Lucasfilm Games' MMO 'Habitat' source code released
This forgotten classic could become open source in the near future.
You may know LucasArts for its spread of excellent point-and-click adventure games like Loom or Day of the Tentacle, but do you remember Lucasfilm Games and its massively multiplayer online RPG Habitat that went live in 1986? Probably not. But whether you look back fondly on that year and the short-lived MMO or are simply interested in seeing older nuggets of gaming goodness being preserved, you're in luck. Habitat's source code is now available.
The Museum of Digital Art and Entertainment (MADE) has been hard at work over the last two years bringing the source code to fruition, and has uploaded it to Github, where developers, historians and gaming enthusiasts can download and inspect it for their own purposes.
MADE director and founder Alex Handy notes that this project took nearly three years of work in all from 2013, when the original Habitat coders offered up the Habitat source code to the museum. Handy and the rest of the museum staff took it upon themselves to further the efforts to preserve Habitat for others in the future.
But they don't want to stop there. Handy and his team would like to get the game up and running via Linux servers and also procure any additional code from AOL, who originally hosted Habitat servers back under the Quantum Link moniker.
These are impressive efforts to preserve a game that many may never have heard of, and out of a love for the medium. Check out the source code here if you're so inclined.
