By far, my favorite column to write here at Massively OP (and the one that always takes the longest) is The Game Archaeologist. I’ve been doing this in one form or another for about eight years now, and I still haven’t run out of material from the MMORPG genre’s crazy and shadowy past to dust off and bring to the light. It’s part a personal passion project and part a desire to create some sort of organized history of all of the nooks and crannies of this genre before it gets lost.
Speaking of that organization, at the end of every year I like to publish a comprehensive guide to The Game Archaeologist to date. Not only will you get every column that we’ve covered but also all of the new pieces from 2020. So tuck in, learn a thing or two, and broaden your gaming horizons!
Proto-MMOs from the 1970s and 1980s
- Air Warrior and Legends of Kesmai
- Dungeons and Dragons
- Lucasfilm’s Habitat
- The Island of Kesmai
- Maze War
- Mirrorworld
- Monster
- A brief history of multi-user dungeons (MUDs)
- The Plato MMOs
- Sceptre of Goth
MMOs from the 1990s
- BBS door games
- Castle Infinity
- Dark Sun Online
- The 4th Coming
- Fates of Twinion and Ruins of Cawdor
- Furcadia
- Kingdom of Drakkar
- Lineage
- Mankind
- 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
- Terra, SubSpace, and Sovereign
- Tibia
- Underlight
- Virtual worlds of the 1990s
MMOs from the 2000s
- Anarchy Online
- Asheron’s Call
- Asheron’s Call 2
- Auto Assault
- The Chronicles of Spellborn
- City of Heroes part one, part two, part three, part four, part five
- Clone Wars Adventures
- Dark Age of Camelot
- Dungeon Runners
- Earth and Beyond
- EverQuest Online Adventures
- EverQuest II East
- EverQuest Mac
- Fallen Age
- Fallen Earth
- Fury
- The rise of Guild Wars
- The legacy of Guild Wars
- Hellgate London
- EA’s Majestic
- McDonald’s McWorld
- MTV’s Virtual Lower East Side
- Myst Online Uru Live
- Neocron
- Phantasy Star Online
- Puzzle Pirates
- Rubies of Eventide
- Saga of Ryzom
- Seed
- Shadowbane
- Shattered Galaxy
- Tabula Rasa
- A Tale in the Desert
- The Sims Online
- Disney’s Toontown Online
- Warhammer Online
- World War II Online
- Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
MMOs that never launched
- SOE’s The Agency
- EverQuest Next and Landmark
- Deadlands Legends
- 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
- Funcom’s Midgard
- Microsoft’s Mythica
- Mythos
- Project Copernicus
- Shenmue Online
- 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
- When World of Warcraft opened Ahn’Qiraj’s gates
- Were sequels ever a good idea for MMOs?
- The history of play-by-email games
- The history of Guild Wars 2’s Super Adventure Box
- Super early versions of MMORPG websites
- Remembering the life and work of Brad ‘Aradune’ McQuaid
- The day Dungeons and Dragons Online dropped the free-to-play bomb
- Is it worth the hassle to update graphics in older MMORPGs?
- Ironman modes and elective permadeath
- 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
Believe it or not, MMOs did exist prior to World of Warcraft! Every two weeks, The Game Archaeologist looks back at classic online games and their history to learn a thing or two about where the industry came from… and where it might be heading.
