Hallucigenia - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

It was mid-1998 and Mist Classic was feeling cataclysmic turmoil and upheaval: BBSes closing up shop right and left, artists ditching ANSI art for Photoshop... following the Mistigris World Tour we had undertaken an unprecedented-at-that-time run of monthly artpack releases, at the pace everyone always expected but often was unable to maintain, even as the overall soup got thinner and thinner. Every month saw shuffles of the senior staff cabinet positions, thinking that as long as we just strategized correctly using the limited resources at our disposal, we'd successfully chart a course through the changing times.

There was talk of whipping Mist into trim, mean fighting form by dropping our emerging talent and focusing on the brightest established artists then in our stable -- dipping a toe into the waters of eliteness we'd always explicitly railed against. At the same time, a more experimentalist wing of the community was pointing to the maturation of home scanner and digital photography technology to pivot in a "real-world art" direction, supporting sketches, paintings and photography. These two camps were basically irreconcilable, and while Cthulu distractedly tried to lend each side an ear while getting over his head in bespoke HTML cooking up the M-9808 "artpack as website", the latter camp saw which way the wind was blowing and departed en masse to establish Hallucigenia, including pivotal Mist members Etana (on board since our debut MIST1094 release!), Happyfish (SysOp of our WHQ [The Jade Monkey]), hirez department heads Silent Knight and Dominion, Weird... Spire, Rash, Darklock, Spirit Wolf, Rage, Fire From Heaven, thext, Infinite Madness... it really felt like there was no coming back from defection on this scale. (Twisting the knife, the "trim the fat" contingent determined that the remaining Mist entity was no longer viable, and also resigned, leaving Cthulu wondering what to do with M-9808 and a surprising quantity of loose ends he wound up resolving sixteen or so years later... at least one of them wound up releasing with Hallucigenia down the line!)

Hallucigenia had a good run of things, for a crew established in 1998, releasing nine consecutive artpacks into 1999 before hanging up the "Mission Accomplished" banner (the same month as Hal's final artpack release, Etana launched the "Keyframe: the Animation Resource" cartoon database.) Merging with Shock from area code 410 (Maryland) early on, some wind was cut from their sails when Happyfish went on hiatus for a tour in the Katimavik program, but they managed to maintain steady recruitment on the IRC even as BBSes (including their own WHQ, [Dreams of Dark, Enchanted Lizards]) continued shutting down. (They started with their own echomail network, Creators in Limbo or CiLNet, but briefly this wound up being glommed on to our KiTSCHnet before both of them ran out of BBSes to serve echomail to.) Ultimately they were very much doing their own thing, especially in regards to showcasing "real-world art" (some of which was made to promote Mist, then had the identifying details filed off), but their descent from Mistigris was evident in eg. their very late support of lit in 1999.