Veteran MMO developer Brian Green is perhaps best known for his stewardship over Meridian 59, one of the oldest and long-running online RPGs in the genre. While he’s moved on to other projects, Green took some time recently to be interviewed about his time overseeing Meridian 59 and the legacy that it established.
“It set the standard for the flat rate subscription fee that MMOs and other games used for years afterward,” Green said. “I think that Near Death Studios was also an early pioneer in indie game development; we were just a bunch of developers trying to figure things out. We showed what was possible for a small, motivated team to do; this was important, especially since MMOs were seen as giant monstrosities requiring huge teams when we started Near Death Studios.”
Green also weighed in on the recent efforts by the community to tweak the now-open source title: “I respect that the open source developers are doing what they think is best for the game, but there are many reasons why I didn’t ‘modernize’ the game like they have. A lot of the charm of the game was that the information was hidden, and that figuring out some mechanic was an advantage over others.”
It’s a quick and interesting overview of the game from one of the gatekeepers who guided it over the course of a decade, and we recommend you give it a read!
