Appendix E. Online World Timeline

Copyright 2002 by Raph Koster. Used by permission of the author.

AUTHOR NOTE

Back in 1999, after 13 years of working with online games and 2 years of writing a rant column, "Biting the Hand (BTH)," I finally got fed up with the gaming press treating online games like a latecomer to the interactive market. The final straw was an article by a major computer game magazine that contained the line: "It looks like online games might not be just a flash in the pan after all."

That one made me go ballistic because online games have actually been around longer than PC games. (Remember the "big iron" of mainframes and shared computing?) You'd never have known it from the gaming press in 1999, however, which tends not to care about anything that doesn't bring in advertising money. Until Sony Online started advertising EverQuest ( EQ ) regularly in the pages of the magazines in 1999 and Microsoft finally launched Asheron's Call ( AC ) late that same year, online gaming remained opaque to them.

So I used BTH as the platform for a series of three columns entitled "Happy 30 ^th Birthday, Online Games." I figured no one would care; it was a personal imperative and I didn't expect to get much mail about the series. I just wanted to set the record straight and not give the press an excuse not to know anymore.

Boy, was I ever wrong. The mail response flowed in. When the columns first appeared in October and November of 1999, Raph Koster, then a co-worker at Origin Systems, grabbed them off the Internet and distributed them to a mailing list of MUD developers, where they excited some comment. I had no idea people involved in online gaming were starved for some sense of history about what we do. Of the over 100 BTH columns I've written since 1997, those three columns are the most reprinted of the bunch. Not a month goes by that I don't get a request for a reprint.

Not long afterwards, Raph wrote up his own timeline, this time on the broader subject of online worlds . It is far more extensive and comprehensive than my online game timeline, going back to 1937 and the pre-genesis of the technology industry, and Raph updates it regularly. There is some fascinating stuff in there. It is well worth the time to read the whole thing.

Raph has graciously given us permission to reprint some of the timeline here, starting with 1969. For reasons of space, quite a few of the side and contributory comments for some years have been edited out. Besides, you should really read the whole thing, including some of the comments and history from contributors. The whole of it is shot through with references to important or influential events and works published in those years, with comments from some of the people responsible for them ”utterly and completely compelling stuff.

This edited version is just to give a fairly complete timeline of major events from 1969 on. For the full monty, head over to Raph's personal web site at www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/mudtimeline.html.

You'll be glad you did.

” Jessica Mulligan