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The Game Archaeologist moves into Lucasfilm's Habitat: Part 2
Last week on the exciting cosmic adventures of the Game Archaeologist, we uncovered the ancient civilization of Lucasfilm's Habitat, one of the early predecessors to graphical MMOs. While we talked about how it came to be and pondered just how much money we'd waste if game companies were still charging by the minute, we didn't have the time or space to cover the community and events that formed around this experimental project. That day has come. Prepare your bladder for imminent release! Giving a bunch of players tools to do every which thing in the game and turning them loose without strict regulation might seem like a recipe for an instant sewage pit of a game today, but our cultured, classy behaviors weren't quite trained into us in 1986. When players first set eyes on Habitat, they weren't thinking of min-maxing, kill-stealing, or raid progression; they were trying to make sense of a virtual world using the only frame of reference they had to date: their own lives. Out of a melting pot of ideas and objects came fascinating stories from one of the earliest MMO proto-ancestors of the modern era. Get your '80s on as we head back... to the future!
The Game Archaeologist and the SysOp's Sinister Stratagem
When you think of MMORPGs, I wouldn't blame you if your mind stayed rooted firmly in the past decade or so, perhaps taking a brief vacation to 1997 before returning to today's 3-D polygonal glory. But it's not like people just woke up in the late 90's, looked at each other, and said, "Hmm. Online multiplayer RPGs. Let's make it happen!" On the contrary, history had been building up to that moment for quite some time. Tabletop RPGs and computer MUDs (multi-user dungeons) were both important ancestors of modern MMOs, just as was a mostly forgotten piece of software lore: the bulletin board system, also known as the BBS. In layman's terms, BBSes were like pocket internets -- host computers that allowed anyone to dial up and use special programs remotely. While BBSes weren't (initially) tied together like the world wide web, they featured a lot of the elements that would make the WWW so popular, such as email, forums, and, yes, online games. Today's special one-shot Game Archaeologist will take a brief look at the history of the BBS, as well as a couple of its games that could be considered "MORPGs" (like the renowned website, the "Massively" part would be a while in coming). Dial up, gentle readers, and make your hissing modem noises!
