Mehul Patel

credit to UF News: An interview with Mehul Patel, creator of Utopiahttp://forums.utopia-game.com/showthread.php?618730-UF-News-An-interview-with-Mehul-Patel-creator-of-Utopia retrieved on 02/04/24
Mehul Patel is the creator of Utopia. He designed and built the game. 
== Bio ==
=== Previous games ===
Mehul was involved in the BBS-based gaming movement, and was the creator of some of the most influential and revolutionary BBS games of all time including Barren Realms Elite and Falcon's Eyehttp://wiki.utopia-game.com/index.php?title=Mehul_Patel on 07/04/24. His early works were based on his older brother Amit Patel's own Solar Realms Elite. 
He authored multiple BBS games including an SRE-like game called Alpha Colony VI (AC6), then BRE, Falcon's Eye, The Arcadian Legends. The games were based on the same type of interface, and were designed with an almost identical look and feel. Also, they were InterBBS capable which was quite an acheivement in and of itself. After developing Falcon's Eye, Mehul began losing interest in the dial-up BBS world and began a project he called "Earth". 
Earth 2025 was his first web-based game, built in Borland Delphi in six weeks and hosted on his Solarianet.com site. At first his target audience was 500 users, but within weeks thousands were playing the online BRE clone. Mehul had created Earth to show the power of multiplayer gaming and brought thousands of people into a single gaming environment. He saw Earth as a social game, that was primarily about individuals (or later on, Clans that were self-selecting).
Mehul setup Solaria Games in 1996, which was renamed to Echelon Entertainment in 1999, then renamed in July 2000 to Swirve.Com. 
"when I started Earth, it was an experiment to see if we could create this new type of gaming environment - but we really had no idea what the end result would be. On the low end, I wasn't sure I would find a way to make it a viable business model. On the high end, I thought we'd create a really entertaining and unique game." 
=== Creating Utopia ===
A team setting seemed the natural evolution for Mehul - and a continuation of his previous game, BRE, and the InterBBS nature of that game. He saw the creation of cohorts as taking the level of interaction up to a whole new level, and saw friendships built that spanned the world. Mehul worked on Utopia while he was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. He was just 22 years old when Utopia launched.https://www.vice.com/en/article/evpwpj/utopia-online-game on 06/04/24
Mehul said Utopia's success exceeded his expectations: "Utopia was really an experiment. Part of what made Utopia so great is that every 2 or 3 months, you could have a totally different experience. The entire premise of the social interaction of Utopia was built around interacting with people you didn't know and learning to work with them. It was a mix of learning diplomatic skills, politicking, etc."
Mehul tried to maintain the game with space for players with different activity levels and aims. He focused on catering to less active gamers as he thought that without them the game couldn't work, or at least couldn't grow and attract new players. He wanted the formulas and math to be a necessary, but secondary part of the game, but admitted that he wasn't sure if he should have integrated more math and analysis directly into the game. He thought that the requirements around formulas and calculations helped to build an organic community around the game. At its peak during the early 2000s, according to Patel, the game had around 100,000 active users. 
Mehul was proud that Utopia brought together people from different backgrounds with different interests and taught them to communicate and work together. He compared the game to the TV show Survivor: "I really liked the first season of it for the same reason - people were simply thrown together and had to figure out leadership, learn to get along with
people they didn't agree with, etc. I think Utopia had a lot of that . That's one big reason why I felt picking your own teams took away a lot of what made Utopia great."
One of Mehul's biggest concerns when running the game was that serious players would run off more casual players. 
Mehul did not expect the game to have the impact it did on players real lives. He viewed hearing personal stories as one of the most rewarding parts of running Swirve - "whether it was the relationships built, or teachers that used the games in their classes. My favorite was a story from a parent of an adopted boy - they were struggling to connect with their son. He played Utopia, and they joined in and it opened doors for them all to build relationship. Things like that were beyond my wildest expectations when I started this project." 
Mehul was assisted in running Utopia by Blake, who was infamous for deleting players. 
=== Sale of Utopia ===
Mehul began to feel he was losing interest in the game and prioritised time on other projects over Earth & Utopia. He had received severa; offers to buy the games, but OMAC seemed to be the first company that he felt had both the interest and the resources to commit to take the games to a next level. He sold the game to OMAC in 2008, who later became Jolt Online Gaming. 
In 2017 Mehul said "It's pretty insane. I didn't even know if it would last a year or two at that point," Patel said. He'd designed the game for dial-up internet and thought the advent of broadband would be the end of Utopia. "I am a little shocked that it's still alive today. I would not have expected that." 
== Associated Kingdoms and Alliances ==
Following the sale to OMAC industries Mehul did play Utopia "to see how the new system was working and how the sign up and login process was working.", but did not share which kingdoms he played in. 
== Controversies ==
Mehul oversaw a reshuffle of Players into new kingdoms to encourage new relationships. Many in the playerbase were unhappy with this as it separated friends who had met through Utopia and played together. 
Mehul thought he never quite created the game he envisioned: "the game we were truly aiming for - no cheating, random kingdoms, etc. I think that would have been an incredible experience for a whole new class of casual gamer that we never could quite sustain after the first year or so of the game".
== Pesonal Life ==
=== Post utopia ===
Following the sale of Utopia Mehul opened a coffee shop called Dominican Joes in Austin, Texas aimed at giving back to non-profits . In 2011 he said he was looking to expand the coffee shop and looking for more ways to make a difference in the world. In 2016, after 10 years, the coffee shop was sold to Bennu Coffee Shop while Domincan Joe continued to offer online coffee sales.https://www.dominicanjoe.com/about on 06/04/24 
Immediately following the sale of Utopia Mehul was bound by a non-compete clause so did not start other gaming projects or comment on Utopia. He now occasionally accepts requests for interview about the game. 
Patel also owned an escape room in Austin, and in 2017 said he hadn't checked on Utopia in years