In 2005, MTV showed up at Second Life's first user convention. The outside media began noticing the virtual world. Someone else created a four-dimensional tesseract house with no front or back. Someone who used to work for Peter Molyneux built an island with its own ecosystem. One of the very first users I interviewed, a tall brunette dressed like a prototypical hacker, had built a glass-domed mansion in Second Life. For its first three years, Linden Lab contracted me as the virtual world's official "embedded journalist" - it was a lot like trying to report on a collective hallucination. In its first five years, the creative energy that gamers put into Second Life was fierce and unpredictable. Launched in 2003, Second Life combined the Metaverse aspiration with those proto- Minecraft aspects and bolted them atop social MMO game mechanics, like user-to-user ratings, friending, leaderboards, and so on. Like Minecraft, Second Life also comes with construction and scripting tools so users can create 3-D content in the virtual world with multi-shaped building blocks, then animate them with interactive scripts. After the excessive media coverage waned, and the initial hyperbolic predictions failed to cash out, many forgot about it, but more kept playing.Ĭreated by a San Francisco startup called Linden Lab, Second Life was inspired in great part by the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash - a 3-D alternate reality with its own rules, values, and hierarchies. So I went to meet AM Radio, and the man who made him real.īuzzed by media reports between 20 as the internet's next big thing and then largely forgotten afterward, Second Life is actually a bit more popular now than it was during that time - it had about 500,000 regular users then, and now it has around 600,000. Would love to meet you in person, even if you're busy, a moment or two would be fun." I tweeted in your direction, but it was only my second tweet ever, and I don't know if it went through. This e-mail appeared in my inbox: "AM Radio here. Two years later, a mutual friend met him at South by Southwest, and knowing I was there too, encouraged him to reach out. More key, he'd made it plain many times that he wanted to keep his real and virtual identities apart. It left his fans with no easy way to find him. I received no reply.ĪM Radio's fame came despite the fact that the wider Second Life user community didn't know his real identity. Since I'd written about his Second Life art many times for a metaverse blog, I had his email address. The mystery of his disappearance lingered for a couple years. AM Radio suddenly disappeared from Second Life. Now, five years past the apex of his fame, he still attracts thousands of visitors with every single Second Life installation - 12,000 in the last year.Īnd then, in 2011, something else happened to heighten his allure. Women constantly followed AM Radio around Second Life the way you imagine ladies from another time trailing after a Parisian painter - sometimes they even propositioned him sexually with real nude photos of themselves.
Two people who met as avatars in the middle of his most famous art installation wound up getting married in real life. Some of his most avid admirers told him that his work saved them from suicide. Players often see works by grassroots creators on popular platforms that allow user-generated content, like Minecraft and Skyrim - and that brings the creators a measure of fleeting internet fame.ĪM Radio's acclaim, however, was in another category altogether. But more than that, his work drew a passionate following in the game itself. The New York Times Magazine featured his Second Life work, as many other outlets have.
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But where the British street artist is famous for his sardonic graffiti mysteriously appearing around the globe, AM Radio is famous for creating artwork in Second Life, the user-created virtual world packed full with rich experiences.Įven years after the height of his renown, AM Radio is probably Second Life's most famous artist. If the world of MMOs has a Banksy, it's AM Radio.
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