History of massively multiplayer online games

[1] In 1974, Mazewar introduced the first graphic virtual world, providing a first-person perspective view of a maze in which players roamed around shooting at each other.

The initial implementation was over a serial cable; however, when one of the authors began attending MIT in 1974, the game was enhanced so that it could be played across the ARPAnet, forerunner of the modern Internet.

[4] In 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the UK, started working on a multi-user adventure game in the MACRO-10 assembly language for a DEC PDP-10.

[5][6] Trubshaw converted MUD to BCPL (the predecessor of C), before handing over development to Richard Bartle, a fellow student at Essex University, in 1980.

[8] The popularity of MUDs of the Essex University tradition escalated in the USA during the 1980s when affordable personal computers with 300 to 2400 bit/s modems enabled role-players to log into multi-line Bulletin Board Systems and online service providers such as CompuServe.

[9] In 1987, Nihon Falcom's Yoshio Kiya, creator of the Dragon Slayer action role-playing games, expressed his idea for an online RPG "with a system that allows total freedom for the player.

Avalon, while not the first MUD, certainly set the bar for imitators, boasting never-before-seen features such as fully fleshed out economics, farming and labour mechanics, player-driven autonomous governments with ministers, barons and organization elections, a fully realized warfare conquest system featuring legions, battalions, trenches, minefields, barricades and fortifications, as well as thousands of unique player abilities and skills which formed the basis of Avalon's meritocratic PVP system based on skill-worth as opposed to the traditional level-based progression system favoured by many other games of this genre.

This 2.5-D game was running on 512×512 plasma panels of the PLATO system, and groups of up to 15 players could enter the dungeon simultaneously and fight monsters as a team.

The first commercial MMORPG (although what constitutes "massive" requires qualification when discussing mid-1980s mainframes) was Island of Kesmai designed by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor.

[19] GCP was also notable for actively advertising the use of its text-chat rooms as a vehicle for playing remote role-playing game sessions.

A sized-down incarnation but with vastly improved graphics (avatars became equipped with facial expressions, for example) was launched for general release as Club Caribe in January 1988.

The first commercial text-based MMORPG to make this transition to the Internet from a proprietary network provider (CompuServe, in this case) was Legends of Future Past.

This game was similar to Meridian 59 and likewise has maintained a cult following to this day, recently being re-launched again in 2014 by another group of former players under a new company named KoiWare.

[31] 2002 also saw the release of MapleStory, another sprite-based title, which was completely free-to-play - instead of charging a monthly fee, it generated revenue by selling in-game "enhancements".

May 2003 saw the release of Eve Online, produced by CCP Games, which had players taking the role of spaceship pilots and had gameplay similar to the series Star Control.

With Toontown's unique playing style, players took on the roles of classic cartoon characters, which were heavily based on the world in the 1988 Touchstone Pictures film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The weapons of the game that lured off Cogs were known as Gags, unique objects found in cartoons and comedic nature (such as a flower pot or TNT).

After a good 10 years of the game being targeted to all kinds of audiences, Disney decided to close it in order to shift its development towards another virtual world experience known as Club Penguin.

As of the first half of 2005 Lineage II counted over 2.25 million subscribers worldwide, with servers in Japan, China, North America, Taiwan, and Europe, once the popularity of the game had surged in the West.

It introduced several major innovations in gameplay and also featured an extreme number of possible visual character appearances, and its comic-book superhero theme made it stand out.

[citation needed] While EverQuest II was a commercial success as predicted, World of Warcraft immediately overtook all of these games upon release, and indeed became so popular that it dwarfed all previous monthly-fee MMORPGs.

[37] Though definitely an online RPG, and technically having a persistent world (despite most of the game's content being instanced), it requires only a one-time purchasing fee.

Other differences compared to traditional MMORPGs include strictly PvP-only areas, a relatively short playtime requirement to access end-game content, instant world travel, and strategic PvP.

However, the alternative nature of the payment system in Guild Wars meant that the game did not aim to "compete" with WoW rather than exist alongside it, and in that sense it could still be considered a large success.

[citation needed] A few of the most successful of these were Silkroad Online (launched 2004) by the publisher Joymax, the 3D sprite based MMORPG Flyff by Aeonsoft, Rappelz by nFlavor, (with Aeonsoft and nFlavor merging in 2010 to become Gala Lab Corp) Perfect World by Beijing Perfect World, the 2D scrolling MMORPG MapleStory by Wizet and finally the free-to-play converted Shadowbane by Ubisoft.

[citation needed] Most of these games generate revenue by selling in-game "enhancements", and due to their free nature have accumulated huge numbers of registered accounts over the years, with a majority of them from East Asia.

[citation needed] In mid-2013, WoW was one of the most played games in North America, and the most subscribed to MMORPG worldwide, with a total of over 7 million subscriptions.

[40] In 2014, WildStar that is developed by Carbine Studios was released by NCSOFT was a big budget subscription-based game that later moved to a free-to-play model.

[43] "The Big Five" is a loose term used amongst game critics and reviewers to group the five most popular, successful or active MMORPGs (depending on criteria) of any given period.

The games that are commonly considered members of "The Big Five" slowly shift over time, as some lose active players while others gain more.