2001

• Phantasy Star Online releases for Dreamcast and is extremely well-received. But Dreamcast is discontinued shortly thereafter.

• Communities.com folds . Says a former executive, "It was a dot-com company with dot-com problems." Randy Farmer says, "I wasn't done!"

• Fallen Age is announced. Its producer is a former writer for the MMP editorial site "The Rantings of Lum, The Mad." The game is later cancelled due to creative differences between the US-based and Korea-based portions of the team.

• EQ bans the sale of in-game items on auction sites, and eBay and Yahoo agree to remove the items from their listings. In response, a group of EQ players threatens to sue over their rights to sell in-game items on Internet auction sites.

• Nexon continues to produce online games , announcing Elemental Saga .

• Westwood, a division of EA, announces Earth and Beyond with a cover article in major gaming magazines. It is an MMP Real-Time Strategy/Role-playing Game set in space. Janus Anderson is the lead designer.

• Will Wright starts to talk publicly about The Sims Online .

• Lineage goes commercial in the US in May. It acquires only a few thousand users in the US.

• EA publicly tests and launches Majestic , a conspiracy theory online game that contacts players via instant messaging, faxes, and email. A key force behind the game is Neil Young, who was general manager of Origin during the early days of UO 's live service.

• EA purchases pogo.com.

• Gamespy.com purchases MPlayer.

• The never-announced Dungeons & Dragons Online is cancelled.

• Steven Spielberg's film A.I. makes use of a game extremely similar to Majestic as a form of virtual marketing.

• Ultima Worlds Online: Origin , a.k.a. UO2 , is cancelled. There's a "wake" for the game where design documents are burned in a huge pile.

  "At the wake, I crack a joke to Richard saying that maybe his next company should be called 'destination or something.' I can only assume I was not the only one to make the joke!"

  ” Raph Koster

• Richard Garriott, Starr Long, Kirk Black, Jeremy Gaffney, Carly Staehlin, and many others from UO and the cancelled Ultima Worlds Online: Origin form a new company entitled Destination Games. Shortly after, the company is acquired by NCSoft of Korea, makers of Lineage , and Jake Song moves to Austin to begin work with the aforementioned on a new project called Tabula Rasa .

• Dark Age of Camelot starts public testing.

• There is legal trouble surrounding the development of a new version of Middle Earth Online as developer MM3D sues Sierra.

• Mudpie , an MMP world based on MYST , begins to be discussed by Cyan.

• Seducity is live ”it's an online world about sex, and it offers nudity and sexual animations in a 2D environment.

• World War II Online launches and has a very rough time of it.

• AO also has a rocky launch.

• Funcom announces Midgard . It is intended to be an RPG with a heavy focus on community-building.

• EA begins testing Multiplayer Battletech 3025.

• The nonviolent crafting and socialization world A Tale in the Desert begins public testing.

• Jumpgate , an online space and trading sim, is published by 3DO.

• Numerous former writers from commentary web sites join the staffs of various online games; among them: Jumpgate , Dark Age of Camelot (where Lum, The Mad ”the person ”went), and Shadowbane .

• Blizzard announces World of Warcraft , an MMPRPG.

• Codemasters announces Dragon Empires . Steve Nichols is involved at first, but later departs.

• Dark Age of Camelot launches to glowing reviews and quickly outpaces AC to become the third most popular American online world.

• EA stops development of Multiplayer Battletech 3025 and kills Air Warrior III .

• Fighting Legends , which is perhaps best termed as a party-based tactical online world where you manage a group of units, launches.