[MUD-Dev] Online Worlds Timeline Update
Koster
Koster
Wed Feb 20 21:05:51 CET 2002
It's that time again. :) Here's the periodic posting of the Online
Worlds Timeline.
Major new additions this time around:
* Much new info on TradeWars, courtesy of John Pritchett
* Much new info on the early days of Kesmai, courtesy of Kelton
Flinn
* Finishes off the year 2001 with a lot of game closures... :(
* The year 2002 now has entries
* Publication dates for numerous books including "True Names",
"Johnny Mnemonic", Shockwave Rider, Neuromancer, Otherland, and
Wyrm
* Release dates for films including eXistenZ, Lawnmower Man, and
WarGames
* The usual tiny trickle of people from PLATO days with minor
corrections
This will be live on the site tomorrow, but as usual I thought I'd
post it here for everyone.
------------
Online World Timeline
The following is a timeline for the development of virtual worlds. I
welcome more additions to the timeline. Check at the bottom of this
for a list of sources.
Last updated Febuary 20, 2002.
-Raph Koster
1937
- J. R. R. Tolkien publishes The Hobbit.
- Dr Cat adds, "I personally would like to see Lord Dunsany
mentioned to counter any notion that Tolkien invented swords and
sorcery. Even if everyone including the D&D authors were
obsessed with him (and of course everyone after the D&D authors
was obsessed with D&D)." 1947
- Vannevar Bush conceptualizes aspects of hypertext, the Internet,
virtual spaces, and lots more. 1954-55
- The three books of the Lord of the Rings are published in
England. This is their first publication. 1960
- Ted Nelson gets the idea for hypertext as we know it now. He
won't coin the word until 1963, and the word won't see print until
1965. He works alone on the concept throughout the decade,
choosing the term Xanadu for his project in 1967. 1961
- University of Illinois introduces and patents PLATO, "Programmed
Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations", a network running on the
ILLIAC computer system.
- "The nation's first computer-assisted program of
instruction. PLATO, conceived by physics professor Chalmers
Sherwin and developed under the direction of electrical
engineering professor Don Bitzer, co-inventor of the plasma
display panel, was the world's first time-shared computer-based
education system" according to the UI website.
- "The name PLATO was originally just a name, not an
acronym. Someone invented the acronym sometime in the 1970's,
which was never officially endorsed, but someone printed it
anyway." - Eric Hagstrom 1962
- Spacewar! on the PDP-1. It's 2 player. And it's graphical. And
it is 9K.
1963
- Modem patented by BBN.
- Concept of network connected by modems defined in a paper by
Thomas Marill, Daniel Edwards, and Wallace Feurzig.
1964
1965
- According to Richard J. Auld, the concept of the "FAQ" is
developed on PLATO.
- According to the Cyberpunk Timeline
<http://heriot.brinkster.net/cns/tl.htm>, "MIT researcher Lawrence
G. Roberts & Thomas Merrill connected A TX-2 computer in
Massachusetts to the Q-32 in Palo Alto, California with a low
speed dial-up telephone line creating the first (however small)
wide-area computer network ever built. (Jan.)"
1966
- Ralph Baer conceptualizes the videogame.
- Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is first published in the US.
1967
1968
- By now they are up to PLATO IV, according to some sources.
- "PLATO III yes, PLATO IV no. I started working at CERL in June
1972. At that time we were in transition from PLATO III to PLATO
IV. The new mainframe for PLATO IV had been installed and quite a
bit of system software had been written for it, but it was still
at an early stage." - David Woolley
- Baer files a videogame related patent. This is going to be the
Odyssey.
1969
- Rick Blomme writes two-player Spacewar on PLATO. It works on the
remote network, so it is now true network gaming.
- "The reason Plato was such a good gaming platform in the 70's
and early 80's is that it had graphics abilities superior to
anything else available. 512x512 random access monochrome displays
were simply incredible in a year when paper TTY's were still in
use. Another significant factor was that everyone using the system
had the same hardware capabilities, just as console systems do
today. And response time, at least in the early years, was
incredible...anything over 150ms was considered unacceptable
anywhere on the net, and under 100ms was common." - Eric Hagstrom
- "I think the cool thing to observe is that on PLATO programs
would get deleted, and then some other person would go in and try
to "out-do" the previous game, and so in the space of about 4
years we probably went through 20 different variants of dnd and
sorcery-like games. This was very healthy and kept people playing
the games, which were always changing." - Don Gillies
- ARPANet is founded.
- The Cyberpunk Timeline puts this at August of 1968.
- UNIX is written.
- CompuServe is founded by John Goltz.
- This seems awfully early? Source: "Hacking Into Computer
Systems."
1970
- Dave Arneson starts the first "roleplaying game" campaign,
called "Blackmoor."
- (Arneson himself is not sure whether this occurred in 1970 or
1971). 1971
- Ted Nelson works with various guys individually. (1971-2: Ted
invents/ discovers first "Model T" enfilade*), redesigns Xanadu
around it.)
1972
- Plato reaches capacity for 1000 users.
- Hunt the Wumpus is developed by Gregory Yob on a Time-Sharing
System at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth. This is
not an adventure game (it's a text-only maze game), but a
precursor. (Hans Persson, Adventureland timeline)
- Atari is founded by Nolan Bushnell.
- The second edition of the Chainmail miniatures wargaming rules
are published, including a "Fantasy Supplement." This ruleset will
go on to inspire Dungeons and Dragons.
1973
- Airfight aka Dogfight (flight sim) on PLATO.
- It may have existed earlier, but this is the first reference
with a hard date that I can find.
- "In "Dogfight," two players tried to shoot down each other's
"airplane" -- a tiny spot on the screen -- and avoid being shot
down. You could control the position of your own airplane using
the various keys on the keyboard. (This, of course, was ten years
before joysticks and computer mice became common.) Unfortunately,
the person with the fastest connection to the main computer in
Illinois usually won that game." - Guy Consolmagno, SJ.
- The literal command line name appears to have been "airfight"
(Antic)
- ""airfight" was actually someones clone of "dogfight"...same
concept, different authors. Before that, there was "moonwar", an
where players took turns shooting lasers off walls and around
moons trying to hit the other guy." - Eric Hagstrom
- "Airfight and Dogfight were two entirely separate
games. Dogfight was earlier -- it just had tiny airplane icons
that you moved around on the screen in 2-dimensional
space. Airfight came later and gave you a cockpit view, and is
what apparently inspired Bruce Artwick's Flight Simulator, which
later became Microsoft Flight Sim. I'm guessing Dogfight existed
by 1973, Airfight maybe in 1975 or so." - David Woolley
- "PLATO also had "airfight", a 3-D real-time flight simulator
with 3-D views of horizon & airport & enemy (icon only). One of
the authors was brand fortner. These authors went on to found the
company that became microsoft flight simulator. I think 1973 is
the right year for the existence of airfight - it was EARLIER than
Empire. I think it's very important to realize that microsoft
flight simulator came from plato, from the guys who wrote
airfight. I cannot remember the name of the company they founded,
but it was really successful for a few years before microsoft
bought it in the mid 1980's." - Don Gillies
- "Dogfight was a really stupid 2-d game with a top-view of 2
planes. It was perhaps the earliest PLATO game with a "BIG BOARD"
page. Every user appeared on the page, you could "Challenge" a
user, that user would be given the right to "Accept", then you'd
go to this page where the 2 planes were displayed, top-view,
travel allowed only in the cursor keys directions (cursor around
the 's' key, dirs are e w q a z x c d), when you shoot ('s') a
line shoots out in front of you. You Could only change direction
in inertial ways, i think. Unsophisticated. Not real time. You
could move faster by hitting keys faster. A good programmer could
write this game in a few days. " - Don Gillies
- Talk-O-Matic, a proto-IRC with handles and chat rooms, is on
PLATO at this point (it may have existed earlier).
- "One of the more popular activities was "Talk-O-Matic". Five
people at a time could write messages, and read each other's
messages, on the same screen. Today, Internet chat rooms work on
the same principle. One of the remarkable new features of this
page was that you could log in with an invented name, and pretend
you were anyone you wanted -- any name, any age, any gender. One
favorite trick was to log in using the name of someone else
already logged into the page, simply to confuse everyone else. " -
Guy Consolmagno, SJ.
- "Term Talk on Plato, a 2-user chat, predates the five user
Talkomatic, too. Term Talk also let you go into monitor mode,
where one user saw everything the other user did on their
screen. "- Dr Cat.
- "Talkomatic, by David Woolley, predated term-talk. Check this
link out: <http://www.thinkofit.com/drwool/dwconf.htm>." - Eric
Hagstrom.
- The "Hacking Into Computer Systems: A Beginner's Guide" doc
reports PLATO hacked with the starship Enterprise attacking people
on Airfight (who were expecting airplanes!)
- Dungeons and Dragons is first sold by Arneson and Gary Gygax as
typewritten rule sets.
1974
- The original Dungeons and Dragons set is published, though it
had been well-distributed prior to this.
- "The original '74 D&D set was the only version of D&D until 1977
(although supplements were printed during that "in-between"
time)." - Travis S. Casey
- Somewhere in here, Mines of Moria (it had 248 mazes, according
to Antic magazine in 1984) on PLATO.
- Empire: multiplayer space empire game on PLATO supporting 32
players.
- "A game called "Empire" allowed you to play over weeks at a
time, making moves every time you logged in, building up your
resources in an interstellar empire that eventually would interact
with other players' empires. But somehow it took so long to set up
your own empire that most players lost interest before they ever
encountered any other empire. " - Guy Consolmagno, SJ.
- According to Antic Magazine in a 1984 article, it was in fact
Star Trek based, with Romulans, Orions, Federation, and Kazars
(formerly Klingons).
- Not to be confused with Peter Langston's Empire, which is a
different game.
- "The description of Plato Empire in 1972 contains "making moves
every time you logged in," which is misleading, that sounds more
like the Unix army-tank-plane-boat kind of empire than the Plato
spaceship empire. It was essentially almost the same as Nettrek in
slow motion, with one animation frame every 2-10 seconds. Your
spaceship would vanish if you logged off, though the planets and
armies that were shared resources of your whole team would
remain. And you could call the keystrokes that controlled your
ship "moves" if you stretched it, but your ship would keep
coasting and generating screen updates every ten seconds even if
you didn't type anything. As for a game lasting weeks - I don't
know if it sometimes stretched that long - when we logged on late
one night at Purdue in the early 80s, we managed to conquer the
galaxy three times in one night because nobody was on but us
klingons, so a game certainly could be (and was) concluded in a
couple of hours. I think maybe we won one last one after "You
can't kill / brian / slib" showed up, but he called for help from
other well known good players and slowed us down enough we
couldn't take the whole galaxy any more. "Eventually interact with
other players empires" sounds a lot like the text based Unix with
land armies version as well - in Plato Empire they didn't interact
on their own, only when you attack planets with your spaceship and
beam armies up and then beam them down to an enemy planet. And
there's no eventually about it, you'd be doing that within minutes
of logging on unless you just wanted to dogfight enemy spaceships.
Same with "took so long to set up your own Empire", that's the
Unix Empire (which had many clones and descendants btw, a
bewildering array). There was nothing to set up in Plato Empire,
just log on and fly. " - Dr Cat.
"Not sure about the earliest evolution of the original Empire, but
the surviving version ("conquest") can be played through in a few
hours. Action stops if nobody is in the game, however, so games
could last weeks in the sense that nobody is playing. The more
popular Empire ("empire") is, as you say four teams of 15 players,
with Klingons eventually being renamed Kazar for fear of copyright
infringement. I've participated in wins that took less than 20
minutes, but that was using the fact that all planets start in a
weakened state when the universe is reset after a previous win." -
Eric Hagstrom
"I seriously doubt Empire existed at this early date, because
PLATO IV terminals were still fairly scarce. You would have to
check with the Empire authors, like Chuck Miller, but I suspect
Empire started more like 1974 or so." - David Woolley
"I believe david woolley, Empire is circa 1974. It is the only
game on your list that existed already when i started using plato
in July/August 1975." - Don Gillies (Based on these two notes, I
have moved this entry to 1974 - RK).
Don also provided a full description of Empire to settle some of
the above arguments:
Empire is the game to end all games. It is played on roughly
a 60x60 universe of "quadrants", you fly through a quadrant in
about 10 seconds, in real-time. Your view is a 3x3 long-range
scan. You screen replots to update your location every 10
seconds, but you can hit a key to get an early partial update.
The universe is laid out like a 5-spot dice, there are home
planets in the four corners (Klingon, Orion, Federation,
Romulan). Each home system has 3 planets and a sun. In the
center of the dice-like universe is a system of about 6
planets / suns. Also, there are two "dead planetss" halfway
between each home space.
You have typical weapons (phasers, photon torpedos),
long-range and short-range scans. Your ship is a 16x16 icon
that looks like the real thing from startrek. You can fly or
fire in any directgion, but the ship plots only in the cursor
directions (d e w q a z x c) because its displayed with a
limited set of loadable charsets. Everything - phasers,
movement, torpedo travel - is performed in discrete real
time. There is no animation, but you can take an updated
snapshot any time by hitting a keypress.
Your goal is to drop armies on every planet in the
universe. When this happens, the game ends and the team is
declared the winner. If you get killed, you can go straight
back into the game, which will place you someplace in your
home space with few enemies. You can pick up armies from your
home planet, take them to another planet, bombard the planet
to kill armies, then drop your armies to overtake the
planet. If your homespace is taken over, you can bombard the
planets and then attmpt a "coup" to reignite your home team
armies. The coup can only be attempted about once per hour,
and it often fails.
Empire was a MIND BLOWING game. It had 3 million contact hours
before 1980. Think about it. PLATO only had 1000
terminals. So, there were only something like 9M contact hours
in a PLATO-year.
DND (Avatar) existed by now, according to Steve Gray, who was 11
at the time and writing code for PLATO. DND was apparently the
command line name, and Avatar the game name.
"I think dnd and avatar were two different games on Plato. I
personally played dnd sometime in the 1975 to 1977 time
period, it was a 2D overhead view of a 3x3 sections of a
dungeon map. Dungeon Of Death on the Commodore Pet (from
Instant Software?) was a blatant clone of it. Avatar had a
title screen with the cover art from Dragon Magazine number
one for a title screen, probably traced somehow and converted
into black and orange line art. (No white on Plato till they
made a CRT version of the Plato terminal). Avatar's title
screen said Copyright 1980 at one point, not sure if they
started earlier. Several Plato hackers got together to make
Avatar as a newer and cooler version of Oubliette. " - Dr Cat.
Dr Cat says that Wizardry was directly based on Avatar, down to
the spell names.
""dnd", by Flint and Dirk Pellett predates "avatar". So does
"orthanc", by Paul Resch, Larry Kemp, and myself and done
about the same time. Both have overhead 3x3 views. Orthanc
allowed players to meet and talk in the dungeon, but otherwise
was a single-player game. This is 1973." - Eric Hagstrom
According to Peter Zelchenko, the original authors of DND were
Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood, and Flint and Dirk Pellet were
subsequent authors.
"avatar" was the big hit, of course. Roger Uzan got hooked on it
fairly recently, post-EQ launch. He tried to get me involved,
but I burned out on it a decade ago....I'd rather play
Everquest. There's still a loyal following to this day. 1979?" -
Eric Hagstrom
"I also played Avatar (which was a late arrival to CDC PLATO) in
the mid to later 1980s. The people who wrote it were supposedly
going to to come out with a PC version (and I dont think
Wizardry was it)." - Mike Lindeland
"I am friends with steve grey, i don't think he has the year
right when he says that dnd appeared in 1974; i didn't see it
until months after i arrived in 1975/6." - Don Gillies
"Yes, it was a clone. I played a few hundred hours of DND on
Plato in 1977 (in a bomb shelter in the Army no less) and when I
got my first microcomputer in 1978 I wrote an 8k version of
it. Also wrote a version of Empire (single player) called Trek-X
the same year for the Pet. Both were published by Instant
Software. So began the insanity. :)" - Gordon Walton
"the very first graphical dungeon was probably Orthanc (Pedit5)
on PLATO, written by Rusty Rutherford in late 1974, which would
agree with the introduction of Gygax's first book." - Peter
Zelchenko
Notesfiles created on PLATO, the first BBSes, almost exactly
like today's Usenet.
Also, around now Xerox visits PLATO and they trade ideas,
according to Doug Jones.
"To me, saying notesfiles are "almost exactly" like today's
Usenet is an insult to notesfiles or an unwarranted compliment
to Usenet. Your mileage may vary. :X) Me, I would say "similar"
or something. It is worth noting that the tin newsreader
attempts to impose a notesfiles-like interface on the messy
underlying structure that is Usenet, which can only imperfectly
really be made to work that way - but it's better than nothing,
and I use tin exclusively to read Usenet being an old-time Plato
junkie." - Dr Cat.
"Actually, the first version of PLATO Notes opened in August,
1973. Personal Notes (email) came along about a year later in
1974. Group Notes, the new version of PLATO Notes that allowed
anyone to create a notes file, came out in January 1976." -
David Woolley
Somewhere in here, DECWAR was created. It is Star Trek based
also--perhaps a relationship to the Empire game on PLATO?
"Sometime in the early-to-mid 70s there was a multi-player Space
War game that ran on DEC VMS systems. I played that one for
about an hour one day." - Chris Gray.
"That was called 'Decwars'. Yes it ran on VAX/VMS. We used to
play it on a pdp10. It used shared memory to communicate, not
files - which was one of the ways the sysadmins could detect
it. We generally played 5+ players per side. It had a lot of
intelligent multiplayer design considerations." - S. Patrick
Gallaty.
The first first-person shooter? Dave Lebling and Greg Thompson
write a multiplayer first person Maze for the Imlac PDS-1, with
PDP-10 as a server. It supported up to 8 players, chat, and
bots.
"We wrote this in (umm) 1974. It was based on a single-player
Maze-exploring game Greg brought with him to MIT from NASA. Maze
was 3D first-person perspective with up to eight players, any of
whom could be robotic. The graphics were a _bit_ less compelling
than Quake. You could also chat with the other players. Mostly a
shooter. You could design your own mazes and pick which one you
wanted to fight in, so there could be some exploration. Shooting
was a keystroke (no aiming, you just shot in the direction you
were facing). Hits were handled on the server: if the requisite
amount of time passed for the bullet to travel to the target
passed, and he/it was still in line with it, he/it was
hit. Movement, peeking around corners, and shooting were all
done with the keyboard. We had mice on the Imlacs, but they were
very flakey. I'm not completely sure Greg wrote the
single-person exploration version. It may have been a freeware
program for the Imlac, or written by someone else at
NASA-Ames. He did most of the Imlac coding and I did the server
on the PDP-10. A guy named Ken Herrenstein came in later and
redid the client and server to optimize throughput (sending
position diffs instead of whole positions, and other such
stuff). As mentioned above, you shot in the direction you were
facing. You could then turn and run without affecting the path
of the bullet (they were slow bullets). It was vector graphics,
the look was sort of wire-framed, except the hidden lines (and
hidden players) were removed, of course. You looked like your
name floating in space (shades of EQ!), with little eyes visible
if you were facing the viewer, an arrow showing which way you
were facing otherwise. The later Alto and Mac versions did this
part much more nicely!" - Dave Lebling
Star Trader is written by Dave Kaufman.
"People's Computer Company (PCC), a company that is still around
today and who brought us Dr. Dobb's Journal among other things,
publishes Volume 2, Number 3 of it's newsletter in January. In
this publication is a BASIC source-code for Star Trader by Dave
Kaufman. This game outlined the general details of a
sector-based game with ports and a player moving between sectors
trading three basic products (Fuel, Organics, Equipment) to earn
credits." - John Pritchett's History of Tradewars 2002
1975
- A paper is published on "Teaching mathematics with games" on
PLATO. This is the only formal reference I can find to PLATO and
games. PLATO eventually banned games.
Bridge on PLATO.
" When I was in college in the mid-1970's, the only form of
computerized bridge play was on the nationwide PLATO
network. After playing against humans at the local club, we
would head for campus for late-night bridge on big monochrome
terminals in the university PLATO lab. If we were lucky enough
to find three other humans on the network, the game could be
fairly challenging. Often, though, at least one of the four
players would be the computer (called the PLATO "freak"), which
was programmed with a bare minimum of bridge knowledge. PLATO's
primitive bidding was random after the first round of the
auction, and its defense and declarer play defied logic
- the program always pulled trumps, always played second-hand low
and third-hand high, etc." - Karen Walker
"I was the main author of the bridge game (called "Contract").
Martin Wolff wrote the bidding logic, and I did pretty much
everything else. Karen Walker says "PLATO's primitive bidding
was random after the first round of the auction, and its defense
and declarer play defied logic ..." Well, it was indeed a
pretty pathetic player, I have to admit. However, the bidding
was deterministic, not random. It may have *seemed* random,
though..."- David Woolley
John Taylor reports that he was writing and playing multi-player
games at the University of Virginia in this year.
John Brunner's Shockwave Rider is published.
1976
Will Crowther creates the first version of ADVENT in FORTRAN on a
PDP-1 while working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Boston.
Hans Persson's Adventureland Timeline puts this at 1972, not
1976./
"Well, Will Crowther made the game up after we had been playing
D&D for a few months. A new arrival on the ARPANET project was
also a housemaster at Harvard at the time and D&D had pretty much
just appeared. He dungeounmastered up a dungeon and a bunch of us
from the project team got sucked into playing." - Sandy Morton in
rec.arts.int-fiction
"Since D&D had not been circulated in 1972, Crowther could not
have written ADVENT then, if this memory is correct. Chapter two
of Dibbell's _My Tiny Life_ states that ADVENT was written in
1976, but I haven't found anything else to confirm that." - Travis
Casey
Don Woods put ADVENT on the PDP-10. This is the version everyone
knows.
Apple Computer is founded.
Control Data Corporation buys the PLATO network.
1977
PLATO is up to PLATO V by now.
"PLATO V was really just a microprocessor terminal (also known as
a PPT..I have a manual at home someplace) that coexisted with the
older hardwired terminals. It had some download and standalone
capabilties, but was mostly used in a dumb role along with the
older hardwired terminals (PLATO IV's). The PLATO network did not
radically change as in previous PLATO editions. There were also
several CRT versions produced with similar and standalone
(microTutor) capabilities. Eventually emulators were written for
apples, pcs, and others -- once VGA became an accepted standard
(most VGA cards could be tweaked to display 512x512) and all old
terminals were eventually replaced over the next decade. I gave
mine away to a collector when I moved to San Diego in 1993...too
heavy for me to lug around any more." - Eric Hagstrom
Lebling & Blank start work on Zork on the PDP-10, inspired by
ADVENT. They form a startup with some friends, called Infocom.
"The original Zork, started in 1977, was written by me, Marc Blank
(note spelling), Tim Anderson, and Bruce Daniels. Infocom wasn't
founded until 1979. One source for Zork is that I was in the game
D&D group, which was mostly BBN people, that Wil Crowther was
in. Not at the same time, though; I think I actually replaced him
when we dropped out. Zork was "derived" from Advent in that we
played Advent, liked it, wished it were better, and tried to do a
"better" one. There was no code borrowed, or anything like that,
and we didn't meet either Crowther or Woods until much later." -
Dave Lebling
A new version of Dungeons & Dragons with simplified rules, later
to be called "Basic Dungeons & Dragons", is published. It contains
the first known use of the term "role-playing game".
The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual is published.
Kelton Flinn works on "the text-based amoeboid-like ancestor" to
Air Warrior called AIR between 1977 and 1979.
"If Air Warrior was a primate swinging in the trees, "AIR" was the
text-based amoeba crawling on the ocean floor. But it was
quasi-real time, multi-player, and attempted to render 3-D on the
terminal using ASCII graphics. It was an acquired taste." - Kelton
Flinn
1978
Roy Trubshaw begins MUD1 development. In the fall, he and Richard
Bartle complete the first version, which runs on a PDP-10. The
name, "multi user dungeon" refers to a variant of ADVENT known as
DUNGEN.
"I promised to get in touch with Roy Trubshaw and nail this "how
did the D in MUD come to be there?" question once and for
all. I've now done so, and having exchanged a few emails and
jogged each other's memories, here's the Authorised Version:
The D came first.
As Roy says, "We wanted to call it something and DUNGEN was the
best adventure game that we had played up until then. (I was
never really very keen on Haunt!)". The D has always stood for
"Dungeon" and the fact that the acronym was also a word was a
secondary (though not unimportant) consideration. He didn't
start with an acronym and work backwards; he wanted to write
something that was like a multi-user DUNGEoN.
It wasn't the case that Roy thought Adventure games would be
called "Dungeons", because even then they were being referred to
in the context of ADVENTure. He might have named it after that
program if it had been better than DUNGEoN, but it wasn't.
The "MUDD" title in the listing I have from 1979 was because
someone else (Keith Rautenbach, an undergraduate in the year
above Roy) went through commenting the code and put in two Ds,
probably because he thought it was a reference to Dungeons &
Dragons. It never was, and the file that refers to "MUDD" is
itself called MUD.MAC (.MAC for the MACRO-10 assembly
language). My recollection of a gathering in Roy's flat where we
discussed the name was false. We did have such a meeting, but we
were talking about the map for the BCPL version of the game. Roy
wasn't staying on campus in his second year, and another person
at the meeting (Brian Mallett) didn't come to Essex University
until Roy was in his 3rd year and I was in my second. Roy also
mentioned that he'd recently written something on this subject
to Jerry Pournelle, who in a small part of a longer report on
2001's AAAS meeting
(http://www.byte.com/column/BYT20010228S0009) had put
"multi-user 'dungeons'" as an expansion of MUDs. Here's what Roy
wrote to him: "A totally minor quibble in a very interesting and
succinct report on the AAAS meeting: MUD does stand for
Multi-User Dungeon. There is no need to stick quotes around
Dungeon.
I might have named it MUA after ADVENT(ure) [a text adventure
popular on DEC-10s around the world] but a game called Dungeon
appeared and saved me from trying to find a way to say MUA
without sounding silly. There was also some slight influence
from TSR's Dungeons and Dragons." Dr Pournelle replied:
"Well, clearly you have a right to say it, but I used the
quote marks because the guys at the conference clearly implied
them after I asked. For some odd reason science people looking
for grants aren't interested in being associated with dungeons
with or without quote marks!" Some things never change
(sigh)."- Richard Bartle
Alan Klietz writes Sceptre of Goth, also a mud system. These two
developments were completely independent. Lauren Burka puts this
date at 1979. Sceptre of Goth was also known as Empire for a while
but is not generally referred to that way because of the numerous
other games with the same name.
AD&D Player Handbook published.
Interestingly, according to Lauren Burka, early mud developers
never played the game.
Richard Bartle clarifies, "In my case, that's only true because
AD&D wasn't out yet; I had played D&D quite a bit in 1976-8. The
only real impact it made on MUD1 was the "levels" system, though,
which I thought was a neat way to give players short-to-medium
term goals. Roy Trubshaw knew about D&D and may have tried it once
or twice, but I don't think he ever dived in deeply; he certainly
never designed his own dungeons."
Walter Bright's version of Empire makes it to the DEC-10.
Somewhere in here, Oubliette on Plato.
"Oubliette had a 3D wizardry style view of the dungeons (line
drawings). Might have been the first on Plato to have that - Moria
might have been but I'm not sure what the display style was." - Dr
Cat.
"When I was a little boy, I went and played in the basement of the
Lawrence Hall of Science where they had a small number of
primitive terminals (I can still remember the sound of the
teletypes!). On those machines, you could (if I remember
correctly) login to the "Plato" network. On that system was a
primitive D&D-like game whose original name I can't remember, but
it was renamed "Adventure" for a short while. The game was taken
off of the Plato network, and I moved onto other things, as little
boys are wont to do. I know it wasn't the classic text adventure,
"Adventure," because it had Ultima I-like vector-based graphics
for going into a dungeon, finding a Vampire or Balrog, and seeing
its representation on screen. I remember some details about the
game, like being ranked with other players based upon the success
of your character." - Paul Forbes. I don't know which game this
refers to. I have seen a graphical title screen for Moria.
""oubliette", the first group-oriented dungeon on Plato, was the
model the early "Wizardry" series ripped off, and also predates
Avatar. Spells were cast by typing their names (i.e. alito,
fieminamor), and you had to type them as fast as possible to beat
the monster. 1977?" - Eric Hagstrom
"1974 is far too early for "Oubliette." Oubliette beta (e.g. very
limited access list) was early spring, 1978 -- with unlimited
access list that summer. Oubliette definitely predated Avatar; in
fact, Avatar was supposed to be the "Oubliette buster." I'm
thinking version 1 of Avatar was finished late 1978 or sometime in
1979 -- maybe even later." - Andy Zaffron
1979
Zork released as a standalone game by Infocom.
The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide is
published.
"Swarthmore summer" of specification and design amongst Ted, Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller, Stuart Greene, Eric Hill, Roland King. Mark
and Stuart develop General Enfilade Theory* from Model T; from
this the 88.1 architecture* of Granfilade*, Spanfilade* and
Poomfilade*. Between now and 1992 the XOC team (Roger Gregory,
Mark Miller) build two major designs (neither productized): Udanax
Green (formerly Xanadu 88.1, for its time of near-completion and
shelving), Udanax Gold (formerly Xanadu 92.1, for the intended
delivery date).
S, the multiplayer space combat and colonization game by Kelton
Flinn and John Taylor, is coded over the summer at the
University of Virginia.
MegaWars III was based on S.
"'S' was written in BASIC and supported eight users on the
HP-2000."
Kelton Flinn
S used ASCII graphics.
1980
"Basic Dungeons & Dragons" and "Expert Dungeons & Dragons" are
published.
"This publication marks a split between "Dungeons & Dragons" and
"Advanced Dungeons & Dragons", as TSR modifies the rules of BD&D
to be less like AD&D. The split was made for legal reasons --
David Arneson, the co-creator of D&D, had left TSR and sued for
royalties from D&D. TSR maintained that AD&D was a different game,
and they therefore should not have to pay royalties to Arneson on
it or its products. Maintaining this, however, required that they
not replace D&D with AD&D, as had been their original intent. For
this reason, TSR continued to produce both D&D and AD&D, and to
change the two game lines to be different from each other, into
the early '90's." - Travis S. Casey
"Nsorcery was another cool Plato fantasy game, it existed by 1980
when I played it. It was 2D, tile based, and single player." - Dr
Cat
Empire introduces annual tournaments.
Final version of MUD1 completed by Richard Bartle--Essex goes on
the ARPANet, resulting in Internet muds!
Steve Jackson releases Advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard, along
with In The Labyrinth. The changes made from previous versions
make the games into a roleplaying system.
drygulch exists on PLATO by now.
"Drygulch on Plato had a gold mine that served as the dungeon, it
had a 3D line-drawing display like oubliette and avatar but I
think it was fancier and would display more squares of the dungeon
if walls were open to reveal them. The town had multiple shops
that had 2D line art illustrating the inside of the shop. Among
them were the sherrif's office and the jail. The sherrif could
assign rewards for the capture of players that broke the law and
administer the jail in some way. He was chosen by election, and
easily removed by the "veto" of any one player - you could go into
his office when he was logged off and shoot him dead, and not
being online there was no way he could defend himself from that!
It was all a cowboys and gold miners in the old west theme, if I
didn't make that evident from the preceeding. No orcs or magic,
there were some kinda varmints in the gold mines. Snakes and
spiders and rats I think." - Dr Cat.
"You list under 1984 that drygulch "exists on PLATO by now." While
that is technically correct, it actually certainly earlier than
that (IIRC by 1980 on CDC PLATO anyway [as opposed to CERL
PLATO]). I played with w/ others in a friend's parent's basement
on a PLATO terminal brought home by his father, who was a CDC
employee. It was mentioned in a 1984 article by Antic magazine
(though no dates of origination were given there)." - Mike
Lindeland
"Another PLATO game existing at that time (around 1980) was
Panzerkrieg (sp?). You and an opponent would carry out extended
campaigns against each other in a WWII simulation. Another was
Wolfpack (German, American, and British multiplayer subs
vs. destroyers)." - Mike Lindeland
labyrinth also exists, but I know nothing about it.
Kelton Flinn and John Taylor write Dungeons of Kesmai. It used
ASCII graphics.
"The summer of 1980 we wrote the game that became Dungeons of
Kesmai, which supported six users on a souped-up Z-80." - Kelton
Flinn
They didn't know about MUD at the time. "No. The fantasy lineage
started with the single player fantasy game written for the
HP-2000 in BASIC during 1979-1980, basically extending a maze
combat program I wrote earlier in 1979, to see if I could capture
some of the essence of D&D. That game was rewritten in UCSD Pascal
for the Z-80 running CPM, and as I mentioned, as that point became
6 user multi-player. Dungeons was the cut down single-player
version of that game, still Pascal because CompuServe had a
compiler. There was a TRS-80 Model 1 BASIC version in there
also. At that time I hadn't even heard of Adventure yet. Of course
by the time we were doing the Island late in 1980, I had seen
Adventure and Zork, but we were heading off in our own direction
by that time, a lot more action-oriented and very little
puzzle-solving." - Kelton Flinn
1981
Atari starts trying to put PLATO on their eight-bits. But
negotiations break down.
"Plato was put on IBM PCs (as Plato Homelink?), with an emulator
that reprogrammed the CGA card to do 512*256, which gave a
passable scrunched reproduction of a 512*512 Plato screen. There
was also an Apple II+ emulator made, but it was decided the
quality was so poor it shouldn't be released as a product. A CDC
employee who remembered me from the old days gave me a copy and I
briefly used it to access Plato over my modem at 300 baud with a
280*192 display, the font scrunched to 3*5 pixels or so and barely
legible. " - Dr Cat.
Island of Kesmai is written by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor.
"Island of Kesmai was written in 1980 and 1981, the goal being to
soak up every bit of performance in the the CS department's new
VAX. We succeeded." - Kelton Flinn
"The look and feel of Dungeons actually did not change much, same
basic screen layout and ASCII graphics from the first HP-2000
version through to the Island, but the addition of a
quasi-natural-language parser in place of cryptic single character
commands was done in the Island, and back-fitted when we did the
Dungeons port to CompuServe, so that Dungeons would serve as a
intro for the Island. The Island also introduced copious textual
descriptions of things, whereas the earlier games relied on the
ASCII graphics and terse combat results messages." - Kelton Flinn
William Gibson publishes "Johnny Mnemonic" in Omni.
Vernor Vinge publishes True Names.
1982
Kesmai is founded by Kelton Flinn & John Taylor.
"In November 1981, John saw an ad for CompuServe, namely a
MegaWars ad ("if you had written this, you'd be making $30,000 a
month in royalties!" I think the ad said. Bill was actually
trolling for new games!) That kinda got our interest, so we sent a
copy of The Island of Kesmai manual to Bill Louden and also to The
Source. Even though the game already ran on the Prime computers
that the Source used, they never responded intelligibly. Louden on
the other hand was interested. We tried to bring the original UNIX
version of the Island of Kesmai up on CompuServe's DEC 20's, and
chewed up $100,000 of CPU time (at the then commercial rate) in 3
days. We got it working, but as Bill said, the lights dimmed in
Columbus when it was running. So we headed back to Charlottesville
to retrench. The first step was porting the old Z-80 code, that
became Dungeons of Kesmai, which was cut back to single-player
(probably the only time in history a multi-player game was made
into a single player game!)" - Kelton Flinn
Teletel is created.
"Minitel was the outgrowth of a French Government telecom project
in the early 80's called the "Teletel" network. This went live in
1982. It wasn't until early 1984 that the Minitel service - "phone
top boxes" in many french telephone customers homes, etc - went
live." - Josh Kirkpatrick
1983
MegaWars I launches on Compuserve.
According to S. Patrick Gallaty, the design of MegaWars I was
based on that of Decwar.
"Bill Louden, then at CompuServe, told me in 1989 or 1990 that he
bought DECwar on tape for $50 in 1982 and turned it over to Kesmai
for porting, and that the game did, indeed, become MegaWars I and
then MegaWars III." - Jessica Mulligan.
"The page says MegaWars I was done by us. Not so, the game was
done in-house at CompuServe. Either Bill's or Jessica's memory is
a bit off. John can probably confirm, I think Russ Ranshaw did the
port of DecWars. The quote from Jessica implies MegaWars III was
an outgrowth of MegaWars I, which isn't correct." - Kelton Flinn
"(fyi MW2 was a specific version that used the Radio Shack Color
computer to provide rudimentary graphics)" - John Taylor
"...we dusted off an old coffee-stained printout of "S". We
recoded tbe game in CompuServe's BASIC, enhanced the game some,
incorporated some ideas Bill had, and rolled out MegaWars III in
December 1983. It was an instant hit and stole a lot of MegaWars
I's thunder. That enabled us to go back to the Island of Kesmai,
rewrite it from Pascal into BASIC (a step backwards!) and
rearchitect it for CompuServe." - Kelton Flinn
The film WarGames is released.
1984
The first commercial version of MUD1 opens on Compunet in UK.
Islands of Kesmai launches ($12 an hour!).
AUSI, a predecessor company to Mythic, formes & launches Aradath
for $40 a month.
Atari finally puts PLATO on 8-bits. It has a $5/hour connect
fee.
Minitel goes live.
A detailed history can be found at":
http://appli1.oecd.org/olis/1997doc.nsf/a0c602508a90ce004125669e003b5adf/a8093b855bd4ea32802566ad0056749d/$FILE/10E87215.ENG.
Sometime prior to 1984, John Sherrick writes Tradewars. It's
similar to Star Traders, written in BASIC, and is for BBSes.
"It's not known whether or not Sherrick was inspired by Star
Traders, but I suspect this to be the case since they were both
written in BASIC. Sherrick's Tradewars is developed in BASIC until
December, 1989, when it is ported to C. I believe that Sherrick's
earliest work was freeware, without any restrictions. It is
because of this public domain code, and the Star Trader code, that
so many TW variations have been and continue to be written. At
some point, Sherrick closed his code, releasing it under the new
name of Tradewars II. His version continues to be developed by
John Morris, I am told." - John Pritchett, Tradewars history
"Another BBS door game. This is such an influential game, at least
to me. This was a multiplayer turn based space trading game with a
bit of combat thrown it. You couldn't actually play this at the
same time as another player. You had X amount of moves per
day. When your moves ran out, somebody else got a turn. Yes it was
persistent as your merchant and fleet were left in the game for
other players to destroy or destroy them if they found you." - Jon
Lambert
Gary Martin starts work on TradeWars 2002 in this year. "Gary
Martin, original author of Trade Wars 2002, states that his
version of TW was inspired by Tradewars by Chris Sherrick, which
was active in 1984 but not supported on the BBS he was running. In
1984, Gary decided to write his own version of the game simply
because he wanted to run it under the BBS he was using. It's clear
that Martin's version was inspired by Star Trader. In fact, the
core trading system code still has the same variables as those
found in the BASIC listing. It's also clear that Omnitrend's
Universe was an inspiration for Gary's work where it deviated from
Sherrick's, as many of the concepts in that game are identifiable
in TW2002. There are also areas of the game that are taken
directly from Sherrick's earliest BASIC code, before he and Morris
closed it. In terms of technologies, names and places, Gary's
version is derivative of both Star Trek and Star Wars. Between the
years of 1984 and 1990, Gary Martin and his wife, MaryAnn, took
their version of TW, written in Turbo Pascal, through multiple
versions, going from Trade Wars with 100 sectors, through TW2001
for the popular WWIV BBS, to TW2002 versions 1 and 2, adding the
StarDock with its Tavern, Shipyard, Bank, Underground, Library,
and Police Station, adding planetary Citadels, increasing the
number of ship types, ramping sector count up to 5000, etc. By the
time of TW2002v2, the Martins' version is much more than just the
sum of its various influences. An interesting footnote: during
this time Gary enlisted the help of Drew Markham to create several
of the ANSI images used in the game. Drew Markham later went on to
found Xatrix and create some successful titles including Redneck
Rampage. Sherrick's version was passed to John Morris during this
time. He continued to improve that version of the
game. Development diverged on these two games, taking place quite
independently, so that both games are recognizable as having the
same root, but are very much different in gameplay." - John
Pritchett, Tradewars history
Neuromancer is published, and the word cyberspace is coined.
1985
Islands of Kesmai on Compuserve
"My memory says that Island of Kesmai went live on CompuServe on
December 15, 1985, after a very long internal test. The price was
actually $6 an hour for 300 baud, $12 for 1200 baud. Serious
players paid the bucks." - Kelton Flinn
Stellar Warrior (rewrite of MegaWars) launches on GEnie.
"On the same day [as the launch of IOK], we rolled out Stellar
Warrior on GEnie ($5 an hour for 1200 baud, raised a year or so
later to $6.) Stellar Warrior was a cut down and simplified
version of MegaWars III (not MegaWars), ported to FORTRAN." -
Kelton Flinn
GEnie launches at $6 an hour.
"For example: On GEnie during 1991, our average MMOG customer
spent $156 per month, the equivalent of 32 hours at $3 per hour to
play. However, the hard core players averaged three times that and
accounted for nearly 70% of the total revenue. The top 0.5% had
truly astronomical bills, well over $1,000 per month." - Jessica
Mulligan
QuantumLink,, predecessor to AOL, launches in November.
Habitat is developed by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar at
Lucasfilm, as a product for QuantumLink. The client runs on a C64.
Richard Bartle starts work on MUD2.
Peter Langston creates PSL Empire, apparently as a single-player
game. Not to be confused with the other game termed Empire that
ran on PLATO and which was Star Trek based.
"It was originally written on I -believe- a pdp 11, unknown
OS. The thing that made it architecturally interesting was that it
was designed to run in a server with a 64K code space limitation,
and so it was broken up into 7 modules with user commands compiled
into each of the 7 modules grouped together to try to minimize
reloads. The original PSL Empire had an orthagonal map, which led
to 'funny math' on moving diagonals. The fortran was run through a
fortran to C processor, which is the format that I inherited it
back in the mid 80's. I was the games adminitrator on M-net, which
I believe was the first public access (free access) unix bbs..." -
S. Patrick Gallaty.
"while there might have been some single player Empire initially,
the version I played on a Unix box in the mid 80s was multiplayer,
with BTUs (Beaureaucratic (sp?) Time Units) that slowly
accumulated in your capital. You could log on whenever during the
day you wanted, execute "get info anout my empire" commands for
free all you wanted... But you only could do so much "build this,
change production, route this here, move that unit there, attack
that" type commanding 'cause each command used BTUs. So someone
logging on frequently didn't have as much advantage over someone
who got on seldom. It had a lot of the attributes that got filed
under your Plato Empire description. Mark Baldwin's Empire was
much more streamlined and didn't take forever. (Maybe somebody
somewhere actually finished a game of Unix Empire... Maybe not. I
know people wrote shell scripts to automate a lot of the tasks
involved in maintaining their empires because it was so much
work!)" - Dr Cat.
"Also Rabbitjack's Casino was the first graphic multiplayer online
game from QuantumLink for the C-64 (1985 or 1986, maybe?) and was
later ported to the PC for America Online." - Dr Cat.
"This was developed by Rob Fulop's company (name forgotten) and
Ernest Adams was involved." - Jessica Mulligan
"The "(name forgotten)" Rob Fulop's company (for Rabbitjack's
Casino) was Advanced Program Technology. I worked on the sound
player code for this project back in 1985. :) 1985-1986 sounds
about right for when the game was launched. Rob Fulop was earlier
the author of many Atari 2600 games, including Demon Attack and
Night Driver." - Dan Peri
1986
xtrek, the predecessor to Netrek, is released.
"Xtrek and Netrek are essentially Plato Empire with a much higher
frame rate (in the animating range, rather than one frame every
2-10 seconds!) Computers got a lot faster from 1972 to
1986. There've been various refinements and new features (like the
motionless starbase type of "ship"), but the basic gameplay and
mechanics and commands are pretty close to Plato Empire." - Dr
Cat.
Jessica Mulligan does first play by email game on commercial
online server: Rim Worlds War.
Air Warrior hits pre-alpha.
MUD2 launches in the UK as a pay-for-play service.
UCSD Empire, by Dave Pare, made Langston's Empire a multiplayer
game.
MTrek is first run.
"MTrek ('Multi-Trek') was up and running at University of
California at Santa Cruz from 1986 through the early 90's. At
least through 93. Mainly through the good graces of then-sysadmin
Tim Garlick, who designated ucscb.ucsc.edu as a 'social and games'
system and thereby created an entire community. There was an
author-endorsed variant called 'S&MTrek' (supposedly standing for
'Sean and Madonna Trek') hosted by Jon Luini (IUMA founder) at
gorn.com, back when Jon worked for SCO." - Jame Scholl
Macromind (later Macromedia) releases Dave Lebling's game MazeWars
based on the 1974 game Maze.
"Macromind's version was based on the one for the Xerox Alto
written by Jim Guyton (who heard about it from a friend who had
been at MIT) in the late 70s. Macromind's version used the
Appletalk network. It and the Alto version had a HUD of the maze
(which we always refused to put in -- cheating!). There was no
mouse-look in any of these versions, if my memory is correct: it
was all keystrokes. " - Dave Lebling
Air Warrior is released on GEnie.
"Air Warrior had fewer overall players than GS III, but they
played longer and the game generated equivalent revenue totals." -
Jessica Mulligan
"Air Warrior debuted on GEnie in February 1986, Jessica has that
one right. The initial client was on the Macintosh; the Amiga and
Atari ST versions came along later that year, and the IBM PC the
next. One thing that was unique about Air Warrior was that we
supported Macintosh, Amiga, Atari ST, and IBM PC all in the same
game, flying against each other. In 1988 we rolled out Air Warrior
on the FM-TOWNS for Fujitsu. It was available in Japan for several
years, but the price was too high due to telecom charges, so it
never reached the level of popularity it had on GEnie." - Kelton
Flinn
1987
Simutronics is founded; Gemstone goes alpha late in year.
MUD1 is launched as British Legends on Compuserve.
AberMUDs are released by Alan Cox.
1988
Gemstone launches as Gemstone II on Genie.
IRC is invented.
"If you're going to mention IRC you might mention the invention
dates of Compuserve CB, Genie's chat, and the first chat on
French Minitel (which was in the dawning days of Minitel and led
to some users dropping off with multi-thousand dollar phone
bills). No, I don't know these dates." - Dr Cat.
Mark Baldwin does a GUI version of Bright's Empire for the PC.
QuantumLink launches AppleLink, soon to be AOL. Turns down Aradath
and Galaxy II, though.
Rich Skrenta at Northwestern University releases Monster, a
multiplayer adventure game writen in Pascal that supported online
creation.
"I played and coded some changes to Monster back when I was in
school. It did indeed have online creation, and did IPC through
files." - Jon Leonard.
"I wrote Monster in about three months, during NU's "winter
quarter". I was totally obsessed with coding it. Project
obsession was normal with me (really boosts the productivity
:-), but "Monster Madness" as I called it then really got out of
hand. I was spending all night in the comp center, leaving at
7am, skipping classes, skipping everything. (My 10,000 line VMS
Pascal wonder would compile faster when no one was around, which
encouraged the nocturnal work). I went on spring break, and when
I got back I forced myself to not continue working on Monster. I
was afraid I'd fail out of school if I did. I left it alone
until November of that year, when I started sending it out on
the Bitnet." - Rich Skrenta (from Lauren Burka's MUDLine).
"I can also assert to the 1988 date of Rich Skrenta's "Monster"
game. I have docs and a source listing of it dated Dec 1 1988."
- Chris Gray
Club Caribe, a derivative of Habitat, is released on
QuantumLink.
1989
TinyMUD is released by Jim Aspnes. It runs on Unix and is written
in C. It was originally conceived as a front end to IRC.
Galaxy I launches on GEnie.
A-Maze-ing, 3-d online shooter, on GEnie.
"A-Maze-ing was authored by Greg Corson, and ran on the
Macintosh only. Greg's an old friend of mine from South Bend,
who taught me how to write a DDA line drawing routine to do
faster graphics back in 1981 or so. He started doing
multiplayer online stuff in the 1970s at Purdue and is another
Plato guy from way back. He was later the lead engineer at
Virtual World Entertainment (who made the Battletech centers
with the sitdown cockpits linked together in groups of 8),
worked at NEC coordinating the 3D chip stuff with Sega for the
Dreamcast, and is now at Sony in San Francisco." - Dr Cat.
Lars Penjske's creates LPMuds and opens Genesis.
"Having fun playing Tinymud and Abermud, Lars Pensjö decides to
write a server to combine the extensibility of Tinymud with the
adventures of Abermud. Out of this inspiration, he designed LPC
as a special mud language to make extending the game
simple. Lars says, "...I didn't think I would be able to design
a good adventure. By allowing wizards coding rights, I thought
others could help me with this." The first running code was
developed in a week on Unix System V using IPC, not BSD
sockets. Early object-oriented features only existed
accidentally by way of the nature of muds manipulating
objects. As Lars learned C++, he gradually extended those
features. The result is that the whole LPMud was developed from
a small prototype, gradually extended with features." - George
Reese's LPMud timeline
Simutronics launches Orb Wars on GEnie. Darrin Hyrup was the lead
pogrammer on it. Later that year, Hyrup leaves Simutronics for
AUSI.
"Orb Wars was a team-based competition game where differing
types of mages fought for control over the different orbs in an
arena. You could either play it using ASCII representation or
very basic graphic front-ends. Oddly enough, it would feel very
familiar to the Shooter folks who play stuff like Tribes/Unreal
Tournament etc. The game felt alot like Hack or Rogue except
that you had very clear victory conditions, and the games were
fairly short." - John Moreland.
"It was a tactical multiplayer mage vs mage combat game, top
down, with a windowed interface similar to the old Islands of
Kesmai." - Darrin Hyrup.
"Orb Wars was persistant in score and wizard type (?), but no
objects were kept between battles. The scores were tallied every
month and a 'top 20' list was posted, then all the wizards
reset." - J. Kerr
Legends of the Red Dragon written by Seth Robinson in TurboPascal.
"This was a multiplayer hack n slash adventure game that scaled
up to a eight to ten users. It ran as a BBS door game. It
accomplished this on DOS through some kludgy software interrupt
time-slicing. Anyways I recall it had both PvP and PvCritter
action. This game was wildly popular from it's inception until
the decline of BBSs. I remember redialing and waiting for hours
to get into a slot on the BBSs that ran it." - Jon A. Lambert
1990
TinyMUD shuts down.
TeenyMUD is created as a disk-based alternative to the TinyMUD
codebase. Written by Andrew Molitor and Marcus Ranum.
"It didn't do much other than crash a lot, but it was the first
TinyMUD clone that kept its database on disk instead of memory
(or in swap as was more likely :-))." - Jason Downs
Diplomacy on GEnie, done by AUSI and Eric Raymond (yes, the open
source guru).
Federation II on GEnie.
Negotiations for Ultima Online begin with Origin, Kesmai and
GEnie. Nothing comes of it, however.
100 Years War launches on Genie.
Gemstone II converted into chat space called ImagiNation.
TinyMUCK is written by Stephen White. Over a weekend, he claims.
Later that year, he releases MOO, which stands for "mud,
object-oriented."
Pavel Curtis does substantial modifications to White's MOO code,
creating LambdaMOO. LambdaMOO opens, hosted at Xerox PARC, where
it promptly becomes a major influence in the development of social
issues in virtual spaces.
Islandia opens using TinyMUD code.
TinyTIM opens.
TinyMUSH is written.
FurryMUCK opens. It features avatars that are anthropomorphic
animals.
Fujitsu launches a Japanese version of Habitat that works on
FMTowns at first and other platforms later.
DIKU muds are released.
The mud client tinyFugue is available now in version 1.4 beta.
Shattered World, the first Australian LPMud, opens.
"This MUD is the source of a private distribution LPMud server
used by a handful of spinoff MUDs in the United States." -
George Reese
The pay-for-play text mud Avalon opens in the UK.
AUSI's Dragon's Gate launches on GEnie, written by Mark Jacobs and
Darrin Hyrup.
According to Jessica Mulligan's History of Online Games published
on Happy Puppy and in Imaginary Realities, it's a revised and
expanded version of Aradath.
However, Hyrup says, "It was a new creation, inspired by Aradath,
but bearing little physical resemblance to it. We actually did do
an Aradath remake a few years later, but the project never
surfaced."
Jessica adds, "Darrin's correct. What Mark Jacobs and I agreed to
was Aradath for GEnie, but he and Darrin really went to town and
gave us a far more interesting game. It cost an extra 6 months of
development, which really irritated me at the time, but turned out
to be worth the wait."
"We had one Dragon's Gate player who spent $2,000 per month
every month for over a year (at the time, GEnie's access fees
during the period 7am to 7pm were close to $20 per hour, and
this guy would play during that time)." - Jessica Mulligan
BatMUD opens.
TradeWars 2002 is licensed to High Velocity software to port it to
MajorBBS. This changes the game, which was already multiplayer and
persistent, to also be interactive, since MajorBBS supported far
more concurrent users.
"At about this time, Gary opened Metropolis BBS, a Major BBS in
his home. This was eventually sold to Multi Service where Gary
and MaryAnn went to work as administrators of the new Metropolis
that would have dialups in the cities of the then Big 8 college
conference. Metropolis was one of, if not THE biggest BBS at the
height of the BBSs popularity. It is still active today, though
the parent company, Multi Service, has generalized their focus
to include online game development and hosting. They can be
found under the name Gameport. They are also the current owners
of Legends of the Red Dragon, another extremely popular
multiplayer BBS door game. Interestingly, the Martins and I left
Multi Service before Multi Service became interested in online
game development. That is unfortunate. " - John Pritchett
The apparent first reference to the word "avatar" in print, using
the definition commonly accepted today, of a representation of a
user in a virtual environment. The appearance is in Benedikt's
Cyberspace, in multiple papers. The word apparently originated on
Habitat. Many claim Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash as the coinage
for the term, including Stephenson himself in some editions.
"According to the appendix of my edition of Snow Crash, Neal
came up with the term by himself, but learned after the first
publishing that Habitat had already used it with a similar
meaning." - Lars Duening
"People were already using the word avatar to refer to a
character they played in virtual worlds (albeit worlds residing
in human rather than manufactured worlds). I found Usenet posts
dating back before 1992 where people used it in the same sense."
- Matt Mihaly
The usage of "Avatar" to mean "The graphical representation of
yourself in a shared digital world" was first used in 1984-1988 in
a product that was then called Lucasfilm's Habitat. Chip
Morningstar coined the usage. I was with him at the time. Yes, it
was derived from the Hindi usage. This significantly predates any
other similar usage that I am aware of. (In 1988, the product
changed names to Club Caribe, and the documentation changed the
term for this concept, but by then some in the alt.cyberspace/VRML
community had picked up the term. Neal Stephenson says that he had
thought that the term was original with him, but when I contacted
him at the time, he graciously put a corrected afterword in the
paperback version of Snow Crash.)
It is important to note that the term "Avatar" was used in
another game around later in that period (Ultima IV) and the
concept of an Avatar was in several works of fiction prior to
the development of Habitat, including Vernor Vinge's "True
Names" and John Brunner's "Shockwave Rider"." - Randy Farmer
1991
BSX muds are developed by Bram Stolk.
LambdaMOO opens officially--however, there have already been
several hundred regular players. That same year, it acquires tools
such as site tracking, blacklists, and review boards for user
building.
PernMUSH is founded.
Howard Rheingold's Virtual Reality is published.
Multiplayer Battletech, designed by Kelton Flinn as an attempt to
appeal to exactly the opposite market as Air Warrior did (eg, a
more community-oriented market).
Electric Communities is founded by Farmer, Morningstar, and
Douglas Crockford. They handle the WorldsAway contract as well as
begin design work on a secure distributed "cyberspace OS."
At the suggestion of Walter Feurzig of BBN, MicroMush changes its
name to MicroMuse. It develops into the first educational-outreach
mud, focusing on grades K-12.
Sierra network launches.
"Sierra Network was first beta-tested in a 16 color EGA version
as Constant Companion in 1990 or 1991. (I think 1990). The idea
was that senior citizens would love to use this to play board
and card games with each other. Ken Williams sent Richard
Garriott a beta copy and said he'd like to get an Ultima Online
on there..." - Dr Cat
"The Sierra Network.. often overlooked for it's contribution to
online gaming started in 1991. Version 2.0 was release in
Oct/Nov of 1992. Included in v2 was The Shadow of Yserbius, Red
Baron and Leisure Suit Larry Vegas.. (gambling.. cyber-ing, etc)
along with the v1 games of bridge, chess, checkers etc. I once
played bridge with Bill Gates, as he is an avid bridge player
and had an account on TSN." - Brian Thomson
Tangent Online is created.
"[It] started out around 1991 as Dan Goldman's attempt to make a
graphic online gaming service as a big multiline BBS with a
graphic front end. I was Creative Director and 'Manda [Dee] art
director for a while back then but it wasn't going anywhere at
the time. Tangent Online became Optigon Interactive..." - Dr Cat
Stormfront Studios' Neverwinter Nights launches on America Online.
It was based on the Gold Box SSI AD&D games, and was programmed by
Cathryn Mataga.
Discworld opens. It is an LPMud based on the Terry Pratchett
novels.
1992
"LambdaMOO takes a new direction"-an attempt to have a democratic,
player-run government within a mud.
Genocide, first PK mud. It is an LPMud.
"Genocide starts as the first MUD dedicated totally to
inter-player conflict, which is a fancy way of saying that its
theme is creatively player-killing." - George Reese
MPG-Net founded, launches Kingdom of Drakkar (top view,
graphical).
Simutronics launches Cyberstrike (graphical).
QuantumLink renames itself AOL.
Valhalla, an LPMud, supports itself by charging money.
"Though the MUD was given permission to charge players by Lars,
this move was still controversial among the LPMud community who
belived that Lars no longer had the right to give such permission
given the amount of code which had been donated to LPMud from
various sources." - George Reese
First instances of intermud networks created using LP.
"LPC sockets are added to the MudOS driver. This allows TMI to
create a very rough TCP intermud network. This protocol is later
replaced first by the CDlib UDP protocols, and later by Intermud
3. " - George Reese
Worlds of Carnage, first Diku with embedded scripting.
The first version of Merc, a Diku derivative, is released.
Legends of Future Past opens to the public.
"As I recall, it opened its doors in 1992 as an independent,
BBS-based service accessible through one of the dialup networks
available at the time (Telenet, TYMNET, or Compuserve's phone
network, or some combination thereof). The host service
(NovaLink) was one of the early public ISPs to spring up after the
"opening" of the Internet. I believe they were providing shell
access as early as late 1993. I'm not sure at what point it became
possible to telnet into the service, but if it was at the same
time that they began offering shell access, this would make LoFP
one of the earliest commercial MUDs on the Internet. Its biggest
legacy may have been the number of products it's spawned, probably
because it was a small, independent game that inspired thoughts of
"Hey, we can do this too!" among its players and designers. I know
for certain of four commercial games (two released, two in
development) started by former LoFP players or gamemasters --
making it, as far as I know, more fruitful than Simutronics." -
Ananda Dawnsinger
Nightmare mudlib released.
"Leaving IgorMUD, Descartes takes over the development of
Nightmare from the mudlib point of view. He chooses to use the new
MudOS server, throwing out Nightmare's outdated LPMud 2.4.5 mudlib
and driver. Flamme and Forlock join to help administrate the new
Nightmare. Nightmare LPMud opens to the public. Its mudlib is
eventually released as the Nightmare Mudlib. It becomes the first
publically available mudlib for MudOS, which at this point is
still considered a newcomer among drivers." - George Reese
Neal Stephenson publishes Snow Crash.
The film Lawnmower Man is released.
1993
Mosaic makes the Internet graphical.
Doom comes out in December.
Discworld mudlib released.
"The choice of mudlibs for MudOS helps add to the driver's growing
popularity. At this time, the Discworld Mudlib contains the most
advanced command parser and user interface available in a mudlib."
- George Reese
DGD Lpmuds released.
"A single-user alpha release of the first LPC server not derived
from LPMud, DGD 1.0.a3 (Dworkin's Game Driver, later renamed
Dworkin's Generic Driver), is released for testing. DGD isolated
essential LPC functionality, leaving all, if any, game
functionality completely up to the mudlib. September 16, 1993: DGD
is released in multi-player form as DGD 1.0.a4. This version
introduces support for compiling LPC code to C, then linking C
objects in with the driver. This makes DGD the first driver to
support such functionality. " - George Reese
Worlds of Carnage closes. It will reopen later in the year, but
several players and admins leave, never to return, including
Damion Schubert, Rick Delashmit, and the Kosters.
ROM, a Diku derivative codebase, is released.
Merc 2.1 is released.
CircleMUD 2.00, a Diku derivative codebase, is released by
Jeremy Elson.
Silly, a Diku derivative codebase, is released.
By now, CDC has sold PLATO to The Roach Organization. CDC stays
in Computer-Aided Instruction, but calls their clone of PLATO
Cybis. CERL at UI started NovaNET to replace it, but that was
then transferred to UCI.
Howard Rheingold's Virtual Communities is published.
On LambdaMOO, Mr. Bungle is toaded.
This leads to Julian Dibbell's article "A Rape in Cyberspace" in
the Village Voice, which catapults muds into the limelight.
This also leads to the formation of a petition system on
LambdaMOO, which is a voting mechanism for players with votes
being binding on the mud admins.
The Sierra Network first expands, then is purchased by AT&T and
becomes the ImagiNation Network.
"In 1993 TSN expanded and then collapsed, well was eaten by AT&T.
When they expanded they added on to The Shadow of Yserbius with
Fates of Twinion. Both games were written by Joe Yberra, who last
I heard was at Ensemble. After AT&T ate The Sierra Network.. It
became The Imagination Network. Ken Williams was moving toward the
Realm anyway. The bandwidth of running the sierra network was
killing it. I believe the backbone was Sprint-net. Sierra leased
the lines and subscribers could buy blocks of hours per month or
unlimited hours for about $120 a month. This is what killed
it. Ken had no idea at the how hardcore gamers would eat his
bandwidth." - Brian Thomson
1994
WOO and ChibaMOO meld the web with muds.
Ron Britvich writes Web World, which I have not been able to find
anything more on but which allegedly had 350,000 people log
in. Could it be WOO?
Dragonspires is opened by ex-Originite Dr Cat.
News Corp buys Kesmai.
AT&T buys INN. They subsequently lose their shirt.
LegendMUD opens with Carnage refugees (both Kosters & Delashmit as
well as others); first classless mud? Uses a reverse-engineered
and improved scripting language based on Worlds of Carnage's.
Merc 2.2 releases with a modified version of Carnage's scripting
system, called "mobprogs"--the code was released by an abortive
mud started by Schubert.
Imperium Gothique releases with a Diku scripting language also,
based on independent development.
CircleMUD 3.0 appears.
Work begins on Diku II, also called VME for Valhalla Mud
Engine. It now includes a fully embedded scripting system called
DIL.
Fujitsu's Cultural technologies division reintroduces Habitat in
the US, as WorldsAway. it is later shipped in japan as Fujitsu
Habitat II.
Worlds Inc founded in Seattle, launches WorldsChat.
Avalon opens as a pay-for-play mud on the Internet, after four
years as a dial-up mud in the UK. Is this the first commercial mud
on the Internet?
Nexon, based in Korea, begins work on Kingdom of the Winds, a
graphical tile-based mud.
BBN receives a grant to demonstrate distributed architecture muds
using Muse.
TEN gets going.
""TEN" went into national beta testing in 1994 before Jack
Heistand, Kleiner Perkins or Outland (It was just Planet Optigon
then) were on the scene. It had a multiplayer version of SimCity,
Chess, Checkers, chat spaces, multiple interface themes, game
partner matching, editorial and the ability the play games like
Descent with two players via the service. There were just about 12
people in the company. Outland and Kleiner Perkins joined in
1995. Jack Heistand joined in 1996." - Daniel Goldman
Jack Heistand was formerly of EA Sports. Funding came from Vinod
Khosla of Kleiner Perkins, who merged Outland with Optigon and
pumped in $10 million.- Jessica Mulligan
At the end of June, version 1.0 of Envy, a Diku derivative
codebase, is released.
A company called Cyberspace, Inc gets going. This will eventually
be Turbine.
"Founders were Jeremy Gaffney (CEO), Jonathan Monserrat
(President/Treasurer), Kevin Langevin (Secretary), and Timothy
Miller. None of the rest of the founders are still in the games
biz, they all left Turbine before I did (in January '98)" - Jeremy
Gaffney
1995
id starts testing Quake, which is going to be their real effort at
making online multiplayer games. It becomes an instant phenomenon,
redefining online gaming and virtual reality in the process.
Gemstone III goes live on AOL.
Archetype Interactive begins Meridian 59, with Mike Sellers as a
designer and the Kirmse brothers Chris and Andrew as
programmers. Mike offers Raph Koster a job, but he declines
because of a job offer from Origin. He recommends Damion Schubert
for the job instead. Archetype and Meridian are later acquired by
3DO, where Rich Vogel acts as producer for a time.
Air Warrior goes live on AOL.
LIMA mudlib offers Infocom-style parsing.
Rick Delashmit hired by Origin for Ultima Online joining Starr
Long and Ken Demarest. Demarest shortly thereafter leaves for
Titanic, a startup. Later that year, Origin also hires the
Kosters as designers.
AlphaWorld launches, also by Ron Britvich. It's a successor
product to WorldsChat, not the same engine. It supports a whole
twelve avatar appearances.
Electric Communities officially incorporates and gets venture
capital. Their product is a major revision of Habitat, called both
Habitat and Microcosm. It features a secure distributed
architecture. It is later shelved as being ahead of its time,
according to Farmer.
Time Warner Interactive launches Jim Bumgartner's The Palace.
Jake Song of Nexon leaves Nexon to join Inet, and branches TK
server to create Lineage. He joined NCSoft later at 1997.
Illusia, a graphical mud with static backdrop scenes, opens to the
public.
TeenyMUD 2.0 is released.
"All functional versions of TeenyMUD were released by Sean Coates
and myself 1990 - 1993, with the last one (TeenyMUD 2.0) being a
completely new implementation written by me and released in
1995. TeenyMUD 2.0 was still disk based, but its world paradigm
was very much MUSH-like. Sean (Xibo) still runs his MUD, (EVIL!)
to this day, evil.xibo.com 4201. It's one of the oldest, if not
the actual oldest, continuously operated server." - Jason Downs
Valhalla moves to player donations instead of charging for access.
The TV show VR5 appears on US TV. In this show, a researcher has
found a way to enter virtual reality, and through it enter other
people's minds. The show is cancelled after one season.
1996
"LambdaMOO takes Another New Direction"-the admins take back over.
Meridian 59 opens.
"Until Meridian 59 launched in 1996 and UO launched in September
of 1997 with flat monthly rates, billing for commercial MMOGs was
mainly on a per minute/hourly basis (with a brief period of free
access to AOL's games from 12/96 to about 7/97). Thus, the number
of total subscribers was less important than how long you kept
your hard core players (the top 10%) in game." - Jessica Mulligan
The Realm enters beta.
Dark Sun Online enters beta.
AmigaMUD, a graphical free mud system.
AOL takes on Dragon's Gate. At this point, AUSI has morphed into
Interworld Productions.
Quake is released.
Origin demos Ultima Online at E3.
Engage is announced at E3. It's first beta opens in December, on
AOL, with a multiplayer version of Castles II.
AOL buys INN.
Sherry Turkle publishes Life on the Screen.
John Smedley at Sony's 989 Studios hired Brad McQuaid and Steve
Clover to begin development on EverQuest.
Cyberspace, Inc, lears that the name is taken, and changes to
Second Nature Interactive. Someday, they'll make it to being
called Turbine...!
Nexon launches The Kingdom of the Winds.
Splatterball, by Interworld Productions, is released on Engage.
Shortly after, Interworld becomes Mythic Entertainment.
The Journal of MUD Research launches. In the first issue is an
article by Richard Bartle, "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades:
Players Who Suit MUDs."
SMAUG, a Diku derivative codebase, is released.
Furcadia, done by Dr. Cat and others, opens to the public. It is a
graphical Furry mud, which allows player building and eventually,
player scripting.
TEN officially launches in September.
MPlayer launches in early November.
The Eternal City goes into beta. TEC focuses upon providing the
most immersive roleplaying environment to date, as well a sense of
space and a rich environment. The founders of TEC (Scott Martins,
Ichiro Lambe, Charles Passmore) were originally staff at Legends
of Future Past.
GodWars, a Merc derivative codebase, is released unofficially.
1997
Diablo launches, from Blizzard. Though not a true mud, it is
immensely popular and brings awareness of graphical multiplayer
RPGs to the masses.
Ultima Online launches commercially and breaks 100,000 users very
quickly. Rich Vogel joins Origin before launch.
Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck published.
Second Nature Interactive discovers that its name was taken, and
renames itself Turbine Entertainment Software.
A development deal is signed for Asheron's Call, to be developed
by Turbine. Jeremy Gaffney is among those involved though he later
leaves before it ships. Toby Ragaini is principal designer.
NCSoft launches Lineage.
Neverwinter Nights on AOL was shut down on July 19th, 1997, when
AOL made the official switch to WorldPlay (formerly INN) for the
Games Channel.
Mythic releases Darkness Falls, a commercial text mud.
In September, UOX, the first UO server emulator, manages two
simultaneous connections with UOX3. By 2000, there would be
several hundred UO server emulators running.
1998
Ultima Online is sued in a class action lawsuit. The suit is later
settled out of court. Oddly, one of the plaintiffs is an ex-player
of LegendMUD.
Verant's EverQuest opens in beta.
Rubies of Eventide opens.
Lyra's Underlight launches doing a roleplay-enforced graphical
game, on MPlayer.
Electric Communities acquires The Palace from Time Warner. It also
holds a closed beta of ECHabitats/Microcosm.
Titanic releases NetStorm, an online only strategy title. The
company folds later that year.
Delashmit & others (including Todd McKimmey, formerly of LegendMUD
& UO) form Wombat Games. One of the first contracts is to help get
Sega's massively multiplayer action-strategy game 10six off the
ground.
Julian Dibbell's My Tiny Life is published. The first chapter is
"A Rape in Cyberspace."
Sierra announces Middle-earth, a mmp based on the Lord of the
Rings. Steve Nichols, creator of the Realm, leads the team with
Janus Anderson, also of the Realm, and Daniel James of Avalon.
Mike Sellers plays a role in bringing The Eternal City to The Big
Network where it becomes one of the first (if not the first)
commercial text-based RPGs to be supported by banner ads, using a
Java client.
John Pritchett creates the Trade Wars Game Server, which makes
Tradewars into a TCP/IP game playable over the Internet. He also
founds EIS.
1999
EverQuest opens, and quickly becomes the second huge success in
the newly dubbed "massively multiplayer online roleplaying game"
(MMORPG) genre.
Nine months later, Asheron's Call releases on the MS Gaming Zone.
VR-1's Ultracorps closes on MS Zone.
TEN ditches hardcore and persistent world gaming to become
pogo.com.
DWANGO dies in the US.
EA buys Kesmai (& playNation). This is part and parcel of a deal
to become the exclusive games channel provider for AOL.
MPGNet was bought from the founder and owner, Jim Hettinger, by
Interactive Magic. They combined I-Magic Online and MPGNet and
eventually renamed it IEN.
Verant's Sovereign announced. It looks to borrow heavily from
design elements from Empire.
Simutronics announces a graphical version of their games, to be
called Hero's Journey.
Bioware announces a new Neverwinter Nights, to be a distributed
mud server, at GenCon in August.
Electric Communities mothballs Microcosm.
Nexon develops distributed game servers for Kingdom of the Winds.
They subsequently peak with 12,263 simultaneous users in a single
world, using this technology.
Mythic releases Darkness Falls: Crusade, also a text-based game.
UO2 announced with Starr Long, Damion Schubert & Jeremy Gaffney.
Jack Heistand becomes general manager of Origin. The game is later
renamed Ultima Worlds Online: Origin.
Sierra re-starts development on Middle Earth Online and abandons
The Realm. Codemasters picks up The Realm and Nichols joins them.
Legends of Future Past closes on Dec 31st.
Project Entropia is announced. The novel twist is that real-world
currency will be freely convertible to gamne currency, and vice
versa.
On December 2nd, CompuServe stopped running MUD1 after 13 years of
operation.
"We were given a whole 0 days notice." - Dr Richard Bartle.
The film The Matrix is released.
The film eXistenZ is released.
2000
LucasArts and Verant announce a Star Wars Online project.
Sony Online Entertainment acquires Verant.
Squaresoft announces Final Fantasy Online. Other major console
series also announce later that year, including Phantasy Star.
Sony announces that the PlayStation 2 will have a broadband
solution by 2001.
Mythic Entertainment announces Dark Age of Camelot, a large-scale
graphical mud using some design elements from their Darkness Falls
games. Both Hyrup and Jacobs are involved.
Richard Garriott leaves Origin.
Koster and Vogel and others leave Origin. It is revealed late in
the year that Rich Vogel is producer and Raph Koster is creative
director on Star Wars Galaxies. Other team members include Chris
Mayer (former lead programmer for UO Live) and Anthony Castoro
(former lead designer for UO Live). All except Castoro had been on
a cancelled unannounced project, Privateer Online, at Origin, and
departed for Verant in the wake of the cancellation.
Wombat Games, composed of Delashmit, McKimmey, and Jason Spangler
(former lead programmer on UO: Second Age) among others, announces
Dark Zion, a graphical mud with a fully player-modifiable
environment, no built-in currencies, and a number of other
experimental features.
Funcom's Anarchy Online is a hit at both E3 and ECTS.
In May, Electronics Arts announces the shutdown of most of the
Kesmai games, including Legends of Kesmai and Air Warrior Classic.
Also in May, Erwin Andreasen holds the 16K MUD competition
<http://www.andreasen.org/16k.shtml>. The 18 scratch-written MUD
entries are later released to the public.
In late August, Wombat Games closes, after failing to acquire a
publisher.
On August 31st, 3DO ceases operation of Meridian 59. The game
continues to run in Germany.
It is announced that Ragaini has left Turbine and is now working
on LithTech's unannounced massively multiplayer title.
Several games try to break massively multiplayer graphical online
games out of the RPG mold.
World War II Online is announced. It is envisioned as a tiered
military sim, where players give each other orders. Members of the
team formerly worked on Warbirds.
Also publicly displayed is StarPeace, a management and
city-building massively multiplayer game (think SimCity in space).
The already-open Mankind is a large-scale economics and trading
sim.
A group of ex-volunteers from Ultima Online file a lawsuit
demanding back pay for their volunteer activities.
British Legends, aka MUD1, returns when Viktor Toth, administrator
of MUD2, completes a port of the original game to a new server
codebase.
Dark Sector is announced, a massively multiplayer first-person
shooter by some of the developers of Unreal Tournament.
Verant announced Planetside, a massively multiplayer first-person
shooter. The principal technologist on the team is John Ratcliff,
formerly lead programmer on Simutronics' Hero's Journey, which
appears to have gone dormant.
A small-scale online game, SiSSYFiGHT 2000, makes all the players
into female high-school students, and casts the PvP dynamic as
being about peer pressure, putdowns, and cliques.
In October, EIS transfers trademark righs in TradeWars 2002 to
Realm Interactive, a startup in Arizona. They begin work on Trade
Wars: Dark Millenium, to be a graphical MMORTS.
2001
Phantasy Star Online releases for the Dreamcast, and is extremely
well received. But the Dreamcast is discontinued shortly
thereafter.
Communities.com folds. Says a former executive, "It was a dot-com
company with dot-com problems." Randy Farmer says, "I wasn't
done!"
Fallen Age is announced. Its producer is a former writer for the
massively multiplayer editorial site "The Rantings of Lum the
Mad." The game is later cancelled due to creative differences
between the U.S.-based and Korea-based portions of the team.
EverQuest bans the sale of in-game items on auction sites, and
eBay and Yahoo agree to remove the items from their listings. In
response, a group of EverQuest players threaten to sue over their
right to sell in-game items on Internet auction sites.
Nexon continues to produce online games, announcing Elemental
Saga.
Westwood, a division of EA, announces Earth and Beyond with a
cover article in major gaming magazines. It is a massively
multiplayer RTS/RPG set in space. Janus Anderson is the lead
designer.
Will Wright starts to talk publicly about The Sims Online.
Lineage goes commercial in the US in May. It acquires only a few
thousand users in the US.
EA publicly tests and launches Majestic, a conspiracy theory
online game that contacts players via instant messenging, faxes,
and email. A key force behind the game is Neil Young, who was
general manager of Origin during the early days of Ultima Online's
live service.
EA purchases pogo.com.
Gamespy.com purchases MPlayer.
The never-announced Dungeons and Dragons Online is cancelled.
Steven Spielberg's film A.I. makes use of a game extremely similar
to Majestic as a form of viral marketing.
Ultima Worlds Online: Origin aka UO2 is cancelled. There's a
"wake" for the game where design documents are burned in a huge
pile.
"At the wake, I crack a joke to Richard saying that maybe his next
company should be called "destination or something." I can only
assume I was not the only one to make the joke!" - Raph Koster
Richard Garriott, Starr Long, Kirk Black, Jeremy Gaffney, Carly
Staehlin, and many others from Ultima Online and the cancelled
Ultima Worlds Online: Origin form a new company entitled
Destination Games. Shortly after, the company is acquired by
NCSoft of Korea, makers of Lineage, and Jake Song moves to Austin,
to begin work with the aforementioned on a new project called
Tabula Rasa.
Dark Age of Camelot starts public testing.
There is legal trouble surrounding the development of a new
version of Middle-Earth Online as developer MM3D sues Sierra.
Mudpie, a massively multiplayer world based on MYST, begins to be
discussed by Cyan.
Seducity is live--it's an online world about sex, and offers
nudity and sexual animations in a 2d environment.
World War II Online launches, and has a very rough time of it.
Anarchy Online also has a rocky launch.
Funcom announces Midgard. It is intended to be a roleplaying game
with a heavy focus on community building.
EA begins testing Multiplayer Battletech 3025.
The non-violent crafting and socialization world A Tale in the
Desert begins public testing.
Jumpgate, an online space and trading sim, is published by 3DO.
Numerous former writers from commentary websites join the staffs
of various online games. Among them: Jumpgate, Dark Age of Camelot
(where Lum the Mad, the person, went), and Shadowbane.
Elemental Saga is now in public testing.
Numerous smaller games are announced as being in development, all
of them RPGs. Among them: Darkfall and Mimesis Online and
Archaean.
Blizzard announces World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer RPG.
Codemasters announces Dragon Empires. Steve Nichols is involved at
first, but later departs.
Dark Age of Camelot launches to glowing reviews and quickly
outpaces Asheron's Call to become the third most popular American
online world.
EA stops development of Multiplayer Battletech 3025 and kills Air
Warrior III.
Fighting Legends, which is perhaps best termed as a party-based
tactical online world where you manage a group of units, launches.
2002
3DO drops Jumpgate; the makers, NetDevil, decide to run it on
their own.
Brian Green and Rob Ellis purchase Meridian 59 from 3DO and revive
it.
VR1 announces Lost Continents, an online world themed around
1930's pulp adventures.
The Imagineering group within Disney publicly tests Toontown, a
Disney-animation themed online world that sticks close to the
"groups of players kill critters" paradigm, but changed around for
a young child audience. It's notable for not letting people
communicate directly in game, to satisfy COPPA rules.
Majestic is shuttered by EA, having failed to garner enough
subscribers or retain them. The episodes of the game are released
all together on one CD to the retail market.
Funcom's Midgard is put on hold so they can concentrate on Anarchy
Online.
Mythic is sued by Blacksnow Interactive, a small firm that makes
its money by gathering in-game items to sell to other players. BSI
is alleging that Mythic is damaging their business by preventing
the sale of in-game items via online auction sites.
Still looking for info on these items:
???? - MajorMUD "... a mud that originated on BBSs (MajorBBS?)
...this one seems important though I've never played it. I just
_know_ someone on this list has." - Jon Lambert
Sources:
Me (Raph Koster)
Lauren Burka's MUDLine
Amy Bruckman
Mike Sellers
Dr Cat
Damion Schubert
Randy Farmer
Jessica Mulligan
Richard Bartle
XYZZYNews
"Hacking Into Computer Systems"
"The Dot Eaters"
University of Illinois
Adventureland
Antic Magazine
Oddly, a paper written by a pair of Jesuit astronomers.
Dr Cat
Just as oddly, a website about bridge.
A bunch of miscellaneous references from mailing lists and
newsgroups and interviews of folks like Steve Gray and Doug Jones.
Jame Scholl
David R. Woolley
Don Gillies
Andy Zaffron
George Reese and his LPMud timeline
<http://www.imaginary.com/LPMud/timeline.html>
Dave Lebling
Kelton Flinn
Dan Peri
John Pritchett and the TradeWars History
<http://www.eisonline.com/twhistory/> page
Jerry Gilyeat
Jon Lambert
Chris Gray
Travis Casey
Bruce
Erik Jarvi
Richard Aihoshi aka Jonric of the VaultNetwork
Daniel A. Koepke
Toby Ragaini
Brad McQuaid
Ola Fosheim
Grostad
John Taylor
Dave Kennerly
Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
Darrin Hyrup
S. Patrick Gallaty
Derek Snider
John Moreland
Jeff Freeman, aka Dundee
Colin Glassey
Eric Hagstrom
Josh Kirkpatrick
Richard Woolcock
Daniel James
The official Xanadu website <http://www.xanadu.net/> and Ted
Nelson's website <http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/>.
Jason Downs
J. Kerr
Jeremy
Gaffney
Brian Thomson
Peter Zelchenko
The Cyberpunk Timeline
<http://heriot.brinkster.net/cns/tl.htm>
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