History
It featured four teams: The Drakulian Empire, the Praan-Blug Cartel, the Transgolian League and the Zsiverian Collective. Players would join these teams for one month stints and attempt to score more collective points than any other team for that month.
Originally Hecklers Online virtual "tokens" were given out as prizes to the highest scoring player on each team at the end of the month, but this practice was later dropped at the request of players who wanted to discourage new players from joining just for the tokens.
The companion forums to the trivia game developed a life of their own, far beyond the original scope of the game's designers. Several large groups of players took it upon themselves to develop characters, and so a free-for-all sort of board-based role-playing game was born. The team boards as well as a general "Roleplay forum" created all kinds of storylines and drama throughout the life of the game. America Online decided in the fall of 1999 that the boards should be moderated, and put a team of community representatives in place to do so.
Zealot Trivia was shut down in January 2001 after Hecklers Online finally disappeared late in 2000. The staff who had run Zealot Trivia began a new science-fiction themed enterprise at RevolutionSF.
Read more about this topic: Zealot Trivia
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
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