Creatures Caves

As of my latest bibble, I've had yet another thought about a way the Creatures series can maintain a healthy community for the foreseeable future (well, until technology progresses to the point where computers start having trouble running games as old as the series on them; C2's already got serious issues with modern machines). Namely, they could do with some better marketing.

The series is rather obscure, and to my knowledge it's never been super popular. With no new game or spiritual successor seeming truly feasible, it's reliant on mods to keep things fresh. Unfortunately, all the great modders back in the day were people who grew up with the series. Then they went and got lives, moving on to things more important than Creatures. However, there was no one to replace them, thanks to the series' obscurity...and I believe that this is the dominant reason why the community's so quiet nowadays.

We need fresh blood, a new set of modders willing and able to give the community a new lease on life. With most plans of a new game/spiritual successor being nothing more than a pie in the sky, I believe the most realistic method for getting the new blood is by marketing the original trilogy. After all, with the whole series being available on GOG for an affordable price, the series is more accessible than ever (in theory, anyway).

I'm not entirely sure on how to go about that task, but I can think of a good starting point: Creatures needs a better social media presence. I know at least one person makes use of Twitter for Creatures-related things, but for the most part I haven't heard of many people tapping into social media's potential. I've heard of more people who don't want to touch it with a 25-1/2 foot pole.

To that end, I think a good start is getting "official" Social Media accounts. Maybe for Creatures Caves in particular (as it IS the current hub of the surviving Creatures Community), but even just for the CCSF it'd probably do wonders.

Past that, if there's any special treatment the games need to run on modern machines, such treatment should be readily accessible and easy to use. We can write "how to get Creatures running to maximum efficiency" tutorials all the time, but we need to go beyond that. We need to have everything a potential newcomer might need to run Creatures to the best of our ability in one, easy-to-access location. And then make sure that knowledge of that package is readily known to those who we might convince.

This is just a vague outline, though; I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a marketing expert by any stretch of the imagination. All the same, I'd like to hear it if anyone else thinks such a marketing campaign is feasible, propose more concrete ideas to what I'm throwing around here, or just ground my idealism if I'm getting too idealistic here.