MMORPGs - From MUDs To Mainstream

Thanks to GameSpy for the first in a series of weekly articles charting the evolution of massively multiplayer online games. The piece discusses the claim that "All of the elements of MMOGs existed by the late eighties, but they did not exist in a single product", but suggests that Meridian 59 was the first "Internet-based, true graphical-based MUD." The article goes on to chart the rise of MMORPGs through Ultima Online (which "proved that there was a market for MMOGs, but... also suffered from problems that would haunt online worlds"), Lineage (which found "a ravenous market of its own overseas"), and EverQuest (which "accomplished everything that Meridian 59 attempted to do.")

The most interesting development

[Dancin_Santa]

The gradual commercialization of characters such that their existence had a monetary value is the most interesting development in gaming, IMO.

Why just play the game when you can now buy yourself into the top ranks? It's a very interesting concept.

Paying for high level perks

[tessaiga]

Selling items and characters might be new, but only because MMORPGs themselves are fairly new. The concept of paying money to "short-cut" your way to the top has been around ever since games were available. Companies have been selling products like GameShark [amazon.com] for buffing your characters long before eBay. Or, even before that, people paid money for hint books and strategy guides for shortcutting puzzles and in-game challenges.

If you think about it, it's not much of a stretch to go from paying money to a

Re:Paying for high level perks

[MMaestro]

Companies like GameShark had nothing on early PC gaming "short-cuts". Cheat programs for PC games have been handmade and hand distributed for years now. The only reason you're hearing about character selling these days is because MMO games save all character data on their own servers and have a (fairly) secure system. You NEVER heard of anybody selling their items or characters in Diablo 1 or Diablo 2 (open server) where the data was saved on the player's computer.

Re:The most interesting development

[Mizery De Aria]

One reason not to buy a character may be due to the reputation of the character being of poor quality.

Commercial or free ?

[OzPixel]

Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of it, but I played a graphical Mud at one point, which I'm fairly sure was before Meridian 59 came out. It was free, though, and quite primitive graphically - I believe it was more of a graphical extension to a normal Mud of some sort than a completely new thing.

Meanwhile, text-based Muds haven't gone away. For example (plug time!) Dartmud has been around for over 10 years now, featuring fully skill-based system, many races, crafting, guilds, questing, magic,

Re:Commercial or free ?

[Filik]

Shameless self-plug: http://crossfire.real-time.com/
The first release was in summer of 1992 (v0.01).

-Frank.

Re:Commercial or free ?

[Doctor Cat]

I believe it was more of a graphical extension to a normal Mud of some sort than a completely new thing.

It sounds like you're probably thinking of Regenesis, which was at it's core a text mud with the ability to attach illustrations (vector graphic ones I think) to locations. It was an interesting early experiment. I think it was developed in Sweden?

There were some commercial games that predated Meridian 59 considerably as well. Neverwinter Nights on AOL was based on the SSI Gold Box games, adapted

The Realm Online!

[Calmiche]

Whoa, hold on! The Realm Online came out several months before Meridian 59. It actually existed as a stable open beta for almost a year before that!

It featured, at the time, better graphics, more people playing and a great deal more innovations. Many latter MMORPG concepts were based off the ideas it pioneered.

Development began in 1995 and shortly thereafter Sierra bought the rights to it and began supporting it. It was developed at the same time as the legendary INN. It moved through several compa

Didn't mention the first online RPGs

[Doctor Cat]

This quote from the article could be a bit misleading:

There seems to be general agreement that MMOGs grew out of MUDs.

While it's accurate that the inspiration and even the past development experience of most MMOG developers came directly from the text MUDs (including myself) - I think this article is likely to contribute more to the belief that online fantasy combat/roleplaying games started with the first MUD in 1978.

The fact is, though, there were online D&D inspired games on the Plato network as much as 3 to 4 years before that - and they ran on 512*512 monochrome graphics displays as opposed to the text-only of the early MUDs! Some of the early games were DND, Moria, Oubliette and Avatar. I was lucky enough to get the chance to play around with the Plato system in the mid 70s, it was also innovative in the areas of real-time chat, message boards, email, and a lot more. In many ways it was 20 years ahead of its time. They also had a 32 player game of spaceships and planetary conquest, which Netrek is pretty much directly based on. Pretty amazing stuff in its day. They had 1200 baud communications when everyone else was using 300 baud modems, and smart terminals that you could download custom character sets or graphics into to speed up interactive graphical applications. Those were the days. They were really the birthplace of interactive real-time multiplayer graphical computer games over a network, I wish history would give the system the credit that it's due. It was developed at the same University in Illinois where the first graphic web browser (Mosaic) was invented. Quite an innovative place.

Re:Didn't mention the first online RPGs

[Rhys]

(UIUC) Notes is in fact still the only tolerable message board in existance. At least compared to all that web crap today. Nobody who likes unix could say they like the web crap more than good 'ol command line notes.

SVIRP RID ON!

They Forgot Club Caribe

[Anonymous Coward]

Unbelievably, they mention QuantumLink's Rabbitjack's Casino but completely pass over Club Caribe. This was a game that took place on a resort island with all kinds of activities to do - basically it was Maniac Mansion (used the same SCUMM interface) but with a HUGE world with periodically updated content by Q-Link, all on the Commodore 64.

I remember you used to be able to steal other players' heads. For real. It left them headless.

This was around 1990.

Open Source?

[DarkZero]

The concept for Meridian 59 did not begin with 3DO. A small company called Archetype Interactive conceived the game. "It was a major effort," says Koster, who had developed a name in the MUD creation world and turned down an offer to work on Meridian 59. "For a long time, work on Meridian 59 was distributed over the Internet. People worked remotely. It was a grassroots effort that made good."

I've never quite figured out why the open source movement has never produced anything like this. The dedication to