I had a PS1 game where I could build stuff out of cubes, and it came out in December 1995. It was called Geom Cube, a port of Blockout [wikipedia.org]. Nintendo even cloned it on the Virtual Boy [wikipedia.org]. As for texturing those cubes, Doubutsu no Mori (ported to USA as Animal Crossing) explored it in 2001, and MySims refined it.

I think the VW fad is starting to die off a bit now and we are seeing people asking "All well and good, but we've seen virtual worlds and the novelty has worn off.

If that's the case, Second life would still be only ten simulators, not increasing every month still.

What's my subscription gonna get me this time?

There is no subscription fee for Second life.

There is if you want any land to put your stuff in. A parcel of Second Life land called a "sim" costs $1,000 plus $295 per month. This gives you 16 acres, the same area as an Animal Crossing: Wild World town.

Of course, you don't have to buy a sim, you can just buy a parcel of land. Private sim owners and Linden lab both sell smaller parcels of land for a lot less. No setup fees either.

Additionally, one does not need land on Second life to interact, build, show off things, sell things (places like slexchange will provide server box parcel locations to host your prim server thing).

But sure, if you want a permanent place to stick your sky castle, sky mall/shop etc. It suddenly becomes a problem.

So I can set up my own second life server, using the open sourced SL server code? Oh wait, there isn't any!

There is one [opensimulator.org] actually. And the Second life viewer is opensource [secondlifegrid.net] too.