Although Beta 1 officially started on Monday, April 5th of this year, we had already sent out all invitation emails on previous Sunday. The very beginning, as was somewhat expected, was a total disaster. The game account interface of the old "Beta Portal" caused a few problems and the majority of our testers couldn't log in due to their game account containing invalid data, so we had to invite them manually one by one, fixing the database entries by hand.

Early on the morning of the 5th of April, all accounts were finally ready to go. At this point the excitement was such that even the thought of sleep was impossible. Before this point in time we had never seen more than five accounts logged in simultaneously, so watching the first logins was our only interest, and sleep could wait. It was awfully stirring to watch all those testers logging in and see them moving through our vision of New York City in the 24th century, but unfortunately it didn't last long. The server applications crashed after only about five minutes, and it crashed again a few minutes after each automatic restart. "Great start..." I said to myself, but I didn't really expect immediate success with a project of such complexity.