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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 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.
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, exploration, and the occasional comet wiping out vast tracts of land. (dartmud.com 2525, also see their website for more details.
David.
If you think about it, it's not much of a stretch to go from paying money to a programmer who makes a game that you'd like to play, to paying another gamer who trained up a character with high-level abilities you'd like to try out. As gaming becomes more mainstream and attracts more casual gamers with disposable incomes and limited time to invest in gaming, we'll probably see this trend increase.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
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.
Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.
I remember you used to be able to steal other players' heads. For real. It left them headless.
This was around 1990.