Music to accompany this post:
On my first day of playing, I said to my old buddy RagnaR who introduced me to the game, that Eve was wonderful because it had no backstory. Whatever players decided to make happened in the game is the history, and even as a non-capsuleer, I'd read about major events in the Eve universe. Like the burning of Jita, and the real-life passing of Vile Rat, member of the Council of Stellar Management, the player/dev interface.
Of course, RagnaR metaphorically slapped me and told me there are hundreds of pages of backstory and lore written, and I should go study it...dammit, first NPC agents now him, why does everyone behave like they're my mum?
In the end, by my account, I was almost half-right. EVE has a lot of backstory, some of which I'll try to summarize in the next few days, but even official Eve lore has a great amount of content from after the game went live and its universe became a living breathing world populated by actual players.
Before EVE
As in many sci-fi opuses set in the far future, planet Earth has been lost to the ages, indeed the whole milky way galaxy is lost in time and space to the inhabitants of New Eden, ie. you and I playing EVE Online.
The human species had evolved technologically to the point where space travel was not only possible, but also profitable thanks to exploration and asteroid mining (indeed even now in the real world, some hotheads are speculating and investing in this very idea). Colonies were placed on nearby moons and planets. Our solar system was fully settled by around 2700 AD. As expected it snowballed from there and soon Jump Gates,Warp Drive and Jump Drives were invented, making interstellar travel possible. Well, "soon" meaning 900-1200 years later.
One day, in the year 7987 AD, a massive wormhole near Canopus was discovered, leading to a whole other Galaxy. It was symbolically named EVE. Some experts claimed this discovery to be "off da hizzok!". Paleolinguists are baffled to this day.
People nicely played together to stabilize the wormhole with massive jump gates on each side, taking a couple hundred years for their construction alone. The gates artificially and successfully held EVE open, but 75 years after its discovery, it all broke down. Travel between the Milky way and the freshly-colonised New Eden system and its eponymous Galaxy was cut off.
Thus ended an Era of mankind.
The Dark Ages
Without the vital industrial and material support from the Milky Way, most colonies in New Eden suffered full societal breakdowns, and almost all of the history from this Era has been left unrecorded.
However, human beings being the resilient kind, several settlements survived in isolated pockets of space and eventually grew into the five great Empires: Amarr, Caldari, Gallente, Minmatar, and to my surprise, Jove, whom I didn't know being of Human origin.
Keep a watchful eye, tomorrow I will tell you the little I know about the rise of the four Empires.
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