"MUD, better known as Essex MUD and MUD1 in later years, ran on the Essex University network until late 1987, becoming the first Internet multiplayer onlinerole-playing game in 1980, when Essex University connected its internal network to ARPANet."
Neither...I had to google it My first memory of online gaming was essentially a MUD though. Some sort of BBS text based space exploration thingy.
I wasn't into MMOs at all back then (I don't know that "MMO" or even "MMORPG" were even words), but as I recall there were a few in the early- to mid-nineties. However, they sort of rode on the backs of old-school dial-up internet service providers (like AOL, Genie (!!), Prodigy (!!!), etc.). The ISPs would charge customers by the minute (like, a lot - you could easily rack up hundreds of dollars if you weren't careful), and the MMOs and other games would get a royalty based on amount of time played. Many of those games also had exclusive contracts with their carrier ISPs, so it wasn't like anyone with an internet connection could play any game. Also, I don't know if any had graphical interfaces. I have it in my head that Meridian 59 was the first non-text online multiplayer game, which existed afer the internet "opened up," so to speak, but I could be wrong. Actually, I could be wrong about all this... I'm running on foggy memories from 20+ years ago, so take all this with a shaker of salt.
A lesser known MMO game that has been running for 17 years (unless Blizzard finally got them shut down because of 'competition') is "Star Wars Combine", believe it started sometime in 1999 (at least, in 2012 it had been going for around 13 years, and finally got combat, real combat, and creatures to hunt, in 2013, you couldn't even defend yourself when some arzecrack abused the system to arrest and execute you)
One of the earliest MMORPGs in the "typical" meaning was Meridian 59, released in late 1995. It's still running as freeware (open source).
That brings back some good old gaming memories, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, ChuChu Rocket, Starlancer, and of course PSO2. Ah,Good Times!
Kudos 2 ewe. Great trigger and the survey sayz, " Knock Knock" "Whose there?" NOXThe first multiplayer online game that caused WoW delayed for two years. The chakram weapon was the craze in-game while Xena was hawt on da Telly.Age of Wonders had the first game troll
Empire for the Plato system came out in 1973. I remember playing multiplayer LAN based games on Macs in the late 80s.
Oh, sweet summer child... My first real delve into MMOs was back in 1996 with the original Neverwinter Nights (NWN) on AOL. It was a 2D, mostly text-based game with only the single server that could hold a max of 500 players. When AOL shut it down many folks moved to The Realm Online (TR) and Ultima Online. EQ would show up just a couple of years later and set the US MMO world on fiyah until WoW came along and blew even their impressive numbers out of the water. Back in those early days of MMOs it was common for bugs to remain in games for a while it they weren't literally shutting down the servers. In NWN, if you were in PVP and someone had died you could target their corpse and use it to deliver damage to whoever entered the combat cloud in their place (we called it "necro'ing"). In EQ there was a hole in the map in West Karana near the zone line with East Karana, if you fell into it you would be transported to the bind point on the other end of the (very large) zone. In The Realms you can enchant your weapons, way back when though there was a bug allowing you to put up to 5x times (meaning each hit was 5x the poison application, there was no known upper limit I can recall). Some things got work-arounds. Like in EQ when players realized they could get on top of buildings and kill guards (big exp) with absolutely no danger of getting hit (guards had no ranged ability). The GMs had to start monitoring rooftops in all the cities until they eventually got a fix for it (allowing guards to warp up to you). The old days of MMOs were like the wild west with players constantly doing things in games that developers had never planned for.
Actually, when I was in high school in 1983 there was a Star Trek like battle game you could play against people on the teletype machine. Meaning: There wasn't a computer screen showing you what was going on. It would print out a simple text image and you'd respond and wait for the printer to print the next image.
Back in '83, my girlfriend and I broke into the Pentagon's gaming system....here I have a screen cap of it. I think it's still playing and has gotten to the 'global pandemic' or 'civillization breakdown' levels by all evidence outside.
I'm a big fan of online games too. The best thing is that I don't need to install them to play. Plus I started using VeePN VPN to protect my privacy while playing. That's convy and it helps me to bypass all restrictions. Useful tool for any gamer, there are so many online snoopers.
In 1995 I used to play a RPG called Gemstone III on AOL. It's still around. It's a text based game and it's still pretty popular. They also had Modis Operandi which isn't around anymore. But like I said, Gemstone is still around. Here is the link of you care to check it out: https://www.play.net/gs4/
I played in a few MUDDs back in the day. The command similarities when I saw Everquest finally get released was enough that it was clear to see where those early MMOs were getting their foundation.
