On The Genesis Of LucasArts' Habitat

Thanks to Oblomovka for pointing to a Habitat Chronicles post chronicling the early days of LucasArts/LucasFilm Games, including the 1984-era "pair of proposals, one for something we called Lucasnet, which would correspond to what nowadays we'd call a games portal, and one for something we called the Lucasfilm Games Alliance, which would correspond to what nowadays we'd call a MMORPG (and indeed, which looked in concept a lot like what Star Wars Galaxies turned out to be in practice, albeit 20 years later)." The eventual product, as documented by the creators, was Lucasfilm's 1986-launched Habitat, "arguably one of the first attempts to create a very large scale commercial multi-user virtual environment", but the detailed post also strays into defining the Lucasfilm ethos in the '80s, pointing out provocatively: "We were absolutely forbidden from doing any [games] that made use of the company's film properties, especially Star Wars. That was viewed as just like spending money, since these properties were, in effect, money in the bank."

Remembering the hype

[Sinistar2k]

I remember quite well the hype surrounding Habitat. As a QuantumLink subscriber, I looked forward to its release because I thought a graphical interface for user communication was the coolest thing ever.

Habitat was lauded in all the major C=64 magazines of the time, but then sort of disappeared, only to materialize in the form of QuantumLink's Club Caribe. Club Caribe itself didn't last very long (2 years, according to the paper), possibly because it was a premium content feature (that is, you were charged above and beyond your monthly QuantumLink service charge in order to use it). It was also quite feature limited in comparison to the original promised Habitat feature set.

Club Caribe was just too late...

[Anonymous Coward]

Habitat for whatever reason took forever to launch, and when it did, it was in the form of "Club Caribe", a tropical island type of setting.

For its time it was very cool. Basically, check out "There.com" and that's what Club Caribe was exactly, but in 2D with "Maniac Mansion" style graphics and interface.

It launched just a little too late, as the Commodore 64 was in decline already. Too bad though...Here we were in 1988 with a multi-user environment already. Custom avatars... chat, "emoticons" (in the form of actions your player could do through macro keys). There was exploration, social events, currency, ... gosh, it was cool!

Re:Remembering the hype

[nutsy]

The Lessons of LucasFilm's Habitat [fudco.com] (from the same site) is also a really good read, both in terms of origins and in terms of users/administration; reselling dolls and crystal balls is enlightening, as is the bit about DEATH and THE SHADOW. It's a pity the "screenshots" are faked (as far as I know, the only real screenshots surviving from Habitat's development are photos of monitor screens).

The next step, of course, is to endlessly nag them to release the source code. ;)