Ace Online

Lore & Background

Ace Online began as Space Cowboy Online in North America, hosted by Gala-Net through the gPotato portal. The client was made available for download on May 22, 2006, and service went live on May 26, 2006. On December 26, 2007, Space Cowboy Online was shut down, announced by Gala-Net staff. Following this closure, the European version was hosted by GameForge GmbH and renamed AirRivals in early 2008 (originally intended to be called Flysis). The North American release resumed under Suba Games on September 26, 2008, as Ace Online. Other publishers followed: Arario Corporation launched the Japanese server in the first quarter of 2009, and Axeso5 opened the first Latin American server in February 2011.

Reader's Guide

Ace Online's significance lies in its long-running, player-driven nation war system, which has sustained the game across multiple publishers and regions for over a decade. The core gameplay involves piloting customizable starfighters (Gears) in aerial combat from a third-person view, with an optional first-person cockpit view. The Nation War system pits two factions—Bygeniou City United (BCU) and Arlington National Influence (ANI)—against each other in raids, skirmishes, and mothership wars. Motherships, such as BCU's Anubis and ANI's Horus, spawn when a nation accumulates enough National Contribution Points (NCP), and their destruction grants bonuses like increased recovery rates and access to exclusive maps. Strategic Points and arena battles also contribute to NCP and War Points, which can be spent in the War Point Shop. The game's free-to-play model includes an item shop (available from June 23, 2006) offering enhancements, weapon gambling, and enchantments, with a risk of breaking equipment beyond the fifth enchantment. The legacy of Ace Online is that of a niche but persistent MMO that maintained a loyal community through its structured PvP and territorial control mechanics.

Did You Know?

• The game was originally released in North America as Space Cowboy Online on May 22, 2006, and shut down on December 26, 2007.
• The European version was initially intended to be named Flysis but was released as AirRivals in early 2008.
• The BCU mothership is named Anubis and spawns in Tylent Jungle; the ANI mothership is named Horus and spawns in Reynard Beach.
• Players can gamble weapon stats using a 'Weapon Gamble' card that randomly adds prefix and suffix attributes.

The Dawn of Playable Virtual Spaces

In the mid-1970s, a handful of experimental programs quietly laid the groundwork for every multiplayer world that would follow. In 1974, Mazewar gave players a first-person view of a maze where they could shoot one another, making it both the first graphic virtual environment and the first truly networked game. Its creators initially linked machines with a simple serial cable, but once one of them enrolled at MIT, the title was upgraded to run across ARPAnet, the embryonic backbone of today's Internet. The following year, Will Crowther built Adventure on a DEC PDP-10, creating the first widely played text-based dungeon crawler. Don Woods expanded it in 1976, weaving in Dungeons & Dragons-style elements and even a computer-controlled dungeon master. That success inspired a team of MIT students to write Zork in the summer of 1977, which quickly became a hit on the ARPANET. A DEC programmer then ported it to FORTRAN under the name Dungeon in 1978, ensuring the concept reached an even wider audience of early computer enthusiasts.

MUDs and the Cultural Explosion of Text Worlds

Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the United Kingdom, began coding a multi-user adventure in MACRO-10 assembly language in 1978. He named it MUD in tribute to the Dungeon port of Zork he had enjoyed playing. After converting the code to BCPL, the precursor of C, he passed the project to fellow student Richard Bartle in 1980. The game, later remembered as Essex MUD or MUD1, kept running on the university's network until late 1987. Its influence surged across the Atlantic during the 1980s, when inexpensive personal computers and 300-to-2400-baud modems let college students dial into multi-line bulletin boards and services like CompuServe. The community jokingly reinterpreted the acronym as "Multi Undergraduate Destroyer" because of how much time students poured in. In 1989, Yehuda Simmons released Avalon: The Legend Lives, introducing a deep economic system, player-elected governments with ministers and barons, a layered warfare conquest system, and a meritocratic player-versus-player structure based on skill-worth rather than levels. Many designers who would later shape the MMORPG genre, including Raph Koster, Brad McQuaid, Matt Firor, Mark Jacobs, Brian Green, and J. Todd Coleman, cut their teeth as MUD players or developers.

PLATO: Graphical Multiplayer Before It Was Mainstream

While text-based adventures dominated the public imagination, the PLATO educational system was quietly pushing graphical multiplayer design years ahead of the curve. By mid-1974, PLATO hosted Spasim, a space-battle game accommodating up to 32 simultaneous users, alongside Talkomatic, a multi-user chat system. Oubliette, written by Jim Schwaiger, predated MUD1 by roughly a year and was so punishing that no single player could survive alone; groups were mandatory. Moria, copyrighted in 1978, followed with party-based gameplay that also allowed solo character management. Perhaps most remarkable was Avatar, begun around 1977 and opened in 1979 by three high school students—Bruce Maggs, Andrew Shapira, and Dave Sides—using PLATO at the University of Illinois. Running on 512-by-512 plasma panels, this 2.5-D dungeon crawler let groups of up to 15 players team up to fight monsters simultaneously. Despite their sophistication, these titles were locked inside PLATO's proprietary infrastructure and could never reach the broader public. Textual worlds running on Unix, VMS, or DOS, by contrast, were far more accessible, which is why they shaped the next generation of multiplayer design.

The First Commercial Online Worlds

The leap from academic experiments to paid consumer services came in the mid-1980s. Island of Kesmai, designed by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor, is generally regarded as the first commercial MMORPG. This roguelike title launched in 1985 on CompuServe, charging players twelve dollars per hour and supporting up to a hundred simultaneous users. Around the same time, in early 1985, Games Computers Play (GCP) opened as a dial-in service for Atari 8-bit computers out of York, Pennsylvania. Users connected via 300- or 1200-baud modems and navigated an isometric virtual mallscape with a joystick, chatting in private or group rooms, exchanging mail, and entering different doors to play multiplayer games. Though Commodore's PlayNET edged out GCP by a few months as the first graphical online service, GCP's lineup included Lords of Space, widely cited as the first commercial graphical MMO. Together, these early paid services proved that multiplayer virtual worlds could sustain a business model, setting the stage for the massive online titles that would follow in the decades ahead.