"My memory says that Island of Kesmai went live on CompuServe on December 15, 1985, after a very long internal test. The price was actually $6 an hour for 300 baud, $12 for 1200 baud. Serious players paid the bucks."
” Kelton Flinn
Stellar Warrior (rewrite of MegaWars ) launches on GEnie.
"On the same day (as the launch of Island of Kesmai ), we rolled out Stellar Warrior on GEnie ($5 an hour for 1200 baud, raised a year or so later to $6). Stellar Warrior was a cut-down and simplified version of MegaWars III (not MegaWars ), ported to FORTRAN."
” Kelton Flinn
GEnie launches at $6 an hour.
"For example: On GEnie during 1991, our average MMOG customer spent $156 per month, the equivalent of 32 hours at $3 per hour to play. However, the hard- core players averaged three times that and accounted for nearly 70% of the total revenue. The top 0.5% had truly astronomical bills, well over $1,000 per month."
” Jessica Mulligan
QuantumLink, predecessor to AOL, launches in November.
Habitat is developed by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar at Lucasfilm, as a product for QuantumLink. The client runs on a C64.
Richard Bartle starts work on MUD2 .
Peter Langston creates PSL Empire , apparently as a single-player game. This is not to be confused with the other game termed Empire that ran on PLATO and which was Star Trek -based.
"Also Rabbitjack's Casino was the first graphic multiplayer online game from QuantumLink for the C-64 (1985 or 1986, maybe?), and was later ported to the PC for AOL ."
” Dr. Cat
"This was developed by Rob Fulop's company ( name forgotten) and Ernest Adams was involved."
” Jessica Mulligan
"The (name forgotten), Rob Fulop's company (for Rabbitjack's Casino ), was Advanced Program Technology. I worked on the sound player code for this project back in 1985. :) 1985 “1986 sounds about right for when the game was launched. Rob Fulop was earlier the author of many Atari 2600 games , including Demon Attack and Night Driver. "
