Lost Habitat and Club Caribe development documents found!

Back in 2020, I'd been following up leads of names of former Habitat members and Quantum Link staffers to see if they had any memories of the place, or kept any development materials. One name in particular kept popping up who had also been mentioned in some of the original Habitat Archives that Chip Morningstar compiled for the open source release of the Habitat client and server.

That name was Scott Gries who went by the name of Celebrindl inworld.

Scott originally started out as a beta tester for Habitat, before starting work as a producer at Quantum Link. That role would directly lead to him taking over the reins once the Habitat beta test ended and he was charged with the task of redesigning the Habitat world and turning it into something new. That something new would end up being Club Caribe.

Being in this role meant that he inherited a bunch of documents, manuals, guides and more from his predecessor once he headed up working on Caribe. Scott kept those documents all of these years and they contain a bunch of historically interesting things such as...

For Habitat (1986-1988):

• Graphic Proofs
• Internal memos between Lucasfilm Games and Quantum Link discussing the transitional handover from Habitat to Club Caribe
• Proposals, correspondence and status reports between Lucasfilm Games and Quantum Link
• Play Testing Guides
• Welcome Kits
• Newspaper Articles

For Club Caribe (1988-1990):

• An "admin manual" containing notes written during development, documenting magical commands, macros used to manipulate the database, lists of heads that were permitted to be used, public relations stuff and operations templates.
• The "GHU" manual (GHU stood for God's Handy Utility and was a command line tool used to manipulate the Habitat object database. You could build or edit regions using this. This tool was used a lot in modifying the original Habitat regions and turning them into what would become Caribe)
• Newspaper Articles
• Guide books
• Marketing materials

For both services, 54 page of maps have been found. A mixture of Habitat and Caribe maps are in this collection. Scott previously shared scans of three or four of these and they contained things like a detailed overworld map of the island of Club Caribe, downtown Populopolis in Habitat, the alpha version of the downtown Populopolis and Level 2 of the Dungeon of Death (extra special as this is the only fragment of the Dungeon that survives. it didn't make it into the Habitat database backup).

There is a lot of stuff here that has never been seen before and things that will fill a bunch of missing gaps. The map stuff especially is useful as it may be the only archival source of info we have for certain areas. It'll also be useful for any future restoration efforts.

The alpha map of Populopolis for example was very useful as it features region numbers for every region. If you check those numbers against regions saved from the Habitat database backup, they match 1:1. This helped us to confirm and date those regions so we can see a snapshot of Habitat during its alpha period which most people didn't get to see.

I'd been speaking to Scott about archiving these in some fashion since at least 2021/2022 and although he was able to share a handful of things, time didn't permit because the entire collection is roughly 400 pages or so in total.

In the end, Scott ended up donating his entire collection to the Strong National Museum of Play in New York back in November 2024. I've been in contact with the museum since that time awaiting to see when these documents would be checked in and available to remote researchers such as myself.

The collection is now available, but unfortunately it is not explorable online at this time (and may never be).

As it turns out, copies of the materials can be requested, scanned in and shared but there is a fee and the images aren't able to be reproduced anywhere else unless you pay a separate fee. As this is a passion project for me and small fry compared to most other things, I won't be able to facilitate that as it would cost too much money.

However, I do think that paying to get the collection archived and having digital copies in the possession of someone like myself is worth it because I can still make good use of it.

Things mentioned in these documents can still be written about, quotes shared and sources cited. There is likely to be a ton of extra stuff in here that is worth dealing with the restrictions now put in place on these documents.

I also think one day it may be worth going through things and for certain items, looking into whether it is worth paying to have those documents become shareable to all. Specifically things like the graphic proofs or the maps.

One last restriction was that you are only able to request either 1/3 of the collection or 500 pages, whichever is less. So I've selected a bunch of things from the available list of documents which have the most historical value and gotten a quote for them.

For 229 pages which contain most of what I mentioned in the lists above, it will cost $114.50 to have them scanned and made available.

If you are able to help me offset the cost of gaining access to these important artifacts, please either get in touch with me, join our Discord server if you'd like to chat about it, or you can support via our PayPal or Ko-Fi pages.

The community has been very generous in the past with covering the cost of things like acquiring the Habitat beta blast VHS tapes, the Club Caribe documentary VHS tapes and having them professionally transferred and made available to everyone else and I love that so much. I hope we are able to come together again to continue preserving the legacy of these pioneering online services.