Adventurequest

About Adventurequest

AdventureQuest (also referred to by its website name BattleOn or simply as AQ) is an online single-player RPG developed by Artix Entertainment in 2002 and released on October 15 of that year. It is implemented in Flash and uses vector graphics, some of which are animated. The game follows the adventures of a character tied with the town of Battleon (the player) as he or she explores the game world while engaging in combat with various enemies. As of March 31, 2008, aq.battleon.com, the game's hosting website, has an Alexa rating of 1,029. AdventureQuest and all related games are set within the world of Lore, formerly a tongue-in-cheek reference to the game's original title, Lands of Rising Evil, which has since been explained to refer to Lorithia, a name of the goddess of creation in the game's storyline.

Guardianship, a measure introduced on February 22, 2003 to manage the costs of running the game, added a one-time fee-based character upgrade service. Ownership of the game transfered to the newly-formed Artix Entertainment in 2004, and a server population cap was added for non-Guardian players in May of that year. In June 2004, players of AdventureQuest reached 1 million in number.

By June 2005, the game had 5 million users, an amount which rapidly grew to 40 million by September 2007. As AdventureQuest grew, Artix Entertainment added new methods to pay for in-game content, such as X-Guardianship (in October 2005) and purchasable Z-Tokens (in June 2006), and released other related games, such as DragonFable (on July 26, 2005), MechQuest, ArchKnight and ZardWars.