Island of Kesmai was an early commercial online game in the multi-user dungeon (MUD) genre, innovative in its use of roguelike pseudo-graphics.
[2] After logging into Compuserve and selecting to play Island of Kesmai, the user was allowed to create a character.
[3] These choreographed progressions represented some of the first online questing systems which would become a significant aspect of the wildly popular future MMORPGs such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft.
The island of Kesmai was divided into five regions that totalled 62,000 discrete locations, was populated by 2500 creatures and non-player characters, and could support up to 100 simultaneous players.
It was based on a slightly stripped down version of Island of Kesmai with 2D sprites replacing IoK's roguelike pseudo-graphics, and was available for play at America Online and GameStorm.
[5] In the December 1987 edition of Dragon (Issue 128), Cheryl Peterson gave an in-depth examination of the game, noting it could be used by "anyone with a personal computer and a modem" and that it was unique at that point in time due to the interaction between players.