What Were the First MMOs?

It's 2023 and your sitting at your desk playing one of the latest MMOs, and you think to yourself "I wonder what the first MMORPG was?" You whip out your phone and search it up on Google, and here's what you discover...

Launched in 1991, Neverwinter Nights, was a graphical based MMORPG: an acronym for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. A bit of a mouthful, I know.

Because of the newness of the internet and PC gaming, many internet based games in the following few years had to be distributed, and played, through third-party companies such as AOL and ARPAnet. Therefore, at the time of it's release, people had to pay a whopping $6 USD per hour, bandwidth being expensive and all. However, before the game ran it's course by 1997, the developers and third party companies made it free-to-play. Unfortunately, the thrill was short-lived for the dedicated DnD players, as Neverwinter Nights had then been taken offline and shutdown just a year later.

As would any Dungeons & Dragons franchise would be, it was a matter of time before this game hit record numbers. By year six, DnD's Neverwinter Nights reached almost 120,000 total players after it had been packaged as a free add-on to AOL's subscription service.

The graphical virtual world RPG wasn't the first of it's kind, but it was the first ever massively multiplayer online game. Previously released PC games could not compare. Yes, there were online PC games, but none of them had well-over a hundred thousand users and most of them never got a remaster either. Eventually in 2018 the game got it's well-deserved remaster, and was given a second chance to outlive it's legacy.

Neverwinter's launch truly shaped the history of MMORPGs for the years come. As more titles, such as Meridian 59-which has since been coined as the first 3D MMORPG- were also hitting their debuts.

Following closely behind was a text based MMO, the infamous, Legend of Future Past, launched in 1992! With it's incomparable features loaded to the brim with; unique endings, events, dialogue, crafting, and even skill based progression. Legend of Future Past was next level when it came to PC text based MMO games.

With new questions surfacing, you begin researching more. thinking "Alright, so these were the first MMOs. Okay. But where did it start? What sparked it all in the first place?"

Well, as a matter of fact, Multi-User Dungeons(MUDS), are actually considered the 'founding father' to MMOs as a whole. For example, Mazewar, another iconic title, the first of it's kind, launched around 1973.

Maze, later expanded and renamed to Maze War, is a 3D networked first-person shooter maze game originally developed by Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, and Howard Palmer for the Imlac PDS-1 computer. It was largely developed between the summer of 1972 and fall of 1973, at which point it included shooter elements and soon after was playable over ARPANET between multiple universities~ Handwiki

Unfortunately, despite being multiuser, MUDs were not exactly 'massive' in regards to the amount of players in-game. Hence why a new term was created in the gaming community about a couple decades later.

As more people began taking a liking to the online gaming experience, or just gaming in general, the popularity of MMOs sky-rocketed. By the 1990s, virtual world games were taking off, as was surfing the internet, emailing and chatrooms. All that meant a new territory to explore for future game developers and other internet driven companies or individuals.

If you search online, you'll see an abundance of people will declare that online gaming didn't take off until after 1996. I'd argue that it definitely began somewhere during the late 70s. This is considering the history of the earliest MUDs. Despite primarily being text-based. they were still multiuser and online PC games that had been released around the mid to late 70s.

So there you have it... A brief exploration of where MMORPGs sprouted from. By 2023, I'd say we should be proud of ourselves on how much we've done in the past few decades. Now we have iconic MMO titles such as Maplestory, Lost Ark, Final Fantasy, and even more.

Cites; most of my citations stem from sources like Handwiki, Wikipedia, and GameHub. https://handwiki.org/wiki/Software:Maze_War