Eve Online historian recounts how players made a chaotic space opera all their own

Eve Online, the famously tedious science fiction game, turned 18 years old earlier this month. For nearly two decades, CCP Games’ epic spacefaring MMO has brought players around the world together in a shared universe called New Eden, a wild and dangerous place filled with conflict and intrigue. While the game itself has a fiction all its own, the best stories always seem to come from players. They’re the stuff of great space opera, but — like many things on the internet — all of it is ephemeral. That’s made the work of author and Eve historian Andrew Groen all the more difficult.

Groen’s first book, Empires of Eve: A History of the Great Wars of Eve Online, was published in 2016. Originally funded through Kickstarter, it remains the definitive work on Eve’s early history. It’s a tale pieced together from old message boards, rare first-hand accounts, and chat logs squirreled away in obscure corners of the internet. On Tuesday, May 25, Volume 2 goes up for sale, representing another few years of careful work. Polygon is proud to present a lengthy transcript of the entire first chapter.

We’ve already spent some time with the final product, which was recently delivered to backers. You’ll find this is a sequel written to be approachable and suitable even for readers who have no understanding of Eve or who have not read the first book.

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