Meridian 59

He and his brother actually created the first MMO when they were in college.

It's called Meridian 59.

Go check it out.

It's still playable.

But anyway, that's how we got these games stuck, booted up.

Meridian 59 was the first that looked 3D, you know, from a first-person perspective.

It was actually 2.5D.

It didn't have caves or bridges.

And that had been designed by people who had played earlier virtual worlds, MUDs.

and they had looked at EverQuest.

The EverQuest and Meridian 59 and Ultima Online people did know each other, and they weren't the only ones that make it.

There were rumours of about 200 games, graphical games, being developed roughly the same time as EverQuest, but hardly any of them made it to production.

We were really seeing that chat rooms were no longer just these small secret niche AOL geocities kind of hidden in the background, and it was becoming much more mainstream.

Early game MMORPGs like EverQuest or Ultima or Meridian 59 were glorified chat rooms.

Yes, they had game mechanics and they had bosses and they had stuff you can do, but the downtime in those games was absolutely huge.

A lot of the time was spent just chatting with people because that at the time was novel.

Absolutely, totally agree.

I think my vague memory of Meridian 59 was similar.

I probably spent, I don't know, I think however long I played EverQuest, I think I kept my account open for 18 months afterwards until I actually met John Smedley and he told me, no, we never close the accounts anyway.

Who's to know