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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)