Steve Grand OBE is a British computer scientist perhaps best known for building a one eyed robot orangutan baby called Lucy to see if it could become sentient.. However, in 1996, he released a videogame called "Creatures".

Creatures is set in an arcadian world called Albia, which was created by a race of long dead ancient aliens ("The Shee"). Left over from these aliens are a species known as Cyberlifogenis cutis, or "Norns". These creatures were basically engineered to be Court Jesters/monkey butlers to the ancient aliens, and look kind of like a mix between a Mogwai and Dobby the House Elf.. You play as a disembodied hand, and your job is to bring the Norns back to life from an archive of hibernating eggs.

That's the lore, anyway. The actual gameplay is fairly complex. Norns were touted as not AI but as "Alife". According to Steve Grand, the difference between AI and Alife is a survival instinct. The example he brought up was throwing a Labrador Retreiver and IBM's chess playing computer Deep Blue into a duck pond, and seeing which one fared better.

Anyway these Norns were not exactly programmed. Instead they were based on a rudimentary genome, brain and biochemical system. Norns had requirements to stay alive - for example, a healthy level of glycogen. They had associated drives like "hunger" or "need for entertainment", and if these drives got too low, it could cause issues. These in turn were associated with chemicals - which were complex; Norns would preferentially go for honey - high in "saccharine" but low in "starch", so honey would lower the hunger drive without increasing their glycogen levels (and so a Norn could feel full while starving to death). Female Norns had an entire menstrual cycle involving oestrogen, progesterone and gonadotropin-releasing hormone.

It was your job as a disembodied hand to hatch Norns from eggs and then raise them properly. Initially you can only tickle or slap them, which causes increased "reward" or "punishment" chemicals, and so results in them "learning" behaviour. You can punish them for playing with dangerous items, and reward them for doing good things, and then emergent behaviour develops.

When Norns first hatch, they only speak a baby language called "Bibble". If you spend upwards of 20 minutes (I'm not kidding) on each Norn you hatch, showing them a computer and reinforcing correct words and their name, you can then give them basic orders and slowly teach them categories of object like "toy" or "food". Hence if you see a Norn called Amy is starving you can type "run Amy get food". For whatever reason this was customisable, so you can teach them "cours Amy prends nourriture" (you can't change grammar, but you can change the words for each verb and noun). Well trained adult Norns would be able to teach baby Norns the fully developed language with minimal player intervention (conversely, poorly trained adult Norns will accidentally develop a weird Bibble pidgin that is utterly incomprehensible).

You basically have to teach Norns how to live, because the world is littered with dangerous items like deathcap mushrooms (full of glycotoxin) - along with a failed Shee genetic experiment called Cyberlifogenis vicious or "Grendels", basically a mean goblin thing that will beat up the Norns and potentially give them horrible infectious diseases.

Fandom Reception

Steve developed Creatures as an Alife experiment, and it was received positively. Famed Biologist Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene) said

Creatures represents a quantum leap in the development of artificial life.

and Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy) said he felt the game encouraged people to take up careers in science. But regardless of the experimental value, it was also a commercially released game.

Norns displayed emergent behaviour - an early breakthrough was two Norns learning to play a game of catch with each other, even though that had never been programmed or intended. Norns would spontaneously breed, but if you had trained them well, you could selectively breed them (and you could also engage in eugenics, force-feeding a genetically "undesirable" Norn an "ugly tomato", which would permanently reduce their sex drive to -100). If you bought a separate CD-ROM, you could even genetically modify Norns or create custom breeds with custom sprites, or custom COBs (Creature Objects), like a foodstuff that reduced histamine levels for a Norn having an allergic reaction.

Norn breeds and COBs were shared across the internet and a user base built up. They were very sentimental about the Norns. The manual that came with the game said

Norns are alive, and should be considered to be similar to small children. If you look after your Norn as you would a two year old child, you won’t go far wrong. As with children, Norns can be a bit of a handful, so don’t hatch too many too quickly or your world will be full of little Norns that you can’t give the amount of attention and care they need.

This view of Norns as living two year old children rapidly proliferated among the userbase. Some Norn breeders were interviewed by Wired in 1997

Sedgebeer: It's not uncommon for younger Breeders to burst in to tears when their first norns die. I even got an email from a fully grown man who admitted he cried when his favorite norn died!

Laemmle: When a new norn is born, well, it's some strange kind of feeling - just like when you get a pet ... and when a norn dies it's always very sad. But it's not like being attached to a "nonvirtual lifeform."

Preece: I was attached to my first two, Musa and Tou. When Tou died, it was quite disturbing! But hey - I had backed him up, so now he lives on!

November: A lot of people have complained about such a short life span of the little fellows. Many people do feel a little bit of remorse upon losing one of the little guys.

Skilled breeders eventually developed Norns that had mutated senescene hormones, so became immortal, or managed to mutate a Norn into having telekinesis.

Norn Torture

This is /r/hobbydrama rather than /r/nichehobbies after all.

In a development that should be utterly unsurprising to modern audiences used to games like The Sims, some people realised you didn't always have to be nice to the Norns.

It's easy to accidentally mess up your Norns. You might fail to punish/reward them appropriately and accidentally encourage them to eat poison, or you might mess around with the science kit and inject them with an adrenaline overdose and give them heart attacks, or you could accidentally breed Norns with a genetic disorder that means they can't effectively metabolise chemicals so they develop a condition known as OHSS ("One Hour Stupidity Syndrome"), where the "reward" hormone or the "turn left" hormone slowly builds up in their brain and they end up just endlessly smashing themselves into a wall or forgetting to eat because they feel GREAT.

The earliest intentional issues were "ethical concerns". These included hacked genetic modification that created a Norn/Grendel hybrids ("GreNorns") that would sometimes turn out as evil Norns that spread diseases and beat up other Norns, or "Wolfling" runs, where you hatch a bunch of Norns and leave them to it. Fans were not happy about accidental harm this could cause to Norns.

The first actual Norn torture post appears to have been a troll post on alt.games.creatures called "Do You Beat Your Norns", by a user called "Nornbasher"

Do you beat your norns or do other things to terrorize them. COME on I KNOWcsome of you must have some worlds dedicated just to pain for the little devils. I have all kinds of Norns for the HANNsters if they want what's left of their mangled little bodies. No I don't mean this as mean as it sounds, hey you have to know what the limits of a Norns body and psyche is to help the norns you love. Yes I have a normal norn world too, but I also have one in which some norns are tortured for the betterment of others, but I would be willing to send the HANN group some of my norns to see if they can be rehabilitatered. Email me if you also have worlds like mine, I'll keep you email secret. And by all means send me some of your tortured norns, we can trade.

This elicited the following responses:

ill get you at night while you are sleeping and ill ram your sick mind through your nose and down your throat while its on fire, not to mention ill ram burning incense in your ears while im screaming "Norn stop nornbasher doo!!

I'm getting a group together, we're gonna go remove some crucial parts from this guy so he can't have children.

You (and anyone else into torturing norns) are not invited to download any of my norns from my website to use in your torture worlds. They are for the good people of this newsgroup who are mature enough to give them proper care and attention.

It also attracted the attention of a US Navy Officer, who came to be known as AntiNorn.

AntiNorn

AntiNorn was amused by the vitriol that post had elicited, and had grown tired of a community that pretty much only posted cutesy romances between player Norns and uploaded COBs that made sure they always felt happy and never experienced pain. He felt that side of the game had been fully explored. So he created a Norn called "Slave" and offered her up for download, who he had trained to refer to the player hand as "God".

After I created her I started by hitting her constantly for about 5 minutes. Then I taught her all the words so it would be easier to make her scared of her surroundings. After she knew all the words, I placed her in a small area, surrounded by the FF Cob, with 5 Grendels. I left her there for about 20 minutes, beating her when she attempted to defend herself from the Grendels. After she was sufficiently traumatized, I put her back in the garden. In the Garden I forced her to Get, Look, Push and Pull everything around her, all the time, constantly beating her. I made her fear running so I wouldn't have to deal with that little problem(you fellow torturers out there know how annoying it is to chase them down once they get away). I also forced her to eat weeds, rewarding her when she did so. At the time I exported her, she's a quivering mass of fear. She might eat, if you're lucky, but she probably won't survive long enough for food to do any good. You can download her by clicking below. Have fun.

He also linked to a 30 second clip of Slave getting beaten to death by Grendels.

Large numbers of Norn fanatics were horrified by this, and condemned him to the point of sending death threats. These included further castration threats, plans to inject his eyeballs with hydrogen peroxide, accusations of being a demon and descriptions of acid etching his entrails

Many players downloaded Slave to give her a "second chance" at a happy life. However, when loaded, Slave was full of Glycotoxin and required immediate medical attention. She was scared of "God" and would not follow instructions, and also had been trained to eat poisonous weeds over food. She was so traumatised she was uneasy on her feet and would often fall unconscious out of stress, and was frail so invariably died young. Regardless, many Norn breeders were able to rehabilitate her and she was able to breed with their lovingly cared for Norns and have many babies before having a relatively peaceful death.

That's when the Norn breeders discovered Slave hadn't just been traumatised. She had been genetically modified to constantly produce alcohol in her bloodstream, and their (foolishly not backed up) heritage pedigree bloodlines were now contaminated with drunken Norns who staggered about and passed out continually before succumbing to alcoholism related diseases.

AntiNorn would later gloatingly update the description to read

The Norn just about every Norn lover out there has imported into their world(s) and unwittingly mated to create abnormally drunk children. Wow, I bet they're proud of the fact that they've basically tortured generations of newborns this way.

AntiNorn would go on to create a website called "Tortured Norns". This did not just include Norns with serious issues (including "TickleMe", a Norn who had been genetically modified to associate reward with punishment and so could only experience pain) but also elaborately coded COBs, such as the Norn Crackpipe, which flooded the Norn with temporary happy chemicals before making them miserable, in pain and scared (leading to them reaching for the crackpipe again). He also provided butchery instructions for Norns along with recipes for "Norn Baby Soup" and "Norn Almondine".

Fallout

AntiNorn was interviewed by Wired in an article entitled "Virtual Sadism".

He noted a user called EagleWoman had started a petition to get him removed from the Worldwide Norn Association Webring, and wryly stated that if she'd contacted him and asked him politely, he would have removed himself from it, but since she decided to do a petition without contacting him, he wouldn't budge. He did also observe he got fan mail off sadists that actually disturbed him.

Steve Grand himself commented on AntiNorn years later:

He devised various tortures to make their little lives a misery, and I think he did so with his tongue firmly in his cheek and a challenging grin on his face. I was so pleased about this (although I didn't dare say so publicly while I still represented the company that made Creatures, for fear that it would upset our customers), because it forced people to think about whether this really was cruel,. I expected him to elicit some response from the other Creatures owners, but not quite such a hostile one as ensued. The poor guy received an enormous amount of hate mail, and was excluded from the Creatures Internet community for a long time. Much of his hate mail showed a greater regard for the creatures than it did for the life of this one human being.

AntiNorn stuck about for the sequels, continuing to torture Norns. He unfortunately passed away in 2004 in his early 30s, but tributes to him still crop up from time to time.

Edit: Steve was last heard from on Kickstarter, developing a new form of life with actual imaginations called Grandroids. You can see the very upsetting trailer for it here