# The Fifth Age: 1997–Present

LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt)

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There had been graphical virtual worlds before.

The seminal PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) system went live at the University of Illinois way back in 1961, and many games were written to take advantage of both its network connectivity and graphics-capable plasma display units. Some of these laid down principles that would greatly influence the development of later computer games; some came close to being virtual worlds; some actually were virtual worlds.

Orthanc, by Paul Resch, Larry Kemp, and Eric Hagstrom, was an overhead-view graphical game that, although not implementing a shared world, nevertheless allowed communication between individual players. It was written as early as 1973. Jim Schwaiger’s 1977 game Oubliette (inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and Chuck Miller’s earlier multiplayer game, Mines of Moria) had a first-person point of view and used line graphics to render the scene ahead. It had persistent characters, but was not a persistent world. Also, the interaction it allowed between characters was very limited; it was almost there, but not quite.

In late 1979, the first ever fully-functional graphical virtual world was released: Avatar. Written by a group of students to out-do Oubliette, it was to become the most successful PLATO game ever—it accounted for 6% of all the hours spent on the system between September 1978 and May 1985 [^17]. Again using a Fantasy setting, it introduced the concept of spawning to repopulate areas automatically after players killed all the monsters.

Despite the fact that PLATO was very important in the development of computer games in general, its virtual worlds had little external impact. This was almost certainly because the twin strengths of the PLATO system—its fast network and superior graphics—would not generally become available to home users for another 15 years. If your screen can only display text and your modem only runs at 300 baud, online pictures aren’t exactly a major priority. Insofar as the history of graphical virtual worlds is concerned, the second to fourth ages are pretty much dark ages.

Some of the second age virtual worlds almost went graphical. There were plans to produce Atari ST and Commodore Amiga clients for Bloodstone, a virtual world by Robert Muir that ran on Microlink, but they amounted to nothing. The co-ordinate-based Mosaic system (nothing to do with the browser of that name) pioneered by the MirrorWorld team was ideal material for conversion to graphics, but Pip Cordrey was vehemently anti-graphics and blocked the move. Others toyed with the idea, only to be put off by the expenses involved.

A graphical virtual world that did influence others was Island of Kesmai, (IOK) written by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor in 1981. It grew from a six-player game called Dungeons of Kesmai that the pair had completed a year earlier, and was independent of the other work on virtual worlds going on at the time (the pair hadn’t even heard of ADVENT, let alone MUD1!). IOK debuted on CompuServe in December, 1985.

The game did not have graphics as such. What it did have was a display that used individual letters and other ASCII characters to represent a bird’s-eye view of the immediate vicinity. Because of the ersatz graphics, the degree of interaction allowed between players wasn’t as high as in a purely text-oriented game (a state of affairs that continues to this day), but it was good enough to qualify IOK as a virtual world.

The graphics capabilities of home computers gradually improved, and it was therefore only a matter of time before someone wrote a game that coupled an IOK-style tessellated world with a hardware-specific means of displaying it. Indeed, by the early 1990s the Kesmai Corporation had already done it for their multiplayer flight simulator game, Air Warrior, which had clients for the PC, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and Apple Macintosh. The basic principle was for the virtual world software itself (the server) to send data to software running on the home user’s computer (the client), which it could use as the basis to construct an image [^18].

Although Kesmai eventually produced a (disappointing) graphical version of IOK called Legends of Kesmai, they were well beaten to the punch by NeverWinter Nights (1991 on AOL), Kingdom of Drakkar (1992 on MPG-net), and Shadows of Yserbius (1992 on ImagiNation Network). These games basically took the same approach: a bird’s-eye view of a 2D world built from squares, with flat sprites to represent players, objects, walls, and things to be fought. They maintained separate text areas for information, descriptions, and communications.

This is a very effective way to do it. The bandwidth and server load requirements are comparatively light, the design tools are cheap to develop, and you can create large, interesting worlds with a fair degree of interaction among the players. Such worlds can lack flexibility—you won’t see many circular buildings in them—but they pay for it by their ease of creation. The scale is usually an issue, in that there’s a conflict between the amounts of space in the virtual world that characters appear to occupy (because of the fidelity of the graphics) and the amount they seemingly ought to occupy (because they represent people), but it’s nothing too serious.

Note that although all tessellated worlds are essentially 2D, they don’t have to be shown in the same, boring, map-like way that a newspaper typically displays a chessboard. Instead, they can be shown isometrically. By fixing the camera (that is, the player’s viewpoint) at an angle other than directly overhead (say, at 60°), the impression of a 3D world can be given.

1 This is sometimes referred to as a 2 ⁄2D world. It was inevitable that as soon as computer video cards were up to the job, new games would appear in the more realistic-looking 2½D rather than plain old 2D [^19].

At this point, the story changes continents.

In Europe and North America, individuals wanting to use the Internet for fun would generally do so from home. This was not necessarily the case in other countries. In particular, the trend in South Korea was to use Internet cafés, where people could share their online experiences in a friendly, social atmosphere (with broadband connections). Large chains of such establishments soon spread across the country. This presented Korean game developers with a business model not available in the West: licensing game access to the Internet cafés, rather than to the players.

Two companies took advantage of this: Nexon launched The Kingdom of the Winds in 1996, with NCSoft’s Lineage® following in 1997. Lineage was designed by Jake Song, who had previously worked on The Kingdom of the Winds (TKOW) and was later voted South Korea’s best game designer. Both TKOW and Lineage used a 2D perspective, but the latter had vastly superior graphics and almost immediately became the virtual world with the most real-world players anywhere. It opened in Taiwan and was a huge hit there, too. Attempts to repeat this success in the U.S. market failed, however; for some reason, the game did not appeal to American tastes. It was therefore almost completely ignored in the West, until something happened that forced developers to pay attention: Revenue figures for Lineage in the first quarter of 2000 were posted at 6,500 million Won, that is over five million dollars. Virtual worlds were becoming a global phenomenon, and Korea was a leading marketplace.

In terms of advances in game design, though, the plot returns to the U.S. in 1997.

Although The Kingdom of The Winds predated it, the product that truly proved virtual worlds had come of age was OSI’s Ultima Online (UO).

It is hard to understate the impact that this work had on the consciousness of developers and publishers. Prior to Ultima Online, virtual worlds had been regarded as all potential: It was clear from the devotion they inspired that they could probably make pots of money, but as no one had managed to do so outside of peculiar market conditions few companies were willing to invest in producing one. This was soon to change.

When Ultima Online garnered 50,000 subscribers within 3 months, people took notice. When it broke 100,000 within a year, jaws dropped. Never mind the substantial income from retail sales: 100,000 people were each paying $9.95 per month having already bought the game—and none of that money was going to retailers!

OSI was directly taking 12 million dollars a year from that one virtual world!

Ultima Online set the standard: 100,000 subscribers by the end of year one is the benchmark—anything less than that, and a graphical game-oriented virtual world can’t honestly call itself a success.

So how did Ultima Online manage to pick up so many subscribers so quickly? Part of it was being the right product at the right time, of course, but the Ultima name—one of the best loved and respected by role-playing gamers—was probably the main reason people were so keen to try it. The virtual world it promised really caught the game-playing public’s imagination.

Trying a game doesn’t mean that people will continue to play it, though. With ordinary boxed games, the publishers don’t particularly care whether anyone actually plays their products, so long as they buy them. Ultima Online had to be good enough that people would want to play—and would shell out nearly 10 bucks a month to do so.

That people did play is a tribute to the game’s design team, led by Raph Koster. Raph had a background in virtual world design, having worked on 1992’s Worlds of Carnage (the first DikuMUD to have an embedded scripting language) before moving on to found LegendMUD in 1994 with Kristen Koster (his wife), Rick Delashmit, and others. In 1995, Delashmit signed up as lead programmer for Ultima Online and recommended the Kosters to OSI.

LegendMUD was itself an innovative game, boasting a number of features to promote role-playing that had never been implemented before. For example, unlike other DikuMUD derivatives, LegendMUD was classless (players don’t elect to be fighters, magic-users, healers, thieves, or whatever); this concept was to shape the design of Ultima Online powerfully. The wide-ranging playing experience of the designers meant that they could draw on ideas from many other codebases, too.

Perhaps most importantly, however, Ultima Online was conceived from the start to be a richer and deeper virtual world than a typical MUD, with an emphasis on community building, player-driven action, and the ability to accommodate different playing styles. These were tremendously important insights; they had a powerful impact on the graphical virtual worlds that appeared in the two to three years following UO’s release, and are now regarded as absolute prerequisites in the designs for new virtual worlds. Although later games could take aspects of UO on board, their designers were not always aware of the reasoning that had led the UO team to include or exclude some concept or other [^20]. This led to balance issues (among others), and is one of the reasons why, in design terms, UO remained pre-eminent until the arrival of Star Wars Galaxies in 2002. It is no coincidence that the lead designer of Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) was also Raph Koster.

UO nevertheless did have its problems, the two principal ones being:

- It was at times too innovative. Some of the ideas it field-tested did not work as planned and had to be altered. Examples: The means by which players were punished for attacking each other’s characters wasn’t effective; the detailed ecological model employed broke down when players rapidly killed everything that moved; the economy collapsed after a bug led to hyper-inflation.

- It was a victim of its own success. Although OSI was expecting tens of thousands of players, they weren’t expecting hundreds of thousands of them. The sheer number of people involved meant that the pressure was on to correct any problems as soon after discovery as possible. This caused several management decisions to be made that, in retrospect, set precedents, which perhaps ought not to have been set. Customer service doesn’t scale well or rapidly.

All in all, UO was a game ahead of its time, but not so far ahead as to be regarded as a failure.

The same could not be said of Archetype Interactive’s Meridian 59.

Launched a year ahead of UO (after the company had been bought by 3DO), it was the first graphical virtual world since the days of Avatar to employ a first-person point of view (that is, where the screen shows what the player’s virtual character sees, rather than what someone sitting on a low cloud would see—if they could remove rooftops).

Because players could move around and view their surroundings from almost any angle, Meridian 59 gave a far greater sense of being a 3D virtual world than did UO or Lineage. Indeed, this is the kind of viewpoint people typically mean when they’re talking about a 3D world or viewpoint in respect of any computer game [^21].

Meridian 59 (M59) was designed by Mike Sellers and Damion Schubert, the latter having been recommended by Raph Koster (who had accepted a job at OSI by then so was unavailable). It was intended to become the first “3D MUD,” and in this it succeeded.

However, it was not the huge success that it might have been (and that the designers of other in-development graphical virtual worlds feared it would become) mainly due to a lack of experience. The designers, the developers, and especially the publishers (3DO) made several mistakes that are classic to virtual worlds and therefore should have been easily avoided. To be fair, the designers did know their stuff, but they were working to a small budget and a short deadline.

Among the mistakes made were

- Allowing access permissions for certain features (for example, in-game shops) to be determined by the (soon-to-be-hacked) client software.

- Not fully testing the software. It was very stable, but one particular showstopping bug rendered the in-game currency completely worthless overnight.

- Community-alienating changes of business plan. Originally costing each player $10 per month, they switched to $2.49 per day (“but never more than $30 a month”) and lost a third of their players in the process [^22].

- Self-defeating customer service work (due to a “no comment” policy).

Of course, these errors were also made by many of the virtual worlds that followed Meridian 59 (indeed, they’re still being made today). These other virtual worlds didn’t all fail, however, so why did M59?

M59’s problem was that it didn’t garner enough players early on to weather its storms. There are several reasons for this, but they all come down to the fact that it was launched too soon. M59 is remembered for being the first 3D virtual world; if it hadn’t gone to market prematurely, then it wouldn’t have been able to claim this title, but instead of being the pioneer it could well have become the paradigm.

What M59 did wrong that actually hurt it was

- It had poor marketing. Few people outside the online gaming community knew it existed. The computer games press didn’t care about it.

- Its graphics didn’t compare well to those of other 3D games around at the time (particularly Quake’s). This is probably why the computer press didn’t care about it.

- It had insufficient content. The world felt very small, and it lacked many features traditional to the Fantasy genre that potential players were surprised to find missing.

- There weren’t enough people with Internet connections when it launched. Ironically, if they hadn’t launched early to get the drop on Ultima Online then there almost certainly would have been.

In other words, it wasn’t the design that killed it but the business decisions made. Design is hugely important, but it can’t do everything.

Even so, Meridian 59 did a lot of things right. In particular, it released expansion sets to keep players interested and (until it changed its pricing scheme) it made the total number of players important, rather than the total number of hard-core players. It also ran multiple incarnations of its virtual world on different servers, some of which it licensed to other countries (which although it had been done commercially back in the days of Shades had by then gone out of fashion).

Although the M59 team was inexperienced to begin with, they soon learned. M59 graduates are now among the most sought-after personnel in the industry. Mike Sellers (who left before M59 shipped) went on to become lead designer of The Sims Online; Damion Schubert accepted the same position for Ultima Online 2 before setting up as an independent creative consultant and eventually winding up working on the much-anticipated Shadowbane [^23]; producer Rich Vogel took over from Starr Long at Ultima Online shortly before that game’s launch, later beating all opposition to land the plum position of producer for Star Wars Galaxies.

The main reason for M59’s only modest success was that it came to market a touch too soon. In 1996, few people had a graphics card in their PCs and their modems were 14400 baud. M59 therefore had to be written for this level of client hardware, or no one would have played it.

A year later, when UO launched, prospective players had upgraded and the OSI team was able to deliver a far more feature-rich product. UO had a somewhat bigger budget, too.

UO wounded M59, but not mortally. The fatal [^24] blow was only to come in the spring of 1999, with the launch of 989 Studios, EverQuest. {Erratum: EQ was not responsible for M59’s decline, it was merely the last nail in the coffin.}

If ever there was a case of being in the right place at the right time, EverQuest (EQ) is it. It was basically a DikuMUD with a graphical client bolted on—the similarities are so close that under legal threat its server programmers were forced to sign sworn statements to the effect that they didn’t use any actual DikuMUD code in EverQuest [^25].

Graphically, EverQuest took the same first-person 3D view as Meridian 59, but allowed the camera to roam instead of fixing it to the character’s eyes. If players wanted a bird’s-eye view or to see their own character from behind, they could do so. The graphics also occupied a good deal more of the screen, which greatly improved players’ feelings of being immersed in the environment.

In terms of gameplay, EverQuest wasn’t especially deep (although neither was it shallow). Had it been launched even a few months later, it would probably have had only moderate success; it was never exactly innovative, and there were other games in development which would have made it look inferior by comparison. However, it was launched at exactly the right moment. Its designers (Steve Clover, Brad McQuaid, and Bill Trost) had done a sound job.

It looked good, there were plenty of computer gamers actively seeking an online game to play, its DikuMUD heritage guaranteed a compelling experience, and Ultima Online was getting bad publicity because of its unpopular way of handling combat between players’ characters and its generally poor newbie experience.

EverQuest had no great publicity campaign, which is probably just as well: News of this beautiful virtual world spread by word of mouth so rapidly that it was only through good fortune that enough Internet bandwidth became available in San Diego (where the servers were located) to cope with the demand [^26]. EQ overtook UO in terms of subscriber numbers within six months and its usage figures were ordained to grow relentlessly, month after month, for years.

EQ’s developers were just as inexperienced as M59’s, and they also made a number of novice errors. Indeed, their customer relations department was so systematically bad that at times it seemed people were playing in spite of their efforts, not because of them. So why did EQ put the final nail in M59’s coffin, rather than suffering a similar experience itself?

Essentially, the answer is that EQ reached a critical mass of players.

Whatever the reasons people had for starting to play the game, they continued to play because of the other people they had met there. EQ was constructed to encourage players to form small groups and play regularly with one another; if the team was short a member, players would persuade their real-world friends to make up the numbers. This bonding was something M59 lacked, and in due course led to EQ’s all-conquering progress.

EQ’s impact on subsequent graphical virtual world design was profound. It became the de facto paradigm for the genre. This had three main consequences:

- Players who “grew up” on EverQuest viewed its user interface, gameplay, and feature set as standard. New games that did not conform to this were viewed as flawed. This is not a new phenomenon. Players of Shades who tried out other games were often disparaging about what were actually superior (but non- Shades) ways of doing things. Similarly, after AOL purchased the ImagiNation network and dropped NeverWinter Nights, Meridian 59 received a flood of refugees who then proceeded to demand every NWN feature that M59 didn’t already have, irrespective of how appropriate it was to the game.

- The sheer amount of money EverQuest generated caused developers considering writing a virtual world to jump on the bandwagon. Within two years of EverQuest’s launch, over a hundred graphical virtual worlds had been announced as being in development, of which the vast majority were EverQuest near-clones.

- EverQuest sucked in newbies who might otherwise have tried some other game, thereby depressing the market for the games that immediately followed it and forcing them to survive on their ability to attract the non-mainstream gamers.

One of the products to suffer was Turbine’s Asheron’s Call. Designed by Toby Ragaini (lead), Chris Foster, Eri Izawa, and Chris Pierson, it launched nine months after EverQuest (at least a year late, due to the inexperience of the production team [^27]).

It broke new ground with a number of inventive ideas [^28], primary among which was the story arc: Structures, objects, and new functionality would be added to (and in some cases, removed from) the virtual world on a regular basis (monthly) to unfold an overall narrative.

Asheron’s Call (AC) also had some technical innovations that impacted virtual world design. One of the more irritating things about EQ was that it partitioned its world into zones. Rather than having a single, expensive computer to act as a server for the whole virtual world, each zone ran on its own computer as part of a cluster that comprised the server. Players moving from one zone to another would experience some delay while any initialization information concerning the new zone was transmitted to their PC. Once in the zone they were sharing its governing computer with only a fraction of the other players in the game, and therefore the response was good; however, moving between zones was a pain.

AC didn’t have zones, which meant it presented itself as a single, seamless world—a far more player-friendly proposition. It still used a cluster of computers to manage the world, but didn’t assign individual machines to specific zones. Instead, it used a technique called dynamic load balancing to determine which cluster member was in charge of which location set. If players congregated their characters in one area of the virtual world, the server responsible for it would offload part of that area (and the players associated with it) to another, less heavily loaded machine. Similar distributed server technology had been used by Nexon in 1999 (the year AC launched) to cram 12,263 users in a single incarnation of The Kingdom of the Winds, albeit with a 1 tessellated 2 ⁄2D world rather than a fully 3D one.

AC managed to build up a player base of around 80,000 by the end of its first year—20,000 short of the total needed for it to be considered an unqualified success. Had it launched before EQ, as originally planned, the story might have been rather different.

By the end of 2000, the state of play among the “big three” virtual worlds was as follows:

- Ultima Online (launched 1997) had 230,000+ subscribers from boxed unit sales of 380,000+ and expansion pack sales of 100,000+.

- EverQuest (launched early 1999) had 300,000+ subscribers from boxed unit sales of 600,000+ and expansion pack [^29] sales of 300,000+.

- Asheron’s Call (launched late 1999) had 90,000+ subscribers from 200,000+ [^30] boxed unit sales. It hadn’t released any expansion packs.

What is most interesting here is not so much that EQ had a staggering 300,000 subscribers, but that it had lost a staggering 300,000 players who originally purchased the boxed unit. UO’s retention rate, at 60% overall, was significantly better. Although continuing good word-of-mouth and large-scale advertising campaigns brought EQ yet more swathes of players in the coming years, its churn only got worse.

The next significant release of a graphical virtual world was Funcom’s Anarchy Online in June 2001. The first such world to be written by Europeans (a Norwegian/Irish team), it was a departure in that it took a Science Fiction theme rather than the traditional [^31] Fantasy. To provide some context, lead designer Gaute Godager buttressed it with a story arc. Unfortunately, the game suffered a disastrous launch, from which it took some time to recover. Consequently, it also failed to accumulate 100,000 players within 12 months. This was a shame, because its overall design was quite attractive.

By contrast, the launch of Mythic Entertainment’s Dark Age of Camelot® in October 2001 was a model of how to do things right. This is perhaps not surprising, given that Mythic was a direct descendant of AUSI, the company responsible for Dragon’s Gate. The design team, under the guidance of Mark Jacobs, created a world that was both familiar (from the Camelot legends) and superficially compelling (because of its realm versus realm (RvR) approach to combat between players’ characters [^32]).

These factors made the game attractive to a large constituency, and well-targeted marketing let potential players know. Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) racked up 200,000 subscribers by May 2002, easily supplanting Asheron’s Call as the third most popular virtual world in the West.

All these games are PC-based. It was not surprising, therefore, that console companies with their enormous installed user bases and tightly-regulated platforms would want to get in on the act. The SEGA Dreamcast was bold enough to take the first step (with Phantasy Star Online [^33]), but the company did not really understand the concept of Internet games and the venture was not a success.

Sony, as owners of EverQuest, did understand it, however, and in May 2002 launched Square’s Final Fantasy XI on the PlayStation 2. By the end of August, they had 120,000 users in Japan, each paying a monthly fee of ¥1,280 ($10.71 at the time). Although this qualified the game as a success, Sony’s overheads were such that 200,000 users were needed to break even. Their target was 400,000 users, but they could only envision reaching that number by releasing a PC client. This is not unreasonable: Consoles are secure development platforms, but not so secure that a developer would be foolish enough to trust a client not to be hacked. Therefore, there is no inherent technical reason why a virtual world targeted at console owners should not have a PC client too. It is likely that in the future, major virtual worlds will be expected to support a range of platforms; how this affects the design of the world itself depends on the nature of the lowest common denominator of those platforms [^34].

And so we come to today [^35].

The Sims Online (TSO), launched December 2002, has yet to break the 100,000 subscribers mark. Given the popularity of the Sims franchise, this has to be considered disappointing. My guess is that if the publishers hold their nerve, things will improve in the long term. At the moment, too many people are treating it as a game, then complaining that its only gameplay involves making pizzas for one another. The Sims is more a toy than a game, and the same is true of The Sims Online. Gamers are typically early adopters, but The Sims Online’s core players aren’t. If they come in sufficient numbers to replace those gamers who leave, all will be well. Nevertheless, TSO’s slow start could have some knock-on effects for virtual worlds in general, depending on how the marketers who used it for product placement assess its less than spectacular beginnings.

The Sims Online had over 100,000 beta-testers and has sold over 100,000 boxes. Large numbers of beta-testers are currently quite fashionable: Star Wars Galaxies hit 150,000 in August 2002, and even soon-to-launch EVE: The Second Genesis [^36]—hardly a guaranteed hit—is claiming 140,000. Whether this trend will continue in the light of the experience of The Sims Online, remains to be seen. Skeptics might be forgiven for wondering how many of these beta-testers are beta-testing several virtual worlds simultaneously, and therefore whether the perceived marketing benefit of a large beta-test is as strong as is normally assumed.

There is further evidence from the experience of Asheron’s Call 2 [^37] (AC2). This virtual world also launched December 2002; it has beautiful graphics, but again seems to be struggling to attract newbies. Original AC players have been reluctant to switch over to it, and its attempts to pander to popular player opinion by diluting anything inconvenient (character “death,” the economy) may have backfired—it reduces the challenge somewhat. As with The Sims Online, AC2 had over 100,000 beta-testers but has yet to pick up that many subscribers [^38].

Wolfpack’s Shadowbane launches the day I write this. Long in development, it has been hyped relentlessly to some effect: There’s little doubt exactly what kind of virtual world it is (violent) and no danger that people who don’t consider this to be fun will even play it, let alone complain that it doesn’t address their needs. Other virtual worlds have been prematurely hyped more (Glitchless’s Dawn [^39] and Artifact Entertainment’s Horizons [^40] spring to mind), but Shadowbane seems to have got its act together first. It therefore starts with a relatively small but highly dedicated core player base upon which to build. Time will tell whether it succeeds or not.

It’s clear that the fifth age of virtual worlds will last for some years to come, but eventually its time will pass. Perhaps free 3D graphical engines will herald a new era of homegrown virtual worlds, or maybe advances in virtual reality interfaces or mobile telephony will have an impact. It could be any one of a number of things currently known and unknown that triggers the eventual paradigm shift.

What wonders will the sixth age of virtual worlds bring? That, perhaps, may be for you to determine.


[^17]: Source: http://www.thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm.
[^18]: Many players seem naïvely to imagine that an entire image is transmitted each time one needs to be displayed, as with TV pictures. This is not, however, yet the case.
[^19]: Strictly speaking, any implementation of a 3D space that fakes height is 2½D. This means that games like Doom, which have a first-person perspective but can’t implement bridges, can also be described as 2½D.
[^20]: This is a theme I will return to again and again in this book. You already noticed, huh?
[^21]: Actually, it used a DOOM-like engine and was, technically speaking, therefore only 2½D.
[^22]: Their player base had stopped growing by then, but this hastily shrank it.
[^23]: http://www.shadowbane.com
[^24]: As with many of the characters in them, “fatal” is only a relative term for virtual worlds. Meridian 59 was resurrected a few years later, and can now be found at http://www.neardeathstudios.com.
[^25]: There are copies at http://www.dikumud.com/diku/swornstatement.asp.
[^26]: It is a not entirely unfounded rumor that around this time its competitor Ultima Online had more incoming Internet bandwidth than New York City. Before then, Meridian 59 had regularly caused the Internet to slow down—in Silicon Valley—on patch days.
[^27]: Ultima Online and EverQuest weren’t exactly launched on time either, though….
[^28]: Inventive for graphical worlds, that is; textual worlds, as usual, got there first.
[^29]: The first of these included the EQ client itself, but subsequent ones didn’t.
[^30]: Estimated.
[^31]: Traditional for graphical virtual worlds—text-based ones had long since expanded into other genres.
[^32]: This splits the player base into three factions that can fight each other in certain areas of no man’s land. Anarchy Online did something similar but was less successful. The concept had already been around in text-based virtual worlds for many years, of course, but not on Dark Age of Camelot’s scale.
[^33]: http://www.sonicteam.com/pso/
[^34]: EverQuest’s PlayStation 2 debut, EverQuest Online Adventure, barely qualifies as being a virtual world.
[^35]: March 2003 at the time of writing.
[^36]: http://www.eve-online.com/
[^37]: http://www.microsoft.com/games/zone/asheronscall/
[^38]: It’s hard to be absolutely certain, because Turbine doesn’t release official subscriber numbers. Industry rumor is that it’s short, however.
[^39]: http://www.glitchless.com/dawn.html
[^40]: http://www.istaria.com/