History of massively multiplayer online games

Early Multiplayer Online Games

The first graphical virtual world for multiple players appeared in 1974 with Mazewar. It showed a maze from a first-person viewpoint where players moved around and shot each other. This game was also the first to let people on different computers see and interact with each other in a shared digital space. At first, it worked over a serial cable, but when one of its creators started at MIT later that year, they improved it to run across the ARPAnet, the network that came before today's internet. In 1975, Will Crowther wrote Adventure on a DEC PDP-10, making it the first adventure game to reach a wide audience. Don Woods greatly expanded it in 1976. Adventure included many elements and references from Dungeons & Dragons, such as a computer-controlled dungeon master. A group of MIT students, inspired by Adventure, created Zork for the PDP-10 during the summer of 1977. It grew very popular on the ARPANET. In 1978, a programmer at DEC ported Zork to FORTRAN under the name Dungeon. That same year, Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the UK, began building a multi-user adventure game in MACRO-10 assembly language for a DEC PDP-10. He called it MUD, short for Multi-User Dungeon, as a nod to the Dungeon version of Zork, which he had enjoyed playing. Trubshaw later rewrote MUD in BCPL, the language that came before C, and then passed development to fellow Essex student Richard Bartle in 1980. This game, later known as Essex MUD or MUD1, stayed on the Essex University network until late 1987. During the 1980s, MUDs from the Essex tradition became popular in the United States. Affordable personal computers with modems running at 300 to 2400 bits per second let role-players connect to multi-line Bulletin Board Systems and online services like CompuServe. Because college students spent so much time on these games, people sometimes joked that MUD stood for "Multi Undergraduate Destroyer." In 1987, Yoshio Kiya from Nihon Falcom, who had created the Dragon Slayer action role-playing games, described his vision for an online RPG. He imagined a system giving players total freedom, where someone in a sword-and-sorcery world could choose to do nothing and simply live as a local baker. He thought it would be fun if everyone could take on different roles in a networked computer game.

Commercial MMORPGs on the Internet

When the NSFNET restrictions were lifted, established game companies and online platforms started putting their games on the internet. The first commercial text-based MMORPG to move from a proprietary network like CompuServe to the internet was Legends of Future Past. This game also stood out as one of the earliest to employ professional Game Masters who ran live online events. The term MMORPG itself was created by Richard Garriott, the mind behind Ultima Online, in 1997. Before that, graphical online games were called graphical MUDs or gMUDs. The name likely comes from "MMOG," which first appeared at the 1995 E3 Convention when Dale Addink used it for Confirmed Kill.

Another early hit on the internet was The Realm Online, released by Sierra Online. Even though it came out after Meridian 59, its beta version was live several months earlier. The Realm Online featured fully animated 2D graphics both during combat and outside of it, making it more approachable than text-heavy games or the graphical MUDs it was built on. Its gameplay and interface also felt familiar to players who knew Sierra's earlier graphical adventure games. Like many games before it, The Realm Online used simple turn-based combat, but it offered a huge number of visual character customization options for its time. It is still running today.

Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds had its beta released to Korean audiences in 1996 and is considered one of the first MMORPGs. It remains active, with over 1,000 subscribers. Meridian 59, launched by 3DO in late 1996, was also one of the first internet MMORPGs. It was among the first internet games from a major publisher, one of the first covered in big game magazines, and the first MMPOG to introduce a flat monthly subscription fee. Most importantly, it used a 3D engine that let players see the game world through their character's eyes. A dedicated cult following formed around Meridian 59 that still exists today.

Second generation MMORPGs

By the turn of the millennium, game companies were eager to capitalize on the new market. The concept of massively multiplayer online games expanded into new video game genres around this time, though RPGs, with their ability to "suck in" the player, were (and still are) the most financially promising. The next generation of MMORPGs, following the "big three" of the previous decade, was to include the medieval PvP-oriented Dark Age of Camelot, the sci-fi Anarchy Online, and Ultima Online 2. Anarchy Online, released first in June 2001, was saddled with crippling technical problems upon its release, mostly due to an inability to handle the huge playerbase. Dark Age of Camelot launched smoothly four months later, introducing "Realm vs. Realm" PvP and other innovations, and quickly passed Ultima Online and Asheron's Call in popularity, and became EverQuest's main rival. Ultima Online 2 was cancelled by Electronic Arts in March 2001, as they had decided that the market was becoming saturated and that it would be more profitable to divert resources to the original Ultima Online. RuneScape by Jagex was also released in 2001. 2001 also saw MMORPGs move off of PCs and onto home consoles in a limited form with the release of Phantasy Star Online; however, due to platform limitations, it would not be until EverQuest Online Adventures release that 'massive' features found their way outside of non-combat areas on consoles. 2001 also saw the first fully 3D sci-fi space-ship MMORPG. Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative (also Jumpgate or Jumpgate Classic and commonly abbreviated as JG or JGC) is an MMORPG in a science fiction setting for the PC, released in North America on September 25, 2001 by NetDevil (developer) and 3DO (publisher). In 2002 the sprite-based Ragnarok Online, produced by Korean company Gravity Corp, was released. Though unknown to many Western players, the game took Asia by storm as Lineage had done. The publisher has claimed in excess of 25 million subscribers of the game, although this number is based upon a quantity of registered users (rather than active subscribers). 2002 also saw the release of MapleStory, another sprite-based title, which was completely free-to-play - instead of charging a monthly fee, it generated revenue by selling in-game "enhancements".

Current-generation MMORPGs

In November 2004, a new wave of MMORPGs arrived, often considered the start of the modern era based on shifting ideas of graphics, gameplay, and popularity. That month saw the launch of Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest II and Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft. Sony, riding high on the success of the original EverQuest, expected to lead the market. To avoid cannibalizing its own games, it introduced a flat monthly fee covering EverQuest, EverQuest II, and Star Wars Galaxies. EverQuest II did well commercially, but World of Warcraft quickly surpassed it and every other subscription-based MMORPG, becoming a phenomenon that dwarfed all its predecessors. The closest competitor in paying subscribers was RuneScape, which boasted over a million subscribers alongside an even larger free player base. RuneScape also held the title of the world's largest free MMORPG, though it attracted far less media attention than WoW. The arrival of these newer titles caused subscriptions to drop for older games, including the year-old Lineage II and especially the original EverQuest. Today, World of Warcraft dominates the MMORPG market much like Dungeons & Dragons does in tabletop role-playing, each holding more than half of their respective markets. In August 2005, Sony Online Entertainment bought The Matrix Online, which later shut down at 11:59 p.m. on July 31, 2009. This was one of Sony's early game terminations, followed by Free Realms on March 31, 2014.