How I Created One of the First Achievement Systems

Achievements are one of the special awards and accolades players and teams covet. They allow the winners to talk smack, brag, and show off their awards online. I created my achievement system in 1998 for Microsoft on the Internet Gaming Zone.

Michael Hahn, Blogger

October 18, 2011

2 Min Read

Achievements are one of the special awards and accolades players and teams covet. They allow the winners to talk smack, brag, and show off their awards online.

I created my achievement system in 1998 while I was a volunteer for Microsoft on the Internet Gaming Zone. I was the youngest and first ever host for retail tournaments in Microsoft's history.

I was the host of the Clan World Tournament (CWT). I had to find a way to provide a meaningful prize to the winners that wasn’t considered tangible or have value.

I found the solution in a leader board that gave points to the winners and a custom graphic representation of a trophy. The trophy and leadership achievement system provided an addicting experience. Players and clans wanted to win badly. They wanted the trophy and the points on the leader board.

If you click the the Jedi Knight Trophy link. You will see many trophies from various teams and players. These trophies ranged from gold, silver, bronze. I easily hosted over 100 tournaments for that game. I was blessed to have talented volunteer graphic artists to make these trophies.

The Leader board was a simple HTML table that listed the names of the winners in columns along with the trophies they won. A gold trophy awarded 10 points, Silver, 5 points and Bronze 3 points. I didn’t have any scripts for this type of leader board because CGI, Perl and Asp Classic were the top web programming languages at the time.

Lets fast forward to today's achievement system. Its basically the same thing. Players get personal trophies and a point system on a leader board. Only difference is I didn’t award achievements for unlocking things inside of a game. Everything I awarded was external.

So that is how I created the first achievement system in retail games for online game tournaments.