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By the late 1980s, Sierra On-line and Genie had their own persistent worlds on proprietary networks, but they were not available to the Internet at large. Commercial use of the Internet was limited by the National Science Foundation Network’s (NSFNET) acceptable-use policies. As these restrictions were relaxed, other game companies began to launch games on the Internet.

On AOL, Neverwinter Nights was launched by Don Daglow and Cathryn Mataga. The first official MMORPG for Dungeons & Dragons, it ran through 1997 (Archer 2004:86). It allowed up to 500 people to play together online. Neverwinter Nights also saw the rise of player guilds.

In 1992, Shadow of Yserbius by Joe Ybarra was released on the Sierra Network.

Launched in 1996 by Sierra Online, The Realm Online was a two-dimensional graphics engine that featured Dungeons & Dragons–style character levels, a basic user interface, and turn-based combat. I played the Realm briefly as a rhyming troll and remember it fondly—especially the rat killing. At its peak, the Realm reached 25,000 subscribers, but it suffered later as the threedimensional massive multiplayer online role-playing games arrived. As of 2007, it had approximately 12,000 subscribers.

The first MMORPG available to the Internet was Meridian 59 (Glenday 2008: 170). Released in 1996 by 3DO, Meridian 59 incorporated a large number of players into a persistent world. It was Trip Hawkins, a co-founder of Electronic Arts, who helped coin the term “massive multiplayer.”

Meridian 59 was also noteworthy because it used three-dimensional graphics, the same technique used in games like Doom. With up to 250 people at a time on each server and twelve servers, Meridian 59 was one of the largest graphical games on the Internet.

Meridian 59 established a flat monthly fee instead of the hourly plan that the subscription services used. It was one of the reasons the MMORPG population broadened to a larger market. Codifying the fee as monthly would also become the norm for MMORPGs thereafter.

The path was laid. It was up to the next game to bring brand power to the MMORPG world. In 1997, it happened. Origin Systems released Ultima Online, a descendent of Richard Garriott’s (a.k.a. Lord British) Ultima series.

Unlike Meridian 59, Ultima Online featured a top-down perspective, which was consistent with Ultima VI (Glenday 2008: 178). With over 200,000 players, Ultima Online proved that the MMORPG market was viable.

Ultima Online peaked at 240,000 subscribers shortly after the release of the supplement Third Dawn, a number briefly outstripped in 2003 with the launch of Age of Shadows. Since then, Ultima Online has been in steady decline, down to 75,000 subscribers, two-thirds of whom are from Japan. After my own player-killing and pickpocketing experience, I let the free trial lapse and never looked back.

In 1996, Jake Song released Kingdom of the Winds through Nexxon in Korea. Because a World War II law prevented games from being imported from Japan, Korea was ready for a homegrown game it could call its own. With Korea’s large gaming population and investment in broadband, Kingdom of the Winds attracted over one million subscribers.

The year 1997 was the Golden Age for MMORPGs. Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Asheron’s Call all exhibited unrestrained growth. The games weren’t cannibalizing yet from each other, as there were enough players for all three games. Estimates placed yearly growth at 152 percent (Woodcock 2010).

NC Soft released Song’s next game in 1998; Lineage. A top-down, twodimensional game, Lineage was less about leveling up and more about resource management. Lineage took into account larger team groups, as opposed to the clannish U.S. groups that tended to be much smaller. This made Lineage a social phenomenon that encouraged large groups of players to sign in at once. With over two million players in Korea and another million in Taiwan, Lineage’s player base totaled over four million players worldwide. Since then, Lineage’s subscription