daily knowledge: one of the earliest graphical sandbox MMOs was Habitat, developed by LucasArts and in 1986 for the Commodore 64, and was available through QuantumLink, a precursor to AOL. the game featured and in-game economy, and the ability to trade with, rob, and even kill other players. the developers quickly realized that crafting the world to their vision wouldn't satisfy players, and learned to develop the world based around what the players themselves were doing in it. being a very player driven game, when muggings and murders became a widespread threat, the players themselves set up their own laws, vigilante groups, and safe zones.
https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Worlds/LucasfilmHabitat.html
You can play this! With other people! In your browser! All of Habitat was completely open-sourced years ago - server, client, internal development tools, internal technical documentation, research, design philosophy, and emails. The PL/1 server code was rewritten in Java by some of the original devs to run over the internet. (The two devs who wrote the paper linked above, in fact - Chip Morningstar built the Elko framework designed specifically for efficiently hosting shared virtual spaces, based on what he'd learned building similar systems in the intervening decades, and Randy Farmer built the NeoHabitat server on top of that.)
I've spent virtually all of my free time over the last month digging through this stuff and building the Habitat Inspector - Javascript-based tools that run in the browser and decode all of the various graphics data that's in that source dump. I was able to recover stuff that never shipped and nobody has seen in decades, including a penis designed to be worn as your avatar's face that nobody on the NeoHabitat slack seems to have any memory of.
I was then able to build on that work to create the NeoHabitat region explorer, which lets you click around and view all the areas of Habitat that we've extracted from the database archives. You can also search areas by name, and even use it to get turn-by-turn directions if you want to get somewhere in-game. It's huge! Not only is there a bunch of interesting stuff downtown, but there's a forest, a desert, an island, a cave system, a beach, an 11-floor apartment complex with hundreds of apartments, sprawling cookie-cutter suburban housing... There's Avatar Hell, where you might get sent if a mod decided you needed a time-out. There's places for playing checkers, chess, backgammon, and Capture the Flag.
(If you start typing in the search box, you may find a bunch of with files labelled 1988_backup - these are from a corrupted snapshot of a database that we haven't had the tools to analyze and sort through until now.)
I'm hoping we can use it to generate full visual maps of Habitat at some point, and you can look at abandoned areas that are now inaccessible. I'm also working to leverage all of this to build out tools to easily tweak and design your own Habitat regions. Create and run your own C64 MMO? Why not!
There's so much here, if you're curious about Habitat. I've never encountered anything in game history with so much primary material available, with original developers still actively involved in its preservation, with so much to say that is relevant to our current online cultural landscape. The rabbit hole is incredibly deep.
Massive appreciation is due to The MADE for acquiring the rights and making all of that possible. This level of access is coming for a bunch more early online virtual communities, too, including The Palace and Onlive Traveller.
