Utopia (online game)

Each Age, the span of time during which each game is played, lasts about 10-12 real-world weeks. At the beginning of each Age, the player chooses from a selection of numerous playable humanoid races, faery, orc, dwarf, elf, halfling, undead, avian and human, as well as choosing a personality such as thief, mage or attacker, starting the game with a principality. Each island contains dozens of principalities, which together form a kingdom with a monarch at its head. This ruler is elected by the votes of each principality's leader.

Strategies vary depending on the player's race, with each player entering the game daily in order to command their principality. Players can be declared inactive by the kingdom's ruler if they do not check in.

Utopia was initially programmed by Mehul Patel, who started programming games for pre-Internet bulletin board systems. He developed the game while he was a student at the University of Texas at Austin, and was 22 years old when Utopia launched. He created it because he "liked the idea of empire building, building economies, building relationships, building a social-type game". The takeover of Swirve.com, Patel's site, which hosted Utopia and Earth: 2025, was completed on July 7, 2008 after Patel sold it to OMAC Industries (Jolt Online Gaming). By 2017, Patel owned an Austin-based escape room, and did not even realize the game was still active, as he had designed the game for dial-up Internet and believed it would not survive the transition to broadband, being unsure if it would even last one or two years.

In 2001, Burak Akmenek of Level magazine described Utopia's user interface as "simple", but called its strategy and community "tremendously lively", and said he was never bored despite playing the game for months, noting that he could "write pages" about the game. In a 2003 review published in XtremPC magazine, Juncu Ioana rated Utopia highly, saying that he still loved it to that day. Noting that "teamwork and interactivity compensate for the lack of graphics", he described the game as "addictive". Calling the player base of 80,000 "impressive", he said that its human community was what made it "amazing".

In 2017, Tyler Harper of Vice stated that "Utopia may not be much to look at", describing it as appearing "slightly better than something a high school student might design in a coding class", but called its gameplay "timeless". He described its real-time nature as being a precursor to later games such as Clash of Clans. Harper noted that some players are so dedicated to the game that they have played it since its inception.

The game saw a sequel, Utopia Kingdoms, developed by Jolt Online Gaming and XS Software.