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Gaming, like any artistic medium, has many different forms of expression. you may have games for pure satisfaction, for expressing complex ideas, as a personal project, or as a space to just live in. MMOs tend to dominate the latter most definition, being games that you can log into a simply live out a virtual life in with others.
Of course, the concept of what an MMO is can be given many different interpretations as well. Not all are about social living, while some are exclusively focused on player interaction. Being such a popular format within gaming, you can bet it’s pretty old too. So what was the first ever MMO?
What Defines An MMO?
MMO, as you probably already know, meansMassively Multiplayer Online. Fairly self-explanatory. An MMO is a game that is built around havingmany players simultaneously inhabiting the same world.So in that regard, what sets it apart from any old multiplayer game that might have a large amount of players?
The truth is, there’s not a precise answer to that. What typically defines an MMO is the consistency of it. This can mean both the personal growth of the player and other characters, as well as that of the world itself. It’s a pretty broad definition, and can be stretched fairly liberally.Destiny is an MMO, and so is Final Fantasy XIV. These games have almost nothing in common, yet they both fit the criteria for being an MMO.
Of course, the foundation for an MMO has to bethe massive, simultaneous player base. People inhabit the same server space and can come across each other without always being in instanced multiplayer matches. It’s complicated.
What Was The First Ever MMO?
The simplest part of an MMO has to be its ability to host a great number of players all at once. MMOs are quite old however, and the idea ofwhat constitutes ‘massive’ has changed a lotover the decades since the first MMO.
For example,Maze was the first ever game to allow multiple people to play togetherin a virtual space connected by a shared server back in 1974. Eight players could be in the game with each other simultaneously. Though would by no means be called an MMO now, it wasthe origins for what the format would become.
The game that could genuinely be calledthe first ever MMO would be Habitat. Other games attempting similar large-scale multiplayer projects had existed prior, such as Island of Kesmai and Games Computes Play, though these did not have the same virtual representation and scale as Habitat did with itsbeta launch in 1986.
Created by LucasArts, Habitat was launched usingthe Quantum Link service for the Comodore 64as a beta, a test case for how a virtual world could function. It laid the foundations for much of how MMOs are built today, with a bevy of systems implemented thatplayers could then interact with and manipulate in their own ways, rather than experiencing the game in any singular format. It was an impressive feat for the time to have so many playersinteract simultaneously in a single virtual world.
Habitat’s beta test, whichran for three years, proved to LucasArts that it was simply too expensive to keep running. It was subsequentlysucceeded by Club Caribe, a version of Habitat that was vastly scaled down though still retained many of the social aspects of its predecessor.
In 2017, the original Habitat wasrevived by one of its lead developers as NeoHabitat, allowing one of the first ever MMOs to be experienced once again.
What Was The First Successful MMO?
While Habitat may may been the first proper game that could be classed as an MMO,it became too costly to keep runningand had to be pared down after only a short few years. So what then could we consider the first MMO that made genuine profit and was able to continually grow and keep running?
A few games fit the bill, such asNeverwinter Nights(not the Bioware one), though one of the first to have truly massive fame would likely beUltima Online. There are plenty of reason it could be classed as such a success, though a pretty simple reason would be the fact thatit is still running to this day since its launch in 1997.
The term ‘MMORPG’ was also coined by the creator of Ultima Online, Richard Garriott.
Of course,Ultima Online would be quickly outpaced by Everquest in 1999and would hold that record for quite a while, though Ultima Online is what truly set the ball rolling for more profitable, long-running MMOs.
