Who created what first?
Who created the online RPG? While almost every informed person recognizes Dr. Richard Bartle as one of the co-creators of the original text MUD, finding the source of the modern graphical MMORPG as we know it today is a bit harder.
But, this isn't just a problem with online games; the origin of many popular types of games tend to be hard to divine as well. So, who does get the credit for creating "the first" of a type of game?
A great example of this can be found in Jesper Juul's paper, "Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games". It's an interesting read to see how a very notable example of a popular type of casual game has evolved.
Perhaps the most interesting part is a graph showing influences of different games (PDF). It's interesting to see how games have influenced each other, and how each game has borrowed elements from other games. Notice how the games at the top tend to borrow a lot of elements from each other, but as you progress you see more distinct lines of influence (but there is still a considerable amount of "borrowing" of game mechanics).
Another interesting issue is under the heading of "Zuma: The controversy of moderate innovation". It deals with the game Zuma, which inspired a lot of other clones in the casual games field. However, Zuma itself was a clone of an arcade game known as Puzz Loop. A later game, Luxor was seen as a clone of Zuma, but the developers have claimed they were more inspired by other classic games such as Galaga and Centipede, according to the paper.
What's interesting here is that each developer wants to be seen as an innovator because there's a certain cachet to being original. Cloning another game is seen as a sign of a lesser game developer (even though clones can still be very popular and profitable). The implication in the paper is that PopCap, the developers of Zuma, didn't go out of their way to point out that the game was a clone of Puzz Loop; they were happy to let people assume the game was original and innovative.
Of course, the issue if a game is innovative or not is only of mild interest for most people. Even if a game is a clone, if the original is obscure then the clone can be viewed as original. Zuma's inspiration is pretty obscure to people who haven't played a lot of arcade games (or aren't fans of MAME). Developers care more about this because of recognition by other developers; the developer of a truly original game is to be admired for their creativity and insight.
So, let's think once again about online games. Who is responsible for pioneering modern graphical games? Is it Islands of Kesmai, despite being ASCII-based instead of graphical? Is it Meridian 59 since it's the first game that had elements we've come to associate with modern games, such as a monthly subscription fee and a 3D graphical presentation? Is it Ultima Online, the game that capitalized on an existing game franchise and reached a larger audience? Is it EverQuest, the game that was in development "about the same time" as M59 and UO according to the original developers and that was the first game to reach a sustainable level of mainstream coverage? Is it World of Warcraft, the game that broke 1 million North American subscribers and reached even further into mainstream consciousness?
For most players, the answer is generally moot. Some players try to claim one game or the other was "first" in order to get bragging rights about playing an earlier noteworthy game, but most don't care about older games than they one they're currently playing. For developers, it becomes about being original and recognized by our peers for our work. In any case, I think it'd be interesting to see a chart like I linked above dealing with graphical online games.
The reason I think this matters is because of history. Whether or not games like Islands of Kesmai or Meridian 59 had a huge, direct influence on other games is a point for argument, but you can argue that these games have influenced others in some ways. They also provided the bridges between different types of games. In M59's case, it was the bridge between 2D games charging hourly rates on the online services of the time and the later 3D games that used a monthly subscription fee. Knowing your history and knowing how things ended up in the situation we see today is important for aspiring designers. It's the first hints at how we can challenge the default assumptions that are made in most projects. A designer that doesn't know history will usually just end up making the same mistakes.
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I think, considering that historians disagree all the time about order of events and importance, that the definitive answer will depend more on who you are and what you want to believe.
So, to set the record straight... I invented the Internet and online gaming. I expect the royalty check within a week please. ;)
Comment by Grimwell — 5 December, 2007 @ 9:43 PM
The problem with "first" is that it comes with a bunch of assumptions, one of which is that whatever it labels is the progenitor of whatever it was first at. For example, upon hearing that the "first videogame" was apparently played on an oscilloscope in the 1940s, you might reasonably assume that people saw the game, thought, "wow, what a concept", went off and wrote their own games, and that lead to the mighty industry we have today. In fact, that game on an oscilloscope inspired no-one; neither did the OXO noughts & crosses/tic-tac-toe game written on a Cambridge mainframe in the 1950s. Spacewar!, written in 1961, did indeed inspire others, though, and almost all of today's computer games are in some way descendents of it. Was Spacewar! the first computer game? No - but it's the one that should get all the credit.
With graphical virtual worlds, you need look no further than Avatar on the PLATO system, which came out only a year or two after MUD1. It had pictures, rendered in 3D using vector graphics. OK, so they weren't moving pictures, but they were pictures. Avatar was wildly popular on PLATO, but was trapped by the architecture: you couldn't play it on anything other than a PLATO terminal. Some of PLATO's graphical games did get rewritten for more open architectures once their hardware caught up, but by then the techniques involved had been rediscovered from scratch anyway. You might nevertheless be able to build a tenuous case to say that the graphics in WoW were descendents of graphics from PLATO games; you couldn't say that the virtual worldliness of it was, though. Apart from the influence of some industry veterans such as Gordon Walton and Andy Zaffron (who played Avatar in their youth), Avatar had zero influence on the development of later virtual worlds. However, if you say "Avatar was the first graphical virtual world" then for a strict definition of "graphical" it probably was. Except, Avatar was based on an earlier game called Oubliette, which for my money isn't a virtual world (PLATO advocates aiming for the "first MMORPG" accolade might disagree). Except, Oubliette was based on dnd, which in turn was based on pedit5 - and even revisionists would find it hard to suggest they are the progenitors of today's MMORPGs, because they weren't multi-player.
The PLATO branch of graphical virtual worlds died out with PLATO. Also, they weren't in colour and didn't use bitmaps or textures. Habitat did, and can therefore also claim to be the first graphical virtual world. It wasn't a role-playing game, though, and it, too, failed to spawn any descendants that led to the virtual worlds of today (although it did influence later design when the "Lessons of Lucasfilms' Habitat" paper came out).
Islands of Kesmai, on the other hand, did inspire other virtual worlds that did get some usage. Kingdom of Drakkar and (AOL's) Neverwinter Nights, for example, came from an IOK lineage. Although this line of graphical games was longest-lived, it, too, died out, though - brushed aside by the worlds that came out of the MUD family tree. These are the ones we play nowadays.
Except, although MUD was the progenitor of pretty well all textual worlds, there are some with separate heritages. Dark Age of Camelot, for example, comes from Aradath, a textual world written independently of MUD. I've also heard it said that Meridian 59 was inspired by Sceptre of Goth, although it did have ex-MUDders on its team too (eg. Damion Schubert).
Is Meridian 59 the first graphical virtual world? Well no if you mean one that has pictures of any kind, no if you mean one that has a 2.5D world, yes if you mean one that has a real-time 2.5D world with first-person perspective, no if you mean a 3D world. Actually, it probably doesn't count as the first real-time 2.5D world with first-person perspective, either, if you include things like Air Warrior, although that wasn't an RPG. Still, it seems clear M59 was the first at something; the problem is, that "first" isn't all that meaningful if it didn't act as progenitor to other virtual worlds. So did anyone, having seen M59, go off and write other virtual worlds? Well happily, yes; the developers did go on to other projects, and took their M59 expertise with them. Those other projects were probably informed more by the EQ or UO experience than the M59 one, though, and they originally got that from text MUDs.
Oh, and before I forget, Aradath had a subscription model (rather than a per-hour model) back in the mid-1980s, so M59 wasn't first there, either.
Looking at today's virtual worlds (a least in the west), it's pretty clear they all owe a massive debt to EverQuest. EQ was the first fully 3D world. People who had played EQ, as well as people who had worked on it, went on to develop their own virtual worlds. Yes, UO and M59 were significant breakthroughs, but it was EQ that won the battle. Ironically, M59 could well have come out on top if it hadn't been released early to capture the "first" label. If you want to find the graphical world that acted as progenitor of other graphical worlds, you'd have to go with EQ, though. Of course, its "first" wasn't actually all that much of a big step: it basically bolted a 3D engine onto a DikuMUD architecture. All its gameplay and virtual worldliness came from its Diku heritage, and the expectation that someone would do something like that had been around in the MUD community for several years beforehand.
MUD1 was the main progenitor of MMORPGs, but here we also have problems. It wasn't graphical, it wasn't even massive by today's standards; nevertheless, its conception of what a virtual worlds was and much of its design considerations, are still evident in today's virtual worlds. It was also, by coincidence, "first"; however, that was purely chance. Virtual worlds were invented independently at least 5 or 6 other times: we were always going to get them, just as we were always going to get graphical ones, and as we will in the future get graphical ones where not just the world but the image, too, is in (stereoscopic) 3D. If MUD1 hadn't been "first", that wouldn't have made a difference to its impact; it would, however, mean I didn't get invited to conferences. People like a "first", not a "progenitor", even though the reason they like the first is because they assume it was a progenitor. Go figure.
If you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mmorpg, you'll see MUD gets no mention as being a contributing factor at all. It's been excised completely (except for a screenshot; presumably, whoever decided to wield the axe didn't notice). Looking at the references, this seems to have been justified on the basis of quoting articles of dubious provenance, but hey, that's wikipedia. The thing is, it's like cutting silent movies out of the history of movies, and starting only with talkies. It also doesn't bode well for when we get the equivalent of colour movies coming along - M59, UO and EQ will be similarly cast aside as historical irrelevances, even though you can guarantee that what appears in there will be, in a large degree, as a result of work done in these early MMORPGs.
The point I'm trying to make here is that arguing about which MMORPG was "first" is, in the long run, of little consequence. Yes, it's nice to have the "first" label for today's big news, but the next generation is going to relegate your achievements to a footnote anyway. They'll see what they do as being significantly different to what you did, and then it won't matter whether M59 or UO or Kingdom of the Winds or EQ was the first MMORPG - they'll be talking about the first Virtual Reality Of Obscene Magnitude (VROOM) or whatever instead.
Richard
Comment by Richard Bartle — 6 December, 2007 @ 2:54 AM
One thing to keep in mind with this type of discussion is that two inventions can be very similar and yet entirely independent of each other. Just because one game looks much like another does not mean one copied the other or even that the two were inspired by the same predecessors.
Comment by Aaron — 6 December, 2007 @ 2:38 PM
Richard, you should draw up a "progenitor" chart for graphical games. Sounds like you have most of the information handy.
I'll disagree that "first" is of little consequence. As you said, it gets you invited to conferences and more likely to have a hand in the next generation. It's certainly not the laurels you can rest on for the rest of your life, though, but it makes it easier to be able to continue down the path. Your association with the original MUD has kept as part of the industry; I think this is a good thing for anyone that cares about history or a sparkling conversation partner at conferences. ;)
One problem is that it's hard to tell what the real progenitors are, though. I find it hard to believe that the original EQ developers didn't try out M59 or UO and weren't influenced by them at all. A lot of this information has to rely on developer information (and as I said, they have an interest in claiming to be original for the cachet), and intent. Going back to the original paper I linked above, did Luxor borrow heavily from Zuma as one might assume from appearances? It's hard to tell, because there are multiple possibilities, as the paper discusses.
Further, it's hard to separate things out cleanly. For example, while there's no game out there that claims to be a direct descendant of M59, for example, parts of it did influence other games. M59 was the direct influence, not Aradath, for the current crop having subscriptions, so it's the progenitor in that way. The keynote that Mark Jacobs gave in Austin a few years ago pegged M59 as the gateway game between the previous generation of commercial games largely bound to proprietary networks to the next generation of games that were not associated with a specific network. So, you could argue that M59 influenced the business of online games today, even if it wasn't a huge financial success and nobody's borrowed from its gameplay. Yet. ;)
Of course, this also leads to a discussion of "biggest". As you point out, Richard, this is a more fleeting accomplishment. EQ dwarfed UO, which is being dwarfed by WoW. Does this mean the earlier games are of no consequence? No, but the current trend is to worship the largest game and claim the others have failed. This is one reason why some games try to be "first", because they can't compete in the "size competition".
So, the real reason a lot of the "firsts" do matter is because it does influence what people pay attention to. No matter what stupidity happens on Wikipedia (and there's a lot of stupidity that goes on there), most of the influential developers know that text MUDs influenced online games. In a way, the age makes it less of a threat to them. But, some of them are less eager to embrace graphical games; some EQ developer claiming M59 was a progenitor takes away from his own accomplishments, for example. But, in the end, the well-rounded designer should know about the different parts of the history of the type of game he or she is involved with. And, knowing things like why the subscription model was used can make it easier for people to understand its strengths and weaknesses and how it can be replaced, if appropriate for the game.
My further thoughts,
Comment by Psychochild — 6 December, 2007 @ 5:06 PM
I know UO influenced EQ (to add crafting, for example) because Brad told me so. :)
Ironically, UO's decision to go with a flat sub fee was driven in part by M59 NOT being a flat sub fee at the time the decision was made... it had that weird interim tier thing going on...
FWIW, I make no claims to be first at pretty much anything, and will cheerfully tell you where each design element was lifted from. ;)
Comment by Raph — 7 December, 2007 @ 2:33 PM
The story I've heard from a few people was that M59 decided to go flat subscription because AOL changed to a monthly subscription a little while before M59 launched. Most other games followed suit and most matched the price point that M59 set. It made sense to me because it would be hard for a game to not be flat-rate when others were. We see that now where the traditional U.S. market for online RPGs is resistant to alternative business models such as virtual item sales. (Although, I think the resistance is fading.)
Raph wrote:
FWIW, I make no claims to be first at pretty much anything, and will cheerfully tell you where each design element was lifted from. ;)
And you certainly aren't one of the people I was writing about here. You've repeatedly admitted your text MUD background and respect the history of online games as much as (if not more than) I do. There have been other people that have tried to downplay the role of older games as influences of their games. For example, I remember that Brad McQuaid one time publicly claimed that M59, UO, and EQ were all in development simultaneously for the most part, to bolster his claim that EQ was a "first generation" game; this always irked me because it ignored a lot of the previous games that came even before M59 and UO. I didn't know he did accept UO as a progenitor for at least part of the game.
Comment by Psychochild — 7 December, 2007 @ 3:49 PM
Brian>Richard, you should draw up a "progenitor" chart for graphical games. Sounds like you have most of the information handy.
Yes, but since I wind up being co-author of the progenitor, it's not as if anyone is going to believe it...
>I'll disagree that "first" is of little consequence. As you said,
>it gets you invited to conferences and more likely to have a hand
>in the next generation.
The thing is, though, that the reason people want the "first" there is because they assume that it made the main contribution. They don't care that actually it might have been an irrelevance. Or maybe I'm wrong, and they don't care whether it contributed or not, so long as it's "first"? That would be a sorry state of affairs, but I can believe there are a good many people who don't really think about why "first" is (or isn't) important, they just want it.
>One problem is that it's hard to tell what the real progenitors
>are, though. I find it hard to believe that the original EQ
>developers didn't try out M59 or UO and weren't influenced by
>them at all.
There will be influences, yes, but it's not as if M59 inspired the UO or EQ people to write virtual worlds. They were doing it anyway, because they'd already played other virtual worlds and had already started on their own worlds when M59 came out. Likewise, I'm sure some ideas from UO and EQ must have made their way into M59; it's not as if they were played in isolation. You can't call M59 the progenitor of EQ, though, that really has to be the DikuMUD codebase (and a particular line of that, too).
>Further, it's hard to separate things out cleanly. For example, while
>there's no game out there that claims to be a direct descendant of
>M59, for example, parts of it did influence other games.
Yes, it certainly had influence, as I said. Its designers went on to other projects, and took their M59-formed skills with them. However, for a claim that M59 was the progenitor graphical world to have any meaning, its influence would have to be related to its being a graphical virtual world. Were the innovations M59 passed on to other graphical virtual worlds anything at all to do with being graphical virtual worlds? Well, not with UO, obviously, as its 2.5D graphics are different. With EQ, well, it's possible, although they went with 3D rather than 2.5D so have a claim to be a different kind of first.
I don't contest that M59 was not an influence on later MMORPGs (nor, indeed, that some of those were an influence on M59). As to whether it was first, well, that depends on what it is you want to say it was first at, but it seems clear it was first at something non-trivial. Was it a progenitor of anything, though? Well, the paradigm it set with what it was first at wasn't the one that the others followed, so it looks to me more like a tributary than the main river. It's still a first, though.
>M59 was the direct influence, not Aradath, for the current crop
>having subscriptions, so it's the progenitor in that way.
That's right, but now you have the irony that one of the things it WAS
progenitor at, it wasn't first at!
>The keynote that Mark Jacobs gave in Austin a few years
>ago pegged M59 as the gateway game between the previous
>generation of commercial games largely bound to proprietary
>networks to the next generation of games that were not
>associated with a specific network.
Yes, I believe he's right there. It was big enough to stand
on its own too feet, and was an Internet product, not an
AOL or GEnie product. Its mere existence may even have helped
some people get funding for their development (although Mark
Jacobs demoed DAOC to me at Gencon in about 1995, so I don't
know if he would count in that number). It was certainly
first to breach the dam.
>So, you could argue that M59 influenced the business of
>online games today, even if it wasn't a huge financial
>success and nobody's borrowed from its gameplay. Yet. ;)
Yes, you could indeed argue that, and you'd have a strong case.
(Hmm, this is why you get to write books on the business of
computer games, and I don't!).
>Of course, this also leads to a discussion of "biggest".
Yes - a touchy area if ever there was one!
>This is one reason why some games try to be "first", because
>they can't compete in the "size competition".
Well, size is all context. M59 accounted for more than 50% of the bits going into Silicon Valley - how many other virtual worlds can say that?
>in the end, the well-rounded designer should know about the different
>parts of the history of the type of game he or she is involved with.
Yes, they should indeed.
Sadly, 10 years from now it'll probably be something off PLATO they're
celebrating as the world's first MMORPG...
Richard
Comment by Richard Bartle — 9 December, 2007 @ 12:31 PM
You bastards always forget Asheron's Call. *laugh* Development of Asheron's Call started back in 1994, two years prior to any development on EverQuest. And they were only released a couple months apart. Also along with Ultima Online and Meridian 59, you had the Realm Online, the Shadow of Yserbius and Neverwinter Nights on AOL.
Comment by Septa Scarabae — 9 December, 2007 @ 1:45 PM
Yes, there was a lot of talk of taking the MUD codebase to Java to help with putting up a graphical MUD... I remember Kracus (SysOp) and myself of Legends Forgotten (ROM 2.4b6) codebase, having many discussions on doing it ourselves. I was not that familuar with Java and he was not that fluent in it as well.
Richard (whom I had heard of back then in the mid 90's) brings up some intresting points and a great overview of the history of the genre from baby to child. We still have a long way to go till this genre is put as an adult genre (in my eyes) I would pin 'first' on UO / M59 in my eyes as a player. With EQ/DAoC coming in as a close second. Yes I know there were "Realm Online, the Shadow of Yserbius and Neverwinter Nights on AOL" and others most likely that have gotten forgotten with time, but in terms of access / commerical appeal, UO was the stepping stone for myself, then followed by EQ (sorry Brian I didn't play M59) :( This is just in the view of 'graphical' MUD (aka MMORPG).
I think we need a 'branch' in development already in the MMORPG genre ;) I don't see these games moving back to becoming Mulitplayer, but instead they are taking on more and more single player (solo) aspriations each and every new release. Being masked with the name of Casual Friendly, as to hide the fact your still paying $15 or so a month to play a game pretty much by yourself - unless your guilded or your rl or past game friends tag along for the ride. Why not make NPC's have needs / wants (new branch) where they don't have to ask every single newbie player to go kill 10 rats and bring back 10 pices of rate meat - How many pieces of rat meat does this NPC really need in a single game day?
Comment by Boon™ — 10 December, 2007 @ 8:51 AM
Septa Scarabae>You bastards always forget Asheron's Call.
Not always - I mention it in my book.
>Development of Asheron's Call started back in 1994, two years prior to any development on EverQuest.
So this would make it the first 3D graphical virtual world to have made it out of production, counting from when work started on it, with no interruptions to development?
Fair enough, although by that metric DAOC might beat it.
>Also along with Ultima Online and Meridian 59, you had the Realm Online
Again, I mention this in my book.
As a side note, it's interesting to see how what looked like a dead end, the side-scroller virtual world, has found new life with Maple Story. I don't suppose the latter was based on The Realm Online, but you never know.
>the Shadow of Yserbius
Again, in the book.
>and Neverwinter Nights on AOL.
Ha! I did mention that one!
There are others I didn't mention earlier that should appear in any serious archaeology of virtual worlds, for example Cyberstrike, but I was talking about firsts, not writing a history.
Richard
Comment by Richard Bartle — 10 December, 2007 @ 2:53 PM
I've always been surprised at how Neverwinter Nights on AOL and text MUDs never get any credit. As far as people care, they're just MUDs, and despite some having hundreds of people playing at once, are in no way an MMORPG or whatever subgenre.
I think it's close to impossible to argue about the first graphical and 3D online game because people will always have a different definition of 'first'. For example, I take first to be first commercially released, as a product might as well not exist until then. However, Septa Scarabae (Post 8) seems to define 'first' as first in development. Before we can all decide what came first we must define the meaning of 'first' to prevent these arguements.
Comment by Auguste Sentinel — 10 December, 2007 @ 3:18 PM
Richard>Fair enough, although by that metric DAOC might beat it.
I'd consider the first to be whichever developer was able to create a playable game first. In which case your right, it could have been DAoC. Though, I think DAoC development started in 1995. My point is that Turbine had a working game, in beta testing, at the time of EverQuest's launch. The fact that Asheron's Call wasn't rushed to production is what set it apart from EverQuest.
Comment by Septa Scarabae — 10 December, 2007 @ 5:18 PM
Septa Scarabae>I'd consider the first to be whichever developer was able to create a playable game first.
This depends on what you mean by "playable", of course. It also depends on what you mean by "game"; Air Warrior appeared as a wire-frame graphical game world in 1986 or so, and got polygons and texture maps in later versions. Would it count as an MMORPG? It was developed by the same people who did IOK, so it has a case, even if it can also be described as a multi-player flight sim. CyberStrike, which appeared around 1993, had a 2.5D persistent world and something akin to a levelling system, but it was about mech combat. Would that count as an MMORPG? (It might not count as playable, heh heh).
>Though, I think DAoC development started in 1995.
Yes, I think 1995 was the GenCon I saw it demoed. That was the last GenCon I went to, anyway, so it certainly wasn't later.
>My point is that Turbine had a working game, in beta testing, at the
>time of EverQuest's launch.
Point taken, although EQ might counter that the only way you know something is working is when you launch it.
>The fact that Asheron's Call wasn't rushed to production is what set it apart from EverQuest.
The fact that M59 was rushed to production is what sets it apart, too. They knew they needed to do more work on it, but they wanted the "first" label so they launched prematurely. I guess this is why it rankles somewhat if people don't credit it with the label it cost it so much to win.
Richard
Comment by Richard Bartle — 11 December, 2007 @ 1:21 AM
I wasn't one of the original M59 devs, so I have little ego invested in being considered a pioneer. Actually, it's a bit embarrassing if people do credit me with such a title and I have to explain that I wasn't one of the original developers. So, the reason I defend M59's place in history isn't ego, rather is what I consider a distressing lack of knowledge about the history of the medium. M59 can't directly inspire the creation of other virtual worlds if people are ignorant of it. This is the same motivation that makes me smack people around when they ignore other bits of history such as text MUDs.
On the other hand, I do understand the difficulty in trying to pinpoint a "first" or a "progenitor", which is the reason I posted this entry. There are often egos involved in declaring who is first, on both the dev and the player end. This makes such a task difficult because you're unlikely to get agreement. Even between people with little ego invested, it appears! :)
Anyway, I'm going to have to disagree with Richard again. From my knowledge of the history of M59, it wasn't launched prematurely. Do some developers wish they had more time to work on it before having to deal with a live environment? I can imagine that being the case. My better half once told me a great quote, "Art isn't finished so much as abandoned eventually." An Artist (that is, game developer in this case) can always find something to tinker with in their work. I think the thing that really did M59 in was the horrific advertising. UO had superior marketing in every sense, including the fact that Ultima was a long-standing and beloved name in computer gaming. But, that is just another demonstration of 3DO's incompetence; not surprising they're bankrupt now.
My further thoughts,
Comment by Psychochild — 11 December, 2007 @ 2:05 AM
I find it more useful for my own purposes to group games into "generations" rather than worrying which specific game was first. So for example, I count EQ, UO, AC, and M59 as part of the same "generation" of games. They all had some common influences, and while to some extent they all pulled from each other as well none of them was developed primarily based on what was done in the others.
It still gets blurry when trying to decide which "generation" games fall into - for example, is WoW (which arguably built on EQ's model) one or two generations removed, since you had games like AO and DAoC happening between EQ and WoW.
Those are my thoughts on it, anyway :)
Comment by Talaen — 12 December, 2007 @ 9:55 AM
Brian>From my knowledge of the history of M59, it wasn't launched prematurely.
Damion Schubert was one of the technical reviewers of my book (Matt Mihaly was the other), and wrote a page of comments on the reasons for M59's relative failure. These were enormously helpful, and I rewrote the section on M59 accordingly. He gave 7 reasons why M59 underperformed, which I shan't list right now as I don't think they were intended for public consumption. However, here are some not entirely out-of-context quotes from his reasons:
So while I may well be incorrect, and M59 was not launched prematurely, you can perhaps see how I may have gained that impression. That said, Damion did list other factors, and wasn't in any way entirely putting the blame on the rush to be first. He also listed a number of things M59 did much better than the virtual worlds that launched immediately afterwards, for example it was far more stable.
Richard
Comment by Richard Bartle — 13 December, 2007 @ 2:22 AM
The version of the stories I've heard from M59's original developers agree more with the second reason you list above: 3DO was planning on working on other online projects so they wanted to launch M59 to free up resources for other projects. Of course, most experienced developers know that now the "real work" happens after launch, so that moving people to the other team must have been stressful for the people that remained behind.
In my estimation, notably as someone not on the original development team, M59 suffered much more from other things beyond what might be considered an early launch. As I mentioned above, the advertising was inept at best, abysmal at the worst. I suspect that Damion's reasons above are more from the point of view of a developer wishing, "If we had only had a bit more time and resources!" rather than a serious complaint that M59 truly launched in an unready state. As you mention, M59 was incredibly stable at launch, which was a step above a lot of other games that have followed since.
As a side note, art was a real sore point for a lot of the developers, as Damion's quotes above allude to. Many times when the developers complained about the quality of new art being put into the game, it was explained by management that the new images were "placeholders for the final art." This lead Andrew Kirmse to utter the line I quote in my email .sig, in response to being asked about some bugs in the game:
Comment by Psychochild — 13 December, 2007 @ 3:07 AM
I will fully agree with you here. Ultima Online seemed like so much 'more' of a game back in those days than Meridian 59 seemed like. This is from what I seen heard of them before deciding to buy UO. There was advertising everywhere, and while it was a 2D game it still looked so much better than M59, which was not overly bad for the day compared to other 3D games. It was just that I got to see more of UO in ads and also read more about it on the internet.
Comment by Boon™ — 13 December, 2007 @ 5:00 AM
I know this discussion is dated. I'd like to add that being first to manufacture is fine and dandy, but if you're not first to market, that point of differentiation is lost and your "first" is relegated to a footnote in history.
That said, if the product and/or business [model] sucks, whether you're first to manufacture or first to market is irrelevant. I'd attribute the progenitorship of a product to the supporting organization's ability to ignite diffusion.
Comment by Morgan Ramsay — 9 January, 2008 @ 4:10 PM