# The Fourth Age: 1995–1997 LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt) --- MUDs might very well have been called SOGs had things turned out differently. Around the same time that Roy Trubshaw began work on what was to become MUD1, Alan Klietz wrote Sceptre of Goth on the CDC Cyber run by MECC (the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium). The game (also known as Empire and The Phoenix) was based on an earlier MECC game called Milieu. It was developed completely independently; its mechanics owed more to Dungeons & Dragons than did MUD1’s, particularly in its use of character classes. Sensing the commercial possibilities, Klietz ported it to run on a PC and ran it as a dial-up game. It met with local success, so incarnations were set up in several major U.S. cities. Klietz’s company (GamBits) then sold the software to another company. Unfortunately, this second company ran into severe legal problems and ran out of money. Sceptre of Goth passed to a creditor, and was never released again. Thus, through bad luck, the first commercial virtual world did not have the impact that it might have had, although it did make enough of a mark to influence the design of some later codebases, in particular Mordor. In the UK, offshoots of the MUD1 family tree had done well, but were stymied by the system of high telephone charges that were then in place in that part of the world. When it costs more to connect to a game than it does to play it, there will inevitably be problems. People were running up phone bills of £2,000 to £3,000 a quarter—this at a time when the average salary was under £9,000 for an entire year. The situation was little better in the rest of Europe; Gods did well in Germany, but couldn’t really be said to have cracked the market. Shades, released in a French translation for the Minitel teletext system, made nowhere near the £70,000 or more a year it had been clearing in the UK. The picture was different in the U.S., where local phone calls were basically free. CompuServe recruited over a million subscribers to its system, charging them at premium rates to access data. Games formed a big part of its profit: Whereas it takes only two minutes to check how your stocks are performing, you might spend two hours playing a game. However, CompuServe did not promote its games, fearing that to do so would discourage parents from signing up to the service lest it corrupt their children. Rivals to CompuServe were not so coy. GEnie was launched in 1985 by the former head of games at CompuServe, Bill Louden. Naturally, it put games to the fore, as did another 1985 start-up called QuantumLink. Although QuantumLink carried a very influential precursor to graphical virtual worlds (Lucasfilm’s Habitat, designed by F. Randall Farmer and Chip Morningstar) and was destined to become the mighty America Online (AOL), at the time it was GEnie that drew all the attention. Genie’s games-first strategy worked well, in that by the early 1990s hard-core gamers accounted for nearly 70% of GEnie’s revenue {Erratum: it was closer to 40%.}. However, GEnie suffered from lack of investment (most of its profits went back to parent company General Electric) and the fact that CompuServe’s concerns about the side effects of promoting games were not entirely unfounded. At this time, people still needed “noble content” such as news or educational products as an excuse to sign up for a service, even if they were only intending to play games when they got there. Much of GEnie’s flowering at this time was due to the efforts of its Games Product Manager, Jessica Mulligan {Erratum: the legacy of Bill Louden’s early deals were a more significant factor}. Jessica had worked for QuantumLink, where she had recommended acquiring the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons license for an online game (which was eventually to become NeverWinter Nights). When QuantumLink began to de-emphasize games, she moved to GEnie. There, she assembled an impressive stable of some of the finest games of the day. Because of her, GEnie was the launch point for many classic online games, including two very important virtual worlds: Gemstone II {Errata: all these references to Gemstone should be GemStone, and GemStone II’s official name was Gemstone ][, with square brackets rather than Roman numerals. Also, it was Jess’s predecessor, Jay Saur, who was primarily responsible for bringing Gemstone ][ to Genie.} in 1988 and Dragon’s Gate in 1990 (a year in which earlier UK favorite Federation II also made it to GEnie). Gemstone had been created by David Whatley and his company, Simutronics {Erratum: Simutronics was not incorporated at the time and was then known as Crystal Blade.}, in 1987; the II was added when it went live on GEnie. Simutronics’ expertise grew from BBS technology, and Gemstone II was a descendant of neither MUD1 nor Sceptre of Goth {Erratum: following Sceptre of Goth’s demise, five of the people who worked on it went on to create content for GemStone ][, so it’s unfair to say it wasn’t influenced by SoG. Furthermore, David had also heard of Island of Kesmai when he wrote GemStone.}. In 1989, Darrin Hyrup, the lead programmer on another Simutronics game (Orb Wars), left to join a company called Adventures Unlimited Software, Inc. (AUSI). AUSI was started in 1984 by entrepreneurial programmer Mark Jacobs to run a text-based virtual world named Aradath he had written independently. Like Sceptre of Goth, Aradath ran on a home computer dial-up system, but unlike all other virtual worlds, for the next decade it charged its users a flat fee to play. Although it was turned down by QuantumLink, its promise was enough to tempt Darrin to join Mark to write Dragon’s Gate. This was a smart move. At the end of the pre-WWW era in 1993, five U.S. services dominated the online market: CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, Delphi, and GEnie. Smaller, games-specific services, such as MPG-Net and the ImagiNation Network, were also players in the games market (or tried to be). These services had a stranglehold on virtual world development: If you couldn’t get your game on one of them, you were in for a hard time. At this point, third-age virtual worlds were still the biggest and most important. The WWW changed it all. People were suddenly excited by the concept of “online.” They flocked in droves to those services that offered Internet connection (which had previously been mainly the preserve of colleges). Some, such as AOL, embraced it. Others, particularly the ever-conservative CompuServe, tried to weather the storm and failed. A price war in 1993 among the major services had made Internet access affordable for all. Come 1995, hordes of inexpert computer users were knocking on the door, looking for interesting things. Some of them—rather a lot of them, in fact—wanted to play games. Thus, the short but extraordinary fourth age of virtual worlds began. AOL went for the throat and signed up Gemstone III, Dragon’s Gate, and Federation II (it already had NeverWinter Nights). In common with other services, its business model was based on time spent connected to its system, a legacy of how computer bureaus used to charge for mainframe timeslices in the days when not every company had its own hardware. Also like everyone else, if its customers were accessing content provided externally, AOL paid a royalty. Unlike most of its competitors, however, it paid a fair royalty [^14]. Unlike all its competitors, it picked up a vast user base [^15]. The consequence of this was that games like Gemstone III and Dragon’s Gate were making their authors over a million dollars a month {Erratum: they were being played for over a million hours a month, but weren’t making their authors a million dollars a month; GemStone ][ grossed around $10m for Simutronics in 1997.}. Even the “failing” NeverWinter Nights (NWN) took around $5,000,000 in 1996 {Erratum: it was more like $3m-$4m.}, despite being limited to 500 simultaneous players. It was an amazing time to be in the industry—if your game was on AOL. If not, it was hugely frustrating. Disaster struck when the business model suddenly changed. Small companies that used to run local BBSs began setting themselves up as Internet Service Providers. Initially, they used the same, pay-per-hour tariffs as the big boys. Then, in response to customer pressure, they broke ranks and switched to flat rate charging. AOL followed suit in December 1996, so as not to lose customers to these upstarts. Unfortunately, AOL’s contracts with external information providers assumed a per-hour charge, which AOL had to honor. They tried to persuade game developers to accept a flat fee or a much reduced per-hour royalty, and some indeed went along with it. Others, however, held their ground. It was their opinion that the reason their games were successful was because they were good games; it had nothing to do with standing directly in the flow of AOL’s newbie hose. A compromise dual-pricing scheme was implemented similar to one introduced by GEnie some years earlier, whereby “premium” content (that is, games) was charged by the hour and everything else was flat rate. This was not a great success, though, and by mid-1997 the gravy train had stopped running. Most of the virtual worlds that had been on the big services set themselves up as independent games on the (now easy-access) Internet. After all, if they were able to keep all the money that players paid, they could afford to shed 80% of their player base and still make a huge profit. Unfortunately, they had not anticipated three major obstacles that would humble them greatly: 1. Most of their players objected to paying for a game they had previously considered to be free. Only the hard core—around 5% to 10% of the total—ever made the move. 2. Attracting newbies is very, very difficult. As existing players gradually drift away, from where do their replacements come? 3. Over a thousand virtual worlds were already accessible via the Internet for free—the LPMUDs, DikuMUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, and MUCKs. Sure, they were “free, and worth every penny,” but hey, free is free! These for-pay virtual worlds (and others) do still exist, and do still make money, but it’s nowhere near the amount they did in the halcyon days of 1995–1997. It would be nice to think that developers have learned from this the dangers of over-estimating the intrinsic value of their products; nice, but unlikely. Off-the-shelf codebases are free to use and free to play, but they are not freeware. They come with strict licensing conditions that preclude their being used commercially. This means that there is still some innovation, as people who want to make money from virtual worlds must perforce write their own from scratch. The days when people would willingly pay more per hour to access a commercial virtual world than they would later pay per month [^16] are long gone, however. Yet all was not entirely lost. At its peak, Gemstone III on AOL was attracting 2,000–2,500 players simultaneously. In theory, if a product could attract players in sufficiently large numbers—say, 10 times this number in total—then it might be possible to levy an inexpensive monthly fee and still make a respectable profit. In 1997, Origin Systems Inc. (OSI) launched Ultima Online. [^14]: CompuServe in particular was resented among developers for its arrogant “tell me why we only deserve 92% of the income that our customers generate” approach. [^15]: This was basically because they gave away the client software, I should add. I don’t mean to imply that it was due to their paying a fair royalty to game designers! [^16]: In 1990, GEnie was charging nearly $20 an hour for daytime access—more than double what the major games were charging for an entire month a decade later.