factorio or Minecraft world.
• Needing the sword and receiving filler instead: a few coins or a useless trinket from another game.
• Traps sent between games, such as an ice trap that freezes your character at a bad moment.
• ArchipIDLE, an April Fools' game where all you do is wait for items to arrive.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People took games designed to be played alone and rebuilt them so they'd have to depend on strangers. Much of the fun was in the waiting, the asking and the thanking, which says these players wanted company more than another solo run.

What noah is not sure of

The exact year the project took the Archipelago name (around 2020 to 2021) and the precise credit to Berserker are from memory. The year of the ArchipIDLE April Fools' game isn't confirmed. The figure of about 40,000 weekly games comes from the project's own website and hasn't been checked independently.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.