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.")

Comments

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.

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, exploration, and the occasional comet wiping out vast tracts of land. (dartmud.com 2525, also see their website for more details.

David.

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 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 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.

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.

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 companies over the years, including AOL, Codemasters and now it is owned by a player run company, Norseman Games.

It is one of the longest running MMORPG out there, if not the longest. It still has a fairly large and extremely dedicated fan base.

Since it is under new management, a lot of things are changing. You can expect to see a LOT more about Realm in the coming months.

Check out www.realmserver.com for information and screenshots. The company is even offering a free month trial of the game.

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.