A roleplaying game is a social activity, and from the beginning some designers wanted to make the computer version social too. This tour follows the growth of the shared online world, from a few dozen players on a university network to millions on commercial servers.
The early stops are text and terminals. On the PLATO, games such as Avatar let groups explore a dungeon together in the 1970s. At the University of Essex, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle created MUD1, which gave the MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) its name and many of its conventions. BBS Door Games like Legend of the Red Dragon brought a slower kind of shared world to home computers over dial-up lines.
The middle stops show commercial services adding graphics. Neverwinter Nights put a Forgotten Realms city on America Online in 1991. Meridian 59 opened a 3D world on the internet in 1996, and Ultima Online made the persistent fantasy world famous in 1997, with results its designers did not expect, including the Assassination of Lord British.
Then the MMORPGs became an industry. Lineage in Korea, EverQuest in America and RuneScape in the browser each found audiences in the hundreds of thousands or millions. Economists noticed their Virtual Economies, Gold Farming & the GDP of Norrath. World of Warcraft brought these ideas to a far larger audience, and the Corrupted Blood Incident showed researchers that a virtual world could be a laboratory for the real one.
Many of the people behind these worlds, including Raph Koster, Starr Long, Brad McQuaid and Jake Song, learned their craft from the earlier stops on this tour, some of them as players of MUDs.
As you go, notice three recurring questions: how to make strangers cooperate, how to stop them preying on one another, and who governs a world that belongs to everyone who plays it.
- 1PLATOCommunity · 1960–2006
Start at the University of Illinois, where PLATO terminals with orange plasma screens hosted message boards, chat and multiplayer games in the 1970s. Online community existed here before most people had heard of computer networks.
- 2AvatarComputer RPG · 1979
PLATO's most popular game, begun by junior-high students, let parties explore a dungeon together and chat in real time. Notice how many later online features, from group play to its very name, appear here first.
- 3MUD1MUD · 1978–1999
In 1978 Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex built a shared text world in which players met, fought and cooperated on the way to Wizard rank. The MUD gave the online RPG its name and many of its habits.
- 4Legend of the Red DragonComputer RPG · 1989
Through the 1980s and 1990s, hobbyists ran dial-up bulletin boards, and door games like this 1989 dragon hunt gave callers a few turns a day in a shared village. It was online fantasy for people who had never seen a university network.
- 5Neverwinter NightsMMORPG · 1991–1997
From 1991 to 1997, AOL subscribers dialed into a shared Forgotten Realms city built on SSI's Gold Box engine. It is widely credited as the first graphical online RPG and set the pattern for the MMORPG.
- 6Meridian 59MMORPG · 1996
Opened to the internet in 1996, Meridian 59 offered a first-person 3D world for a flat monthly fee. It arrived before its famous rivals and kept running, in one form or another, for two decades.
- 7Ultima OnlineMMORPG · 1997
Origin's 1997 Britannia made the persistent world famous: player housing, player shops, crafting and a lawless culture of player killing. It passed 100,000 subscribers and showed how hard a virtual society is to govern.
- 8The Assassination of Lord BritishIncident · 1997
On August 9, 1997, during the beta, a player killed Richard Garriott's supposedly invulnerable avatar with a fire field spell. It remains the best-known lesson in what players will do when a world allows it.
- 9LineageMMORPG · 1998
In South Korea, NCSoft's 1998 game of castles and blood pledges spread through PC bangs to millions of subscribers. Online worlds were becoming a mass medium in Asia at the same time as in America.
- 10EverQuestMMORPG · 1999
Sony's 1999 Norrath brought the MUD's structure into 3D: camped spawns, corpse runs and raids for large groups. Its players were so devoted they nicknamed it EverCrack.
- 11Virtual Economies, Gold Farming & the GDP of NorrathPhenomenon · 2001
In 2001 an economist estimated the per-capita output of EverQuest's world and found it rivaled real countries. Gold farming and real-money trading turned fantasy loot into a real economy.
- 12RuneScapeMMORPG · 2001
Launched in a web browser in 2001 by two brothers in Nottingham, RuneScape made the online world free to enter; Guinness recognized it in 2008 as the world's most popular free MMORPG.
- 13World of WarcraftMMORPG · 2004
Blizzard's 2004 Azeroth polished every idea on this tour into the most successful subscription game of its era, with more than 12 million subscribers at its 2010 peak.
- 14The Corrupted Blood IncidentIncident · 2005
End with an accident. In 2005 a raid boss's curse escaped into World of Warcraft's cities, and epidemiologists later studied how players spread it. Online worlds had grown complex enough to model real ones.