While The Game Archaeologist columns take up the most time of any project I do here at Massively OP, I absolutely love doing them for a few reasons. One, personal discovery and learning of MMOs that I was previously ignorant about is very interesting to me. Two, I want to document and preserve as much MMO history that I can before it fades into obscurity. And three, I get to talk about MMOs that are much different than the crop of modern titles that get the most press.
As I did around last Christmas, I’m once again delivering a comprehensive guide to all of the articles in this series sorted by decade and category so that perhaps you, too, may discover a few MMOs you never knew existed and trace the fascinating course of this genre’s history. Enjoy!
Proto-MMOs from the 1970s and 1980s
- Lucasfilm’s Habitat
- The Island of Kesmai
- Maze War
- Monster
- The Plato MMOs
- Sceptre of Goth
- Air Warrior and Legends of Kesmai
MMOs from the 1990s
- BBS door games
- Castle Infinity
- Dark Sun Online
- The 4th Coming
- Furcadia
- Kingdom of Drakkar
- Lineage
- Mythic’s early online games part one and part two
- Meridian 59
- Multiplayer Battletech
- AOL’s Neverwinter Nights
- Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2
- Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds
- The Realm Online
- The Shadow of Yserbius
- Sega’s 10Six
- Tibia
- Underlight
MMOs from the 2000s
- Anarchy Online
- Asheron’s Call
- Asheron’s Call 2
- The Chronicles of Spellborn
- City of Heroes part one, part two, part three, part four, part five
- Dark Age of Camelot
- Earth and Beyond
- EverQuest Online Adventures
- EverQuest II East
- EverQuest Mac
- Fallen Age
- Hellgate London
- EA’s Majestic
- Myst Online Uru Live
- Neocron
- Phantasy Star Online
- Puzzle Pirates
- Rubies of Eventide
- Saga of Ryzom
- Seed
- Shadowbane
- Shattered Galaxy
- A Tale in the Desert
- The Sims Online
- Disney’s Toontown Online
- Warhammer Online
- Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
MMOs that never launched
- SOE’s The Agency
- Interplay’s Fallout Online
- Guild Wars Utopia
- Halo Universe
- Harry Potter Online
- Hero’s Journey
- Highlander Online
- Mythic’s Imperator Online
- Lost Colony
- Middle-earth Online
- Microsoft’s Mythica
- Stargate Worlds
- Perpetual’s Star Trek Online
- True Fantasy Live Online
- Ultima Worlds Online Origin
- Ultima X Odyssey
- Climax’s Warhammer Online
- Wing Commander Online and Privateer Online
- Wish
Miscellania
- A history of EverQuest expansions
- Raph Koster on MUDs and Privateer Online
- Revisiting the first three months of World of Warcraft
- Where are all of the open-source MMOs?
- How DikuMud shaped modern MMOs
- A talk with the man behind EQOA’s revival project
- Six Halloween holidays from buried MMOs
- Six videos from MMOs that never launched
- Eight launch trailers from classic MMOs
- Talking with the Asheron’s Call superfan
- Five eye-opening videos about the MMO genre
- Ten strange pre-release facts about World of Warcraft
- Online gaming service providers from the ’80s and ’90s
- The assassination of Lord British
- Star Wars Galaxies’ NGE
- Seven MMOs operating on borrowed time
- What Star Wars Galaxies life was like before the NGE
- Ten facts of EverQuest life circa 1999
- Ten more facts of EverQuest life circa 1999
