@@JoshStrifeHayes I think you might want to consider re-releasing it at some point down the road maybe as 1 long video instead of 5 parts. Just an idea but might help now that your channel is growing quickly. Maybe at 200k subs or something
Koronis Rift also predated Habitat. MUDs had been available on the Internet well before 1992, however the Internet wasn't widely used outside Academia at the time. Internet adoption for consumers didn't really start until 1993-1994 with Microsoft adding support to Windows and NCSA Mosaic being released. Legends of Kesmai was in Open Beta for quite a while before official launch, then basically vanished for a few months to only be on Compuserve before Gamestorm went live. Interestingly, a lot of games on Gamestorm were from Mythic Entertainment - most notably Darkness Falls, DAoC players will recognise the name.
Goddamn, these videos deserve the same views as your Otherland stuff and beyond. I can't imagine how many hours of research went into this. Really well done, I'm hooked.
Coming close to late 1990's and we all know what mmo comes out then :). Again brilliant take on our favorite genre Josh, thank you for taking this on :)
For those interested in Habitat, just a couple of notes to add to this video: Habitat was actually a beta/pilot test and Club Caribe was intended to be the release version. Habitat didn’t close in March 1988 due to poor profits. It was because the testing period was over and the joint partnership between Lucasfilm Games and Quantum Link specified that once development was completed, it would be handed off to them. The powers that be at Quantum Link decided Habitat had too many fantasy elements and stripped those back, modifying bunch of the in game regions/rooms and shipping it as Club Caribe in the spring of 1989. The game size wasn’t reduced though, all the artwork was stored on the game disk. All of the object behaviours were stored on the server. Quantum just removed the objects they didn’t like from distribution in the in game database. Randy Farmer only modified one thing for Quantum Link after Habitat ended and that was to edit the copyright info/date and add in the Club Caribe title screen. The actual Club Caribe world itself turned out to be way larger than Habitat at its peak.
It’s also worth noting that although Lucasfilm Games (later Lucasarts) retained ownership of the Habitat intellectual property, Quantum Link was solely responsible for Club Caribe from its inception in March 1989 until October 1994.
Wow I'm glad I checked your backlog this is really informative. Not only did I think I knew a lot about MMO's but I also thought Wolfenstein was the first FPS.
Somewhere on a forgotten server, a habitat avatar holds the instant kill gun and giggles to himself about all the fun he will have once his user finally logs back on.
Oh gods, I remember playing the first Neverwinter. it was indeed a really fun game at that time. I am loving this, thanks for the memories. My first computer was a Commador-64. Yes, I am ancient. :D
I know that you make the distinction that Legend of Future Past was the first ONLINE game to have a crafting system, I still feel that is should be noted that it wasn't first game to have crafting system. I think first game to have a crafting system (with also hunger and thirst systems) was Wilderness: A survival adventure 1986. Though, there may have been something even earlier. Game that was literally 30 years ahead of its time with how survival games are now a craze.
1984's Tradewars 2012 had a crafting system in it. Not exactly the same way one would see them in Legend of Future Past. But one could "build" planets and utilize what we call crafting to have them generate certain resources or do specific things. Most people wouldn't consider it a crafting system, I think they would see it more of a "guild base" or "clanhall" type thing.
It's very cool to hear about the games that lead to the features we all associate with MMORPGs today and how they seem to have been added a little at a time. Thanks for these!
For Habitat, the C64 itself was a brilliant choice, it was an extremely popular system... what was not common at the time were modems. I never personally knew anyone that had one back in the day.
@@JoshStrifeHayes I always wanted one but my family could not afford one. I was given a Hayes SmartModem 2400 by my dad, but it wouldn't work with our computer. I wound up selling that to my mom's boss for $300 (mid 80s mind you), then turned around and bought an Atari 800 XL. It wasn't just the computer that was expensive, a decent modem was also very pricey and often necessitated a second phone line to keep peace with the family.
@@JoshStrifeHayes Everybody makes mistakes, or do not find something, or something, Also I am pretty sure its the first mmorpg with hugging/punishing attacking players and its still running.
In the times before service providers, access to dial-up games wasn't limited by a specific service. Anyone could log into the first generation MUDs by dialing directly into the bank of phone lines hooked up to the server run by the game developer. It wasn't until Genie, Compuserve, AoL etc. that game access started being bundled with other services. This stifled online game development for years because game developers lost the direct revenue per player they previously had. It wasn't until the rise of the internet that online games became financially viable again, once developers were able to start charging players for game access again, on top of what they were already paying service providers for access to the internet.
Habitat : Interesting that they couldn’t get the gun back from the player ... what kind of database was used that you couldn’t find that gun. I’m a programmer and used to work as a database designer back in the day. I’m curious as to what the database software was they were using in 1986
Some years ago the source for Habitat was released under an open license (you can find it on GitHub if you're into that kind of thing). Best guess I can come up with looking at the files used build the database seems to indicate that it used a custom database manager named Ghu. A lot of the database building was done with pl1 files. Had to look that one up but apparently its an IBM thing. The idea seems to be that commands are defined in advance and you would have to recompile the database/Ghu from these files if you want additional commands. It looks like the idea is you build it once and go, I'm not sure if Ghu would allow for a rebuild like this that keeps data intact. It may have resulted in a wipe of all existing game and character data. At the end of the day if they never considered a command like "who has X item" then they just don't have that ability. They may have had to look at every character to see what that specific character had on them.
Non-structured queries were extremely difficult to utilize and sorting/searching a disjointed database was extremely time consuming considering the limitations of the Technology we had at the time. Basically. A sheer lack of processing power to conduct database searches.
I think your forgot the Master System for the "console market". As it was also a direct competitor to the NES and Atari. Even though it came out in 1986
I've got a number of issues with this narrative; The early internet wasn't "provider" based, you where either an address on the internet or you where not and it was exclusively academic. Later in the internet life, corporations 'joined' the internet and provided dial in access to their systems to provide access to wider business and personal use. Putting this another way, AOL is NOT the internet, AOL was a 'doorway' to the internet. If feels here like you've been draw into company hype of businesses who created MUD like games during this era (who all seem to feel they where 'the original' and 'the Issac newton of MUD's). It was very organic growth and whilst I concur that you've identified some undeniable key players (like MazeWars) they where certainly not alone for long, nor did they work in isolation such that their ideas can be said to be theirs alone. Still, easy to criticise hard to create. Just wish your narrative was more reflective of the cooperative and importantly collaborative nature of the birth and growth of MUD games (instead it feels like a Puff peice for AOL and other companies).
I have seen a lot of mistakes in this series. AOL, CompuServe, and Genie were commerical BBSs, not internet providers. Not in the 1980s anyways. Even in the 90s, when the CIX backbone was launched, they still didn't provide much more than email services. A lot of the games mentioned on these services were "door" games, not MUDs. Essex MUD was the first game to coin that term and was written in 1980, years before Islands of Kesmai. I guess if you're just going to look at commercial releases, you're fairly accurate, even with the addition of non-commercial games suchs as Maze and Mazewar. But you really gloss over MUDs which dominated the online roleplaying community of the internet through the 90s. Some of them are still quite active today. 56k Modems were not available in the 1980s, they would not show up until the mid 90s. But by the time they showed up broadband was just around the corner, though in a lot of places dialup would remain the standard for awhile longer. In 1985, the best you got was 9600 BAUD. If you think 56k speed was bad, the best in the 80s was six times slower!
I love what you are doing now with the worst mmorpg ever series and the scam busting videos so it's no surprise that I'm enjoying this series too. Unfortunately the amount of time,energy and research required to make videos like this. I'd love to see your take on other gaming histories.
If there's one thing that I just can't understand about people in the UK, it's why they continue to mispronounce Mario when he tells you how to pronounce his name in the game. He says his name in the games. And yet y'all still mispronounce it.
How can you do a "History of MMORPGs" and completely ignore Gemstone 3? You don't even really acknowledge the MUD genre at all, and they were really the first truly Multi-User online worlds that were actually functional.
@@JoshStrifeHayes Ok but surely the MUD claiming to be one of the first MMORPGs, released in 1990 before Never Winter, with thousands of concurrent players on at one time during its peak, and still active with hundreds of concurrent players today should garner at least a footnote. Wouldn't you think?
@@Matt-sl1wg yes, i would, and with the weeks of research and it not popping up on any lists, combined with how few people watched this series, and how pedantic people are being about how my one man unpaid research was incorrect, lead me to abandon it.
@@JoshStrifeHayes it took you "weeks of research?" Everything in your 5-part series can be found in the top-result Wikipedia article when you google "earliest MMORPGs." I accomplished what you did in "weeks of research" with a 2-second Google search.
![Our Virtual World - A History of the MMORPG [Part 3]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Me4Bn72vpYg/mqdefault.jpg)
![Our Virtual World - A History of the MMORPG [Part 3]](/img/tr.png)
It’s fucking criminal how few view this series has. Excellently researched, my dude.
Cheers dude, hopefully ill be able to make more of it someday
@@JoshStrifeHayes I think you might want to consider re-releasing it at some point down the road maybe as 1 long video instead of 5 parts. Just an idea but might help now that your channel is growing quickly. Maybe at 200k subs or something
@@danielmccauley3884 200k subs came back to this message time to re-release it so more people see!
Koronis Rift also predated Habitat.
MUDs had been available on the Internet well before 1992, however the Internet wasn't widely used outside Academia at the time. Internet adoption for consumers didn't really start until 1993-1994 with Microsoft adding support to Windows and NCSA Mosaic being released.
Legends of Kesmai was in Open Beta for quite a while before official launch, then basically vanished for a few months to only be on Compuserve before Gamestorm went live. Interestingly, a lot of games on Gamestorm were from Mythic Entertainment - most notably Darkness Falls, DAoC players will recognise the name.
Why is this series not more popular?! People don't want to learn?
Thank you Josh, for making this awesome research!
Glad you Mentioned Gold Box Neverwinter Nights, far to often forgotten in mmo history.
Why did I have to dig to find this series? This is amazing already!
fantastic videos btw, can't believe this hasn't got more views.
Glad you enjoyed it Steven. I really enjoyed researching and making this series but, it never quite took off which was a shame.
@@JoshStrifeHayes Yeah I noticed there wasn't a part 6, still though, really well researched and put together.
Goddamn, these videos deserve the same views as your Otherland stuff and beyond. I can't imagine how many hours of research went into this. Really well done, I'm hooked.
Otherland is nothing but irrelevant pixels for a shit game.
Coming close to late 1990's and we all know what mmo comes out then :). Again brilliant take on our favorite genre Josh, thank you for taking this on :)
For those interested in Habitat, just a couple of notes to add to this video:
Habitat was actually a beta/pilot test and Club Caribe was intended to be the release version. Habitat didn’t close in March 1988 due to poor profits. It was because the testing period was over and the joint partnership between Lucasfilm Games and Quantum Link specified that once development was completed, it would be handed off to them. The powers that be at Quantum Link decided Habitat had too many fantasy elements and stripped those back, modifying bunch of the in game regions/rooms and shipping it as Club Caribe in the spring of 1989. The game size wasn’t reduced though, all the artwork was stored on the game disk. All of the object behaviours were stored on the server. Quantum just removed the objects they didn’t like from distribution in the in game database. Randy Farmer only modified one thing for Quantum Link after Habitat ended and that was to edit the copyright info/date and add in the Club Caribe title screen. The actual Club Caribe world itself turned out to be way larger than Habitat at its peak.
It’s also worth noting that although Lucasfilm Games (later Lucasarts) retained ownership of the Habitat intellectual property, Quantum Link was solely responsible for Club Caribe from its inception in March 1989 until October 1994.
@@stublad I'm glad I'm watching this series only now that your comments are already there.
Wow I'm glad I checked your backlog this is really informative. Not only did I think I knew a lot about MMO's but I also thought Wolfenstein was the first FPS.
I'm so glad I found this gem of a series
Somewhere on a forgotten server, a habitat avatar holds the instant kill gun and giggles to himself about all the fun he will have once his user finally logs back on.
I didn't know a lot of this. Such a great video.
Oh gods, I remember playing the first Neverwinter. it was indeed a really fun game at that time. I am loving this, thanks for the memories. My first computer was a Commador-64. Yes, I am ancient. :D
Solid documentary man. Thanks for this.
These videos are so well researched and presented. Like others have said, they deserve way more views.
Fantastic work here as always Strife!
This series is fantastic!and for a MMO nerd like me,well need. Thank you josh.
im learning a lot lol
I know that you make the distinction that Legend of Future Past was the first ONLINE game to have a crafting system, I still feel that is should be noted that it wasn't first game to have crafting system. I think first game to have a crafting system (with also hunger and thirst systems) was Wilderness: A survival adventure 1986. Though, there may have been something even earlier.
Game that was literally 30 years ahead of its time with how survival games are now a craze.
1984's Tradewars 2012 had a crafting system in it. Not exactly the same way one would see them in Legend of Future Past. But one could "build" planets and utilize what we call crafting to have them generate certain resources or do specific things.
Most people wouldn't consider it a crafting system, I think they would see it more of a "guild base" or "clanhall" type thing.
It's very cool to hear about the games that lead to the features we all associate with MMORPGs today and how they seem to have been added a little at a time. Thanks for these!
This series is AMAZING!! You've done such a great job!
Great series, dude. Great work. Got a subscriber.
Amazing videos, thank you so much for making these!
This series is really well done, hope to see more like this! Maybe on the different game genres we have today? Cheers Josh!
I can't believe this series has such low views, this is ridiculous. The RUclips algorithm really needs to get it's $hit together.
Excellent work
what a phenomenal series of videos
love these, commenting to help more people see!
The hero I never knew I had. Thank you for crafting, Legends of Future Past. ♥
This has been so awesome and it's only part 2
Re-release this series as one huge video for my binging needs pls Josh
This is amazingly informative!
amazing asalaways thanks for ally our effort.
For Habitat, the C64 itself was a brilliant choice, it was an extremely popular system... what was not common at the time were modems. I never personally knew anyone that had one back in the day.
One of its larger issues was costing $595 on release, which was an absolute ton of money. It was a great system, just super expensive.
@@JoshStrifeHayes I always wanted one but my family could not afford one.
I was given a Hayes SmartModem 2400 by my dad, but it wouldn't work with our computer. I wound up selling that to my mom's boss for $300 (mid 80s mind you), then turned around and bought an Atari 800 XL.
It wasn't just the computer that was expensive, a decent modem was also very pricey and often necessitated a second phone line to keep peace with the family.
Can I ask you something, why didn't you mention the Kingdom of Drakkar, released in 1989 with graphics? Just wondering.
I must have missed that in my research, ill have a look into it, thank you :)
@@JoshStrifeHayes Everybody makes mistakes, or do not find something, or something, Also I am pretty sure its the first mmorpg with hugging/punishing attacking players and its still running.
I'm coming to the party rather late but gr8 job JSH
This content should be required in all schools in America at this point!
hopefully more people find it soon. this series is great.
Awsome videos!!
Sweet video 👌
Nice video!
As an avid war thunder player, air warrior is such a cool piece of history
Bro wtf why doesnt this have more views
cant wait for part 3
In the times before service providers, access to dial-up games wasn't limited by a specific service. Anyone could log into the first generation MUDs by dialing directly into the bank of phone lines hooked up to the server run by the game developer. It wasn't until Genie, Compuserve, AoL etc. that game access started being bundled with other services. This stifled online game development for years because game developers lost the direct revenue per player they previously had. It wasn't until the rise of the internet that online games became financially viable again, once developers were able to start charging players for game access again, on top of what they were already paying service providers for access to the internet.
Great stuff :)
this is very interesting
Habitat : Interesting that they couldn’t get the gun back from the player ... what kind of database was used that you couldn’t find that gun. I’m a programmer and used to work as a database designer back in the day. I’m curious as to what the database software was they were using in 1986
Some years ago the source for Habitat was released under an open license (you can find it on GitHub if you're into that kind of thing). Best guess I can come up with looking at the files used build the database seems to indicate that it used a custom database manager named Ghu. A lot of the database building was done with pl1 files. Had to look that one up but apparently its an IBM thing. The idea seems to be that commands are defined in advance and you would have to recompile the database/Ghu from these files if you want additional commands. It looks like the idea is you build it once and go, I'm not sure if Ghu would allow for a rebuild like this that keeps data intact. It may have resulted in a wipe of all existing game and character data. At the end of the day if they never considered a command like "who has X item" then they just don't have that ability. They may have had to look at every character to see what that specific character had on them.
Non-structured queries were extremely difficult to utilize and sorting/searching a disjointed database was extremely time consuming considering the limitations of the Technology we had at the time.
Basically. A sheer lack of processing power to conduct database searches.
I think your forgot the Master System for the "console market". As it was also a direct competitor to the NES and Atari. Even though it came out in 1986
What the actual hell. Why is this video so underrated. Only 16k views and 68 comments?
I played Neverwinter Nights on my father and brothers Commodore 64 :D I'm old :D
Holy crap...Hero quest....i just got his with the nostalgia stick so fucking hard
excellent
12:25 You're so British it took me a second to realize you're a veteran of the edition wars and not an outsider pretending authority on the topic.
I still play a MUD to this day and have since 1998
I started playing Anarchy Online on dialup modem. :)
I haven't watched yet, but I swear if he doesn't talk about Dragon Quest im gonna lose it
I've got a number of issues with this narrative; The early internet wasn't "provider" based, you where either an address on the internet or you where not and it was exclusively academic. Later in the internet life, corporations 'joined' the internet and provided dial in access to their systems to provide access to wider business and personal use. Putting this another way, AOL is NOT the internet, AOL was a 'doorway' to the internet. If feels here like you've been draw into company hype of businesses who created MUD like games during this era (who all seem to feel they where 'the original' and 'the Issac newton of MUD's). It was very organic growth and whilst I concur that you've identified some undeniable key players (like MazeWars) they where certainly not alone for long, nor did they work in isolation such that their ideas can be said to be theirs alone. Still, easy to criticise hard to create. Just wish your narrative was more reflective of the cooperative and importantly collaborative nature of the birth and growth of MUD games (instead it feels like a Puff peice for AOL and other companies).
gj mate
I have seen a lot of mistakes in this series. AOL, CompuServe, and Genie were commerical BBSs, not internet providers. Not in the 1980s anyways. Even in the 90s, when the CIX backbone was launched, they still didn't provide much more than email services. A lot of the games mentioned on these services were "door" games, not MUDs. Essex MUD was the first game to coin that term and was written in 1980, years before Islands of Kesmai. I guess if you're just going to look at commercial releases, you're fairly accurate, even with the addition of non-commercial games suchs as Maze and Mazewar. But you really gloss over MUDs which dominated the online roleplaying community of the internet through the 90s. Some of them are still quite active today.
56k Modems were not available in the 1980s, they would not show up until the mid 90s. But by the time they showed up broadband was just around the corner, though in a lot of places dialup would remain the standard for awhile longer. In 1985, the best you got was 9600 BAUD. If you think 56k speed was bad, the best in the 80s was six times slower!
Cool ill stop the series.
@@JoshStrifeHayes I am sorry you took it that way, that was not my intention.
the best.
I played habitat and cc
When u coming back to tera? :^)
The standard colors for health, stamina, and mana all the way back in 1996
give this vid some views
Look all im saying is, the view count is low for the quality of content given, leave a comment for our mmo lord and saviour
I love what you are doing now with the worst mmorpg ever series and the scam busting videos so it's no surprise that I'm enjoying this series too. Unfortunately the amount of time,energy and research required to make videos like this. I'd love to see your take on other gaming histories.
If there's one thing that I just can't understand about people in the UK, it's why they continue to mispronounce Mario when he tells you how to pronounce his name in the game. He says his name in the games. And yet y'all still mispronounce it.
Algorithm
Mud
How can you do a "History of MMORPGs" and completely ignore Gemstone 3? You don't even really acknowledge the MUD genre at all, and they were really the first truly Multi-User online worlds that were actually functional.
Because research on the earlier muds us much harder due to lack of info about them, and I'm one guy trying his best
@@JoshStrifeHayes Ok but surely the MUD claiming to be one of the first MMORPGs, released in 1990 before Never Winter, with thousands of concurrent players on at one time during its peak, and still active with hundreds of concurrent players today should garner at least a footnote. Wouldn't you think?
@@Matt-sl1wg yes, i would, and with the weeks of research and it not popping up on any lists, combined with how few people watched this series, and how pedantic people are being about how my one man unpaid research was incorrect, lead me to abandon it.
@@JoshStrifeHayes it took you "weeks of research?" Everything in your 5-part series can be found in the top-result Wikipedia article when you google "earliest MMORPGs." I accomplished what you did in "weeks of research" with a 2-second Google search.
@@Matt-sl1wg cool, make a video series and edit it all together and ill stop this one.