1990


  • TinyMUD shuts down.

  • TeenyMUD is created as a disk-based alternative to the TinyMUD codebase . It was written by Andrew Molitor and Marcus Ranum.

    "It didn't do much other than crash a lot, but it was the first TinyMUD clone that kept its database on disk instead of memory (or in swap, as was more likely)."

    Jason Downs

  • Diplomacy launches on GEnie, done by AUSI and Eric Raymond (yes, the open source guru).

  • Federation II launches on GEnie.

  • Negotiations for Ultima Online ( UO ) begin with Origin, Kesmai, and GEnie. Nothing comes of them, however.

  • 100 Years War launches on Genie.

  • Gemstone II converted into chat space called ImagiNation .

  • TinyMUCK is written by Stephen White ”over a weekend , he claims. Later that year, he releases MOO, which stands for "MUD, object-oriented."

  • Pavel Curtis does substantial modifications to White's MOO code, creating LambdaMOO . LambdaMOO opens, hosted at Xerox PARC, where it promptly becomes a major influence in the development of social issues in virtual spaces.

  • Islandia opens using TinyMUD code.

  • TinyTIM opens.

  • TinyMUSH is written.

  • FurryMUCK opens. It features avatars that are anthropomorphic animals.

  • Fujitsu launches a Japanese version of Habitat that works on FMTowns at first and other platforms later.

  • DIKU MUDs are released.

  • The MUD client tinyFugue is available now in version 1.4 Beta.

  • Shattered World , the first Australian LPMud, opens.

    "This MUD is the source of a private-distribution LPMud server used by a handful of spin-off MUDs in the US."

    George Reese

  • The pay-for-play text MUD Avalon opens in the UK.

  • AUSI's Dragon's Gate launches on GEnie, written by Mark Jacobs and Darrin Hyrup. According to Jessica Mulligan's History of Online Games , published on Happy Puppy and in Imaginary Realities, it's a revised and expanded version of Aradath . However, Hyrup says, "It was a new creation, inspired by Aradath , but bearing little physical resemblance to it. We actually did do an Aradath remake a few years later, but the project never surfaced."

    Jessica adds, "Darrin's correct. What Mark Jacobs and I agreed to was Aradath for GEnie, but he and Darrin really went to town and gave us a far more interesting game. It cost an extra six months of development, which really irritated me at the time, but turned out to be worth the wait."

    "We had one Dragon's Gate player who spent $2,000 per month every month for over a year (at the time, GEnie's access fees during the period 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. were close to $20 per hour , and this guy would play during that time)."

    Jessica Mulligan

  • BatMUD opens.

  • TW 2002 is licensed to High Velocity Software to port it to MajorBBS. This changed the game, which was already multiplayer and persistent, to also be interactive, since MajorBBS supported far more concurrent users.

  • The apparent first reference to the word "avatar" in print, using the definition commonly accepted today, of a representation of a user in a virtual environment. The appearance is in Benedikt's Cyberspace , in multiple papers. The word apparently originated on Habitat . Many claim Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash as the coinage for the term , including Stephenson himself in some editions.

    "The usage of 'avatar' to mean 'the graphical representation of yourself in a shared digital world' was first used in 1984 “1988 in a product that was then called Lucasfilm's Habitat . Chip Morningstar coined the usage. I was with him at the time. Yes, it was derived from the Hindi usage. This significantly predates any other similar usage that I am aware of. (In 1988, the product changed names to Club Caribe , and the documentation changed the term for this concept, but by then some in the alt.cyberspace/VRML community had picked up the term. Neal Stephenson says that he had thought that the term was original with him, but when I contacted him at the time, he graciously put a corrected afterword in the paperback version of Snow Crash .)

    "It is important to note that the term 'avatar' was used in another game around later in that period (Ultima IV) and the concept of an 'avatar' was in several works of fiction prior to the development of Habitat , including Vernor Vinge's True Names and John Brunner's Shockwave Rider ."

    Randy Farmer



Developing Online Games. An Insiders Guide
Developing Online Games: An Insiders Guide (Nrg-Programming)
ISBN: 1592730000
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 230

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