Justin Olivetti is Massively Overpowered’s resident Game Archaeologist; he never lets a good old game stay buried. [Follow this column’s RSS feed]
the game archaeologist
The Game Archaeologist: EverQuest II East
Publishing a video game globally is a monumental task, more so if it is a live online game such as what you'd find with...
The Game Archaeologist: Where are all of the open-source MMOs?
Recently we had an interesting question come in from reader and Patron Rasmus Praestholm, who asked me to do a little investigating: "What (if...
The Game Archaeologist: Maze War, the first online multiplayer shooter
It is sometimes hard to know how far back to go when chronicling the history of early MMOs and their ancestors. After all, this...
The Game Archaeologist: Phantasy Star Online
The Dreamcast was a brief but shining aberration in the gaming world. Coming along years after Sega had fallen out of its position as...
The Game Archaeologist: How Sceptre of Goth shaped the MMO industry
When it comes to text-based MMOs created in the '80s, '90s, and 2000s, the sheer number of them would blot out the sky. There...
The Game Archaeologist: When Hellgate London got Flagshipped
It seems that it really wasn't too long ago that I was filling in the time between night classes by boning up on video...
The Game Archaeologist: SOE’s The Agency
The graveyard of Sony Online Entertainment and Daybreak Game Company is certainly full enough to be considered a threat if there was ever a...
The Game Archaeologist: Rubies of Eventide
I can't say that Rubies of Eventide has been on my radar, like, ever. And yet practically every time I've asked for suggestions of...
The Game Archaeologist: How DikuMUD shaped modern MMOs
Even though there are hundreds and thousands of MMOs spanning several decades, only a small handful were so incredibly influential that they changed the...
The Game Archaeologist: Earth and Beyond
Personally, I prefer science fiction over fantasy nine times out of ten, even though most of the MMOs that grace my desktop are fantasy...
The Game Archaeologist: Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds
I confess that I have a particular fascination for MMOs that came into existence in the 1990s. It's not only the fact that I...
The Game Archaeologist: Hero’s Journey
Fiction writers know well of Joseph Campbell's identification and outline of the monomyth, or "hero's journey," in many stories. The 12-step process starts with...
The Game Archaeologist: Wing Commander Online and Privateer Online
In late 2012, former Wing Commander developer-slash-movie director Chris Roberts emerged from a decade of obscurity to ask for help to fund his vision...
Don’t miss The Game Archaeologist’s histories of Asheron’s Call
The impending loss of Asheron's Call -- and Asheron's Call 2 again -- hit the MMORPG community pretty hard when the sunsets were announced...
The Game Archaeologist: A talk with the man behind EQOA’s revival project
This past week we reported on an ongoing attempt by a small group of faithful EverQuest Online Adventure fans to bring back the MMO...
The Game Archaeologist: EA’s Majestic
"This is not a game. Or is it?"
Conspiracy theories and paranoia were hot with pop culture in the 1990s, largely thanks to movies like...
The Game Archaeologist: Mark Jacobs on Mythic’s early online games, part 2
We're back with our second part of an interview retrospective of Mythic Entertainment's early online games with CSE's Mark Jacobs. Last week, we talked...
The Game Archaeologist: Mark Jacobs on Mythic’s early online games, part 1
When you bring up the name "Mythic Entertainment," chances are that most gamers are going to immediately think of the studio's two major MMOs,...
The Game Archaeologist: Six Halloween holidays from buried MMOs
There are two things to know about Halloween and MMOs. The first is that just about every online game in the known universe puts...
The Game Archaeologist: The Island of Kesmai
It was the mid-'80s, and I was just a kid in love with his family's IBM PC. Not having a wealth of capital at...
