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LucasArts and Verant announce a Star Wars online project.
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Sony Online Entertainment acquires Verant.
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Squaresoft announces Final Fantasy Online . Other major console series also announce later that year, including Phantasy Star .
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Sony announces that PlayStation 2 will have a broadband solution by 2001.
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Mythic Entertainment announces Dark Age of Camelot , a large-scale graphical MUD using some design elements from their Darkness Falls games . Both Hyrup and Jacobs are involved.
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Richard Garriott leaves Origin.
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Koster, Vogel, and others leave Origin. It is revealed late in the year that Rich Vogel is producer and Raph Koster is creative director on Star Wars Galaxies . Other team members include Chris Mayer (former lead programmer for UO Live ) and Anthony Castoro (former lead designer for UO Live ). All except Castoro had been on a cancelled unannounced project, Privateer Online , at Origin, and departed for Verant in the wake of the cancellation.
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Wombat Games, composed of Delashmit, McKimmey, and Jason Spangler (former lead programmer on UO: Second Age ), among others, announces Dark Zion , a graphical MUD with a fully player-modifiable environment, no built-in currencies, and a number of other experimental features.
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Funcom's Anarchy Online ( AO ) is a hit at both E3 and ECTS.
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In May, EA announces the shutdown of most of the Kesmai games, including Legends of Kesmai and Air Warrior Classic .
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Also in May, Erwin Andreasen holds the 16K MUD competition (www.andreasen.org/16k.shtml). The 18 scratch-written MUD entries are later released to the public.
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In late August, Wombat Games closes , after failing to acquire a publisher.
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On August 31, 3DO ceases operation of M59 . The game continues to run in Germany.
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It is announced that Toby Ragaini has left Turbine and is now working on LithTech's unannounced MMP title.
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Several games try to break MMP graphical online games out of the RPG mold:
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World War II Online is announced. It is envisioned as a tiered military sim where players give each other orders. Members of the team formerly worked on Warbirds .
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Also publicly displayed is StarPeace , a management and city-building MMP game (think SimCity in space).
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The already- open Mankind is a large-scale economics and trading sim.
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A group of ex-volunteers from UO file a lawsuit demanding back-pay for their volunteer activities.
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British Legends , a.k.a. MUD1 , returns when Viktor Toth, administrator of MUD2 , completes a port of the original game to a new server codebase .
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Verant announces Planetside , an MMP first-person shooter. The principal technologist on the team is John Ratcliff, former lead programmer on Simutronics' Hero's Journey , which appears to have gone dormant .
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A small-scale online game, SiSSYFiGHT 2000 , makes all the players into female high-school students and casts the PvP dynamic as being about peer pressure, putdowns, and cliques.
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In October, EIS transfers trademark rights of Trade Wars 2002 to Realm Interactive, a startup in Arizona. They begin work on Trade Wars: Dark Millenium , to be a graphical Massively Multi-Play Online Real-Time Strategy (MMORTS) game.