- MMO: Massively Multiplayer Online…
- MMOG: Massively Multiplayer Online Game
- MMOPW: Massively Multiplayer Online Persistent World
- MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer Role-playing Game
Until somebody standardizes the acronyms referring to games such as EverQuest,
Star Wars Galaxies, and Dark Age of Camelot, the history
of this, the fastest growing sector of gaming, will remain fodder for debate.
There seems to be general agreement that MMOGs (for the sake of this article,
we will call them "massively multiplayer online games") grew out of MUDs
(Multi-User Dungeons). In 1978, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle completed
MUD1, which ran on a PDP-10. (For a closer look at the genesis of the original
MUD, check out our Smartest
Moments In Gaming History: #19 or this interview
with the creators. Raph Koster's impressive
website also contains some background on what happened next.)
The Elements of MMOG
All of the elements of MMOGs existed by the late eighties, but they did
not exist in a single product. For example, in 1985, Randy Farmer and Chip
Morningstar of LucasFilm, created a virtual online world called Habitat
that Commodore 64 users could access through QuantumLink. "The first graphical
online virtual world that supported lots of players at once -- more than
16 -- was Habitat, and that was the mid-eighties," says Raph Koster, the
chief creative officer at Sony Online Entertainment.
"This was created before there was a LucasArts. It ended up seeing commercial
launch primarily in Japan, where it became fairly popular."
By the late eighties, companies such as Sierra Online had persistent worlds
that they maintained on their own proprietary networks. Services such as
Sierra Online's Sierra Network (later known as the Imagination Network)
and GEnie offered multiplayer graphical games such as Yserbius
and Air Warrior, but these games were not technically
on the Internet -- you logged on to proprietary networks to play. They also
had a very different business model than the flat fees
we expect today:
"Those services, the precursors to AOL, became
the place where these games found their market," says Koster. "They brought
in crazy amounts of money because they were on hourly or per-minute fees.
The first graphical one was on QuantumLink. That was Rabbitjack's Casino.
It was a casino game.
"But after that, Air Warrior
came along. ... At the time, 16-player was a big deal. So, if you had a
multiplayer game that exceeded 16, you might as well call it massive."
Playing games on proprietary servers was a major step toward modern MMOGs,
but it was not the same thing. The first MMOG to be played on the Internet
was an impressive little number called Meridian 59...
Meridian 59
If there is a game that qualifies as the Neanderthal game (Neanderthal being
the spot in human evolution in which Homo sapiens were indisputably human)
in MMOG evolution, it's Meridian 59, which was released
in 1996. Originally developed by an outside firm, Meridian
59 was the first game to incorporate large numbers of players in a single
world, a persistent world, and many of the other identifying elements of
MMOGs. Like many experimental games, it was not corporate sponsored, and
was created under unusual circumstances.
The concept for Meridian 59 did not begin with 3DO. A
small company called Archetype Interactive conceived the game. "It was a
major effort," says Koster, who had developed a name in the MUD creation
world and turned down an offer to work on Meridian 59.
"For a long time, work on Meridian 59 was distributed
over the Internet. People worked remotely. It was a grassroots effort that
made good."
In many ways, 3DO was the perfect fit for such a pioneering effort. Trip
Hawkins, a highly-evangelistic co-founder of Electronic Arts, created 3DO
as a games technology company. His company created the 3DO hardware platform,
which it licensed to Panasonic, Goldstar, and other manufacturers in an
effort to re-shape the games business.
By 1996, however, with Sony, Sega, and Nintendo dominating the console market,
Hawkins turned his attention to new paradigms. Looking for a way to bring
his Might & Magic franchise to the Internet, Hawkins bought
and published Meridian 59.
Meridian
59 also marks the introduction of the term "massively multiplayer."
In 1996, as Hawkins tried to explain his game to the press, he used terms
like "massively multiplayer" and "3D persistent world" quite liberally.
Rich Vogel, currently vice president of development at Sony Online Entertainment,
was working at 3DO during that time. He confirms that these terms originated
with Meridian 59. "The term 'massively' was first used
at 3DO. Actually, 'massively multiplayer Internet game' was Meridian
59's revelation. We coined that phrase."
Koster, who worked at Origin Systems, remembers things differently.
"The massively multiplayer term was coined by Electronic Arts marketing.
At that point, Ultima Online was announced. I remember
the meeting in which they told us they were going to call it 'massively
multiplayer' and we were like, 'Okay, whatever.'" (Looking back, Koster
admits that it is possible that 3DO coined the phrase and that Electronic
Arts marketing borrowed it.)
Meridian 59 stood
at the crossroads of many technologies. Along with its place in MMOG history,
it also stands out for its use of the same 2.5D graphics technology that
id Software popularized in DOOM. Meridian
59 was the first effort at some technologies and one of the last significant
uses of others. What it stands out as more than anything else is a transition
game:
GameSpy: Was Meridian
59 the first attempt at a massively multiplayer game?
Koster: That depends
on how you define massively multiplayer.
GameSpy: Was it the first attempt at a persistent world?
Koster: That depends
on how you define 'persistent.' Let's back up and define terms. I'm going
to get a little pedantic on you. A lot of people define 'massively multiplayer'
as meaning a certain number of players that can be held in one copy of
the world … in one shard if you like. Meridian 59 capped
at only 250, which is actually the limit for text-based MUDs as well.
By that definition, Meridian 59 is not "massively" multiplayer.
It was part of a small explosion of projects that were all going on around
the same time.
But Meridian 59 should also be given credit for several
firsts:
"I think Meridian 59 was ahead of
its time. It was the first true Internet-based game … not private network-based
game. Everything else was on a private network. Meridian 59
was the first Internet-based, true graphical-based MUD," says Vogel. "At
that time, we had the largest audience. I would say we had 250 [people]
on each server in our worlds. We had 12 servers up and working. At that
time, that was the biggest.
"We paved the way. A lot of things
that we did in Meridian 59, such as the price model, such
as having expansions, such as text overhead -- we paved a lot for the graphical
3D (well, we were 2.5D) games.
"We did a lot of things that
no one had ever done before. The way we ran chat, the way we did our interface
for equipping and un-equipping, customization of characters -- all of that
was never done before. We led the way there and a lot of people followed
… our customer support, our $9.95 per month price. … Was it as successful
as Ultima Online? No. It had 12,000 people."
One year later, MMOG gaming burst into the mainstream, backed by the marketing
muscle of EA and the creativity of one of the most respected names in roleplaying
games...
Ultima Online
In 1997, Origin Systems released Ultima Online, the brainchild
of Richard Garriott -- a true pioneer in the world of role-playing games.
Garriott, also known as "Lord British," was well-known for his long-running
Ultima RPG series. In 1997, he brought those games online.
"The prototype of Ultima Online was architected
using the Ultima VI engine," remembers Raph Koster, who
helped design the game. "They hired a programmer from the world of MUDs,
Rick Delashmit, and Rick created it while working there as a contractor,
converting Ultima VI to be a 100-person orks vs. humans
[game]. They ran that as an internal play test. Based on that success,
Richard Garriott was able to get funding for Ultimate Online."
Ultima VI, and consequently Ultima
Online, featured the top-down perspective. This differentiated Ultima
Online from Meridian 59, which had DOOM-like
graphics. (Meridian 59's 2.5D graphics became permanently obsolete when
id released Quake. "At the time, doing a full 3D engine was too hard. Quake
was already out. All the Ultima Online programmers were
obsessed with Quake. They played it constantly," says
Koster.)
The top-down perspective opened comparisons to another famous RPG -- Diablo.
"Diablo came out just before U.O.,"
says Koster. "I remember reading the previews of Diablo."
Released on September 26, 1997, Ultima Online had a leg
up on Meridian 59; people knew the Ultima
name. "Ultima Online had a great name. I mean, 5 million
people played Ultima games," says Vogel, who moved over
to EA to become the first producer on Ultima Online.
Eventually attracting over 200,000 subscribers, Ultima Online
proved that there was a market for MMOGs, but it also suffered from problems
that would haunt online worlds. Technical problems plagued the early days
of the game, and Ultima Online was one of the earliest
instances of player-killers who would gang up on newer players. Were player-killers
just another part of the game, players who paid their fees and should be
allowed to enjoy it their way? Or were they a nuisance that plagued the
vast majority of other players, harming the overall game? It was Ultima
Online that first tackled this question.
While working on Ultima Online, the Origin team became
aware of a project that would become the most popular MMOG in history. "During
our development time on Ultima Online, Starr [Starr
Long, one of the producers on the project] found links to Jake Song
and Lineage while it was still in development," says Richard
Garriott. "The U.S. press was not paying any attention to it. There was
no English text, so all we could do was look at pictures." Lineage
would soon find a ravenous market of its own overseas...
Lineage
In 1996, as 3DO released Meridian 59, Nexxon released
Kingdom of the Winds, the first game created by a Korean
designer named Jake Song. The game was well-received and the developer went
on to continue experimenting with massively multiplayer. At that time, all
of the stars were perfectly aligned for MMOGs to catch on in Korea. (See
GameSpy's look
at Korean gaming for more detail.)
"Korea, for decades now as a vestige
of World War II, has had a law on the books that dissuaded companies from
importing goods from Japan. Game machines from Nintendo, Sega, and Sony
have been effectively banned," says Garriott, who now works for NC Soft,
the phenomenally successful Korean game publisher. "Console gaming has been
banned in Korea! Combine that with the fact that Korea has an extremely
high-density population. Half the population of the country is in one high-density
town -- Soule.
"The government, a decade or more ago, decided
to make a strategic investment in broadband service to the country. They
also did the same thing with phones, and even phone-based online games are
popular in Korea. The result of the government investment, the government
restriction against console games, and the high-density culture resulted
in PC games becoming more popular, and in particular, online games."
Kingdom of the Winds attracted over 1 million subscribers.
Nearly a full decade later, EverQuest, the most popular
MMOG in the west, is approaching 500,000 subscribers worldwide. In 1998,
NC Soft released Song's next game -- Lineage. Lineage
was not a traditional RPG of the Meridian 59/EverQuest
variety.
"Lineage is a top-down 2D game,"
says Garriott. "The Lineage gameplay model is very much
a territorial conquest and management game, compared to most U.S. MMPs,
which are personal role-playing games with personal leveling up." The difference
is notable, and highlights the cultural differences between the U.S. and
Korea: "Most MMPs in the United States have very little tribal ownership
of territories and what that ownership can provide you and your team. Lineage
has not only a very good personal leveling-up system, but it also has an
outstanding team-versus-team territorial ownership bent." As a result, Lineage
was intensely social, encouraging large groups of players to come together
in Korea's LAN gaming centers to rampage across terrain as conquering armies.
The response was phenomenal. More than 4 million people subscribed to Lineage.
"Worldwide, we're pushing 4 million subscribers to Lineage," says Garriott.
"In Korea, there are about 2.5 million. The other 1.5 million are mostly
in Taiwan, with a few in a handful of other Asian countries."
EverQuest
In a 1998 interview, analyst Seema Williams of Forrester Research predicted
that online game revenues would grow from $277 million in 1998 to $1.9 billion
by 2002. "That $1.9 billion figure encompasses $1.3 billion in online advertising
and sponsorships," she told a USA Today reporter. The other $600 million,
she said, would come from online sales of CD-ROMs and online fees charged
by sites with premium games.
At the time that Williams made this prediction, games like Wheel
of Fortune were attracting a lot of attention on the Internet. That
same year, however, Verant (later Sony Online Entertainment) began beta
testing of EverQuest.
Backed by time and technology -- as well as the muscle of entertainment
giant Sony -- EverQuest accomplished everything that Meridian
59 attempted to do. Released in 1999, it was a fully three-dimensional
game that could truly support a massive community. Although in many ways
it was less ambitious than Ultima Online (the economy
and social systems were much more basic), the graphics and sheer amount
of world to explore attracted gamers. EQ was all about
combat, exploration, and character development -- these things it did extremely
well.
The release of EverQuest brought a new level of attention
to MMOGs. The gaming press covered Meridian 59; Newsweek
wrote about EverQuest. The game's rapid growth attracted
attention. When EverQuest players began selling virtual
items for real money on eBay, it made national news.
Obviously, EverQuest also attracted a lot of attention
in the gaming community as demonstrated by this 1999 Gamer's Today interview
with Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi: GT:
Have you ever played EverQuest?
Sakaguchi: My character
is level six in EverQuest. (Sakaguchi smiled and answered this
question directly rather than waiting for his interpreter to translate
it.)
GT: I'll take that as a strong yes.
Sakaguchi: Yes, yes.
GT: Have you thought about making a persistent world out
of Final Fantasy such as the one in EverQuest?
Sakaguchi: I'm certainly
attracted to the idea. I'm also a big fan of Ultima Online,
as well.
By the time of that interview, Sakaguchi had begun work on both Final
Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XI -- an MMOG Final
Fantasy game.
Now nearing 500,000 subscribers, EverQuest has opened
the door for dozens of new MMOGs. Only nine months after the release of
EverQuest, Microsoft introduced Asheron's
Call on its Zone.com online gaming site (AC was another
grass-roots project that ultimately received big publisher funding. It's
doubtful Microsoft would've stepped up if it hadn't been for the success
of predecessors such as Ultima Online). EverQuest's
success also opened the way for Mythic, a company with a long history in
online games, to release Dark Age of Camelot. It also
paved the way for Sony to team up with LucasArts on Star Wars
Galaxies.
The history of the genre is by no means complete. It continues to evolve
as dozens of companies continue to try to develop the next Ultima
Online or EverQuest. This year alone, at least 13
MMOs (including expansions) have already been released, with at least seven
more on the horizon before the end of the year. And those are the higher
profile games! Small "boutique" developers continue to experiment with games
that play with the Massively Multiplayer formula. This genre isn't going
to lose momentum anytime soon!
Be sure to check back on Friday as our MMO series continues when we talk
to some of the pioneers of early MMOs and the lessons they learned in the
freewheeling early days of the genre. |
