All Your History: MMO Part 1 – Crawling Through the MUD

Throughout the Nineteen Seventies, many new technologies were emerging out of research into what computers could accomplish.  One was computer gaming, using the simple graphics and low memory of the time to make an interactive entertainment experience.  Another was less exciting, but wildly more ambitious: networking, the ability to let two different computers in different locations share information.  Inevitably, the time would come when these two technologies would cross with one another, to allow two people on two different computers to play the same game.  Early works such as Nineteen Seventy-Four’s Maze War proved that the model could work.  But games like Maze War were made by academic or corporate research institutions, and were never meant for general distribution.  As time passed, however, and both personal computers and the modern internet began to take shape, online gaming exploded.  In time, the science-fiction dream of a second, virtual world, inhabited with millions of people interacting around the globe, began to take shape.  Games that feature persistent worlds, huge areas, and giant populations have become some of the most powerful, and profitable, forces in all of entertainment.  But while they seem incredibly complex and sophisticated today, the seeds that began the Massively Multiplayer Online Game genre were just about as simple as they could get.

-Crawling Through the MUD-

Roy Trubshaw never set out to start an avalanche.  Studying computer science at the University of Essex, he enjoyed playing an all-text role-playing game called Dungeon, a variant of the popular Zork.  The game was a fantasy adventure about traveling through, obviously, a dungeon, while fighting monsters and collecting loot.  The basic idea and concepts came from the legendary tabeletop role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons.  But all the combat, exploration, and puzzles were expressed by simple text sentences.  “Playing” involved typing in an action to perform.  Sometimes the game would know what the player meant, and sometimes it wouldn’t.

Playing it, Trubshaw had a simple thought: it would be more fun with friends.  Of course, this simple idea was a technical nightmare.  Obviously two different people couldn’t type on the same keyboard, so the other players would have to be on their own computers, and the information on each computer would have to be synced together.  Still, by the late Seventies the concept of networking was familiar to CS students, and the University of Essex had its own internal network that any computer on campus could connect to.

Tackling the challenge, Trubshaw wrote the framework necessary for making a game with multiple users, or what he dubbed a “multi-user” game.  However, he wasn’t much for making the actual game part of the game; he didn’t really care about deciding how much treasure should be around, how many monsters there were, or what items solved what puzzles.  His friend Richard Bartle did.  Bartle effectively took over game design duties, although the two friends didn’t put it in such formal terms.

Critically, unlike earlier networked games, this game was built to support a theoretically infinite number of players.  And pretty soon, it had more players on it than Trubshaw and Bartle could have hoped for.  Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD as the game came to be known, became a huge hobby for a large part of the Essex student body.  Journeying to hostile lands and solving ancient riddles became a favorite pastime.  Originally released in Nineteen Seventy-Eight, the duo worked on it constantly until Trubshaw graduated in Nineteen Eighty.  Bartle took over in his absence.

That same year, the University of Essex joined their internal campus network into the rapidly expanding American network known as ARPAnet.  ARPAnet, and the protocols it used, were emerging as something nearly unheard of in technological history: a global standard.  Technology standards are notoriously hard to actually standardize.  From the voltage that comes out of wall sockets, to the shape of the wall sockets themselves, to what side of the car a steering wheel goes on, every country does it differently.  But for whatever reason, ARPAnet’s Internet Protocol Suite would come to be adopted by every single country on Earth, and pave the way for the modern global internet.

So, when the University of Essex connected to ARPAnet, it opend up MUD to US computers.  And it spread like wildfire.  MUD, its sequels, and its numerous clones became popular throughout the United States just as it had in the University of Essex.  This whole genre of multi-user text adventures like MUD came to be known as: MUD.  Just to confuse people.  While each game had to be run on its own independent server, it wasn’t unusual for a single game to have a hundred players running around in it at the same time, an incredible feat for the early Eighties.  The idea of huge numbers of people playing a single game together on home computers had been born.

While MUD and its various incarnations would continue on for years, the genre it started began to evolve.  In Nineteen Eighty-Five, Island of Kesmai became the first commerial online world.  It used simple ASCII graphics to represent the dungeon that players explored, referred to as a “roguelike” game after the original ASCII graphics dungeon-crawler, Rogue.  It also introduced quests into the mix, more directed objectives as opposed to MUD’s more free-form gameplay.

In the mid-Eighties, before the internet had been made open, a player would first have to connect to a proprietary network for a fee, and only then could connect to a game like Kesmai.  Kesmai was part of the CompuServe network, and so players would have to be a paying member of that network to access the game.  At this time bandwidth was incredibly expensive, and so CompuServe cost between six to twelve dollars per hour to use.  That was considered normal at the time.  And once they were on, Kesmai didn’t cost anything extra to play.  If MUD invented the idea of many players together, Kesmai invented the business around it.

One thing that was missing from these games was graphics; Kesmai’s ASCII didn’t exactly drop jaws.  The introduction of colors and charicatures into an online world came from Lucasfilm Games.  Oddly enough, however, Nineteen Eighty-Six’ Habitat wasn’t so much a game as it was a digital world, which ran on the QuantumLink proprietary network.  The idea was that anyone could log on and create a digital version of themselves, something that Lucasfilm named: an “avatar.”  These avatars could be customized any way players liked, whether they wanted to recreate themselves or invent a whole new look.  Once the avatar was made, the avatar would enter a fully-realized, single world where everyone else’s avatars lived as well.  Critically, the world was persistent: no matter who logged on or off, the world would always be there to return to.  In the world, people could customize their houses and pets, and perform any one of a number of activities, like races or chess.

To test the system, Lucasfilm decided to run a five hundred person beta.  At this time, the developers at Lucasfilm figured they had enough content to last players weeks.  Instead, within hours, testers were asking for more content.  Months of hard work had been consumed in the blink of an eye.  As time passed, the content gap only got worse.  Finally recognizing that players would always absorb content faster than it could be created, the Lucasfilm crew decided to let the players create their own fun.  How best to do this?  By giving players swords and letting them kill each other.

To Lucasfilm’s own horror, the strategy worked so well, that it destroyed their peaceful world.  Instead of playing chess, people just ran around killing each other.  Unfortunately, this meant that anybody who just wanted to walk around had no defense.  And since everybody in Habitat was in the same world, peaceful players just got killed along with everyone else.  However, even with all the complaints this generated, nobody actually stopped playing.  The Habitat beta sucked its testers in and never let them go.  The five hundred testers were soon using up an incredible one percent of the entire QuantumLink network.  QuantumLink knew that if Habitat ever came out of beta, and gained tens of thousands of players, their network would simply collapse.  And so, in Nineteen Eighty-Eight, Habitat was shut down, too far ahead of its time for its own good.    That said, Fujitsu licensed the game for release in Japan, and QuantumLink released a stripped-down version of the world as Club Caribe, which went on to garner fifteen thousand players — a runaway success for the time.

In Nineteen Eighty-Nine, QuantumLink changed its name to America Online.  In Nineteen Ninety-One, game developer Stormfront Studios took the classic MUD gameplay and added in colorful graphics to make Neverwinter Nights, releasing it as one of the flagship titles of AOL’s game service.  Despite the rather limited nature of these graphics, even a little went a long way.  Neverwinter Nights quickly became one of AOL’s most popular and profitable games.  Even AOL’s CEO, Steve Case, used to play quite a bit, and the game became a great forum for him to interact with his subscribers.  That said, the game still cost anywhere from four to eight dollars per hour to play, and that did narrow the potential user base.

It wasn’t until Nineteen Ninety-Five that the seminal game released that combined everything that had come before with the business model that would define the genre well into the next decade.  Meridian 59 was developed by Archetype Interactive, which was later acquired by the game’s publisher, 3DO.  Like MUD, it consisted of gathering treasure and fighting monsters in a fantasy setting.  Like Neverwinter Nights, it featured colorful graphics, although of a much higher quality.  But unlike those games, Meridian 59 did not restrict itself to a proprietary network like AOL.  Rather, Meridian was a separate program that connected to the modern, open internet, which was becoming a household utility by the mid-Nineties.  Since the internet was accessible by anybody, its potential user base was higher than any of its competitors.  Beyond all this, it didn’t charge users an hourly fee, but rather, a flat, ten dollar monthly charge.  This allowed players to put in as much time as they wanted, without worrying about their wallet.

The success of this model was clear and unambiguous, as Meridian 59 went on to host around twenty-five thousand active players, the largest population in a persistent world, in the world.  The impact of the flat monthly rate was so profound, that every succeeding persistent online game for years would follow it.  Indeed, while the roots of the genre go as far back as MUD, Meridian 59 is broadly considered to be the first modern Massively Multiplayer Online game, or MMO for short.  It was also, critically, a role-playing game, making it the first MMORPG as well.

So it was that, after years of experimentation, technology had given birth to a revolutionary new design, a graphical world populated with real people interacting with each other from around the world.  Meridian 59 got the ball rolling, and Nineteen Ninety-Six’ The Realm Online largely copied the formula to become successful on its own terms.  The popularity of Meridian and The Realm soon attracted the attention of two life-long gamers, Starr Long and Ken Demarest.  Combined with the emerging popularity of competitive deathmatch in Ninety Ninety-Three’s seminal shooter Doom, multiplayer seemed ready to explode to the guys.

Fortunately for them, they just so happened to work for Origin Systems, which just so happened to make a franchise called… Ultima.

Tune in next time to see the MMO reach the mainstream

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