14 DAY TRIAL // Virtual world pioneer Randy Farmer, creator of the '80s LucasArts virtual world, along with (Chip Morningstar), made this entry on their Habitat Chronicles blog, telling the story on how he blew up Second Life while it was still in its early Beta stages. The post is entitled: "Second Life History: The Jessie Massacre."
Here he admits to griefing the early Beta Second Life world for 'testing' purposes, as GameSetWatch reports, explaining: "I'd been working with the object spawning directives in the scripting language. I'd also discovered that I could make an object very small (less than an inch in diameter), and very transparent (virtually invisible)."
He continued: "It struck on me that I could make a weapon of mass destruction and do it very cheaply. It worked like this: a tiny invisible floating grenade that would explode into dozens of invisible tiny fragments flying outward spherically at maximum velocity and doing maximum damage and then immediately teleport itself to another random location in the simulator. It would be undetectable, unstoppable, and lethal: The perfect killing machine. It could only be stopped by me shouting the keyword: STOP!"
I'm sure that many of you are quite fascinated by now, but the reality is that something like this isn't all that hard to do in a virtual world such as Second Life. But to undo something like this...
"It turned out that my grenades were too small and invisible. Though they were now inert I couldn't find them to remove them. In effect, they were a dormant virus in Jessie. So, I filed a bug report: "Unable to select small, invisible objects." The in next day or two there was a patch to the client to "show transparency" so that it would be possible for me to see them, select them, and delete them - which I promptly did. But the legend remains."
Great Story what can I say, but again: what makes it so special? My apologies if I'm missing something here. Griefers do so much more damage than this, but then again, Farmer's intentions weren't malefic.