Blizzard
| Owner(s) |
Host Edwin |
| Founded |
26 October 2012 |
| Running? |
✓ |
| Website |
? |
| VP Suite | |
Blizzard is a world in Virtual Paradise & is often considered the flagship world in which most of the community resides.
Government
The world of Blizzard is operated by Edwin, who makes the ultimate final decisions regarding what happens within it. Historically, the world takes inspiration from earlier ideas used in AWTeen, such as community governance, which is almost always respected by the world owner except in the most extreme of occasions.
A large portion of the world was originally regulated on a community & role playing level by the institutions of the Kingdom of Palmshire prior to its decline into relevance & dissolution by 2018. The world is now mostly decentralized and consists of multiple, independent cities. The Commonwealth of Independent Cities is the closest to a community government that Blizzard currently has, which is led by graystripe as of 2023.
History
Established on 26 October 2012, Nibbles originally conceived the idea for the world and thus can be rightly called the founder of Blizzard. Tom did the construction of the original Ground Zero for the world. Construction for this ground zero, dubbed version 2.0, was begun on 29 April 2013 under direction of Legion with some assistance from Roy Curtis (who did the ruins near the center of GZ), Tom, and Edwin. Blizzard, almost immediately upon its inception, was heavily inspired by the community & culture of refugees from AWTeen, a world in Active Worlds dedicated towards teenagers & younger adults. Existing projects such as the Kingdom of Palmshire, a virtual nation that had existed since 2004, as well as cities like Cypress Hollow & Huntington, would rapidly migrate their infrastructure over & contribute towards a new, spiritual continuation of the Teen community.
Other communities, most notably Summerville in mid-2013, would jump ship from Teen to Blizzard to escape continuous griefing efforts staged by the Iceman Clan, a vandal organization, but notably also opt to recreate their new home far away from the rest of the established world. Most members otherwise chose to build closer to the GZ and establish cities such as New Huntington, Downtown Blizzard, New Beachfield & New Cypress Hollow, which all participated largely within the Kingdom of Palmshire for RP & organizational purposes.
By 2015, the city of Victoria was established by the community leaders of Fantasia, a city in Alphaworld, for the purposes of testing the VP platform's building capabilities. It would quickly become a prominent city in its own right once the Fantasia leaders became locked out of their accounts on that platform, leading to the rise of both the Victorian Republic & the Lemerican Federation. The Fantasian migration brought over fresh faces, but also became initially disruptive to the rest of the community that opted to continue participating largely within ecosystem of Palmshire. By late 2016, an alliance between Victoria, Rezdog & Summerville would force the collapse of Palmshire's role as the sole governing body of Blizzard, and an overall decline in the interest of nation RP that ran the world up until that point. Blizzard would be visited by Vinesauce in 2017, with the community knowing ahead of time about his arrival. Reactions by Vinesauce regarding the state of the platform itself as well as areas explored by his stream served to upset many in the community enough that Blizzard as a whole became a lot less active for a long period of time. Efforts such as the nominal establishment of the Commonwealth were done to attempt to mitigate some of the damage, with little to no avail.
It would not be until the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 that interest in Blizzard (Virtual Paradise, by extension) was revitalized. Several projects were resurrected and began to receive fresh maintenance, mostly because of the unusual circumstances. This proved to be largely beneficial for Blizzard as a whole. Momentum would carry on all the way to 2023, with the resurrection of Victoria & Cannaville as well as the establishment of several other cities and projects hosted by Summerville, which had since become the new landing zone for users in Blizzard that did not have a predefined home location set. A moderately famous YouTuber by the name of Redlyne would visit VP by mid-2023, bringing the platform back into the spotlight once again.