Meridian 59

[Morreion]

Meridian 59 official site

Meridian 59 Wikipedia article

Meridian 59 is an online computer role-playing game first published by the now defunct 3DO Company and now run by Near Death Studios. First launched online in an early form on December 15, 1995 and released commercially on September 27, 1996 with a flat-rate monthly subscription, Meridian 59 is often credited as the first 3D graphical "massively multiplayer online game" or MMO.

Meridian 59 (Eurogamer)

Like Ultima Online, Meridian 59 is skill- rather than class-based, so you're given relative freedom to create, say, a mace-wielding fog-spawner, or a monk-like brawler with an aptitude for transforming elderberries into hearty dinners. The level of choice on offer was a little daunting, so I rolled my default: your basic meat-and-potatoes warrior. Then it was an unceremonious dump into a Raza tavern, where I was immediately compelled to go and visit the local blacksmith. Leather armour purchased and equipped, I breezed through the empty town and ventured into the tomb that was, so I've heard, infested with undead.

Meridian 59, it must be said, looks a lot like Doom - or Heretic, if you prefer, which used the Doom engine in a fantasy setting. Certain characters, like the blacksmith, are static sprites; others, like myself, other players, and monsters, can be viewed from six different perspectives, giving the whole thing a kind of pseudo-3D mien. Despite the 2004 botox jab, the game obviously hasn't aged well, and I must confess to being a little put off by this. It's not so much of a problem in cities or even dungeons, but the wilderness zones, which are essentially corridor mazes with tree textures on the walls, are immensely frustrating to navigate, and I frequently found myself submitting to the moist, pungent maw of a giant groundworm just so I could respawn somewhere more interesting.

Old school!

[Regolyth]

I never played this one. I think I was playing Diablo at the time. I never heard of an MMO until UO was about to be released.

[Morreion]

The Game Archaeologist crosses Meridian 59: The highlights (Massively)

Depending on your standards and qualifications, there's several contenders for "first MMORPG," so it's a coin toss whether or not Meridian 59 fit the bill here. Was it massive enough? Did its pseudo-3-D engine count as a 3-D MMO? Ultimately, I don't think Meridian 59 has to worry about prestige either way, as it quickly racked up an impressive list of other firsts for the industry. These include:

* The first internet game from a major publisher
* The first time that a massively multiplayer RPG was considered a "real" game and covered in the major game magazines.
* The first graphical MMO to move beyond 2-D
* The first time a game was referred to as an "MMORPG"
* The first MMO to have a flat rate monthly subscription
* The first MMO sold in a retail box
* The first MMO that was accessible via the internet instead of a network like CompuServe
* The first MMO that used the web to handle accounts and deliver a client download

The Game Archaeologist crosses Meridian 59: An interview with Brian Green (part 1) (Massively)

Two things stick out for me. The first was when I realized I was talking in real-time to someone in England. He was explaining how the Thieves' Guild code worked and mentioned it took into consideration your "wedge." I asked what that meant, and he explained it was slang for money. At the time, it blew my mind.

The other thing that struck me was the ability to create a world that others participate in. I dabbled in tabletop RPGs (and got into them seriously at university) and loved fantasy literature, so I was familiar with creating a world. But the thought of having masses of people all sharing the world was extra exciting to me. So the ability to talk to others you wouldn't normally and the ability to create and/or explore a whole new world (Socializer and Explorer, for those of you marking your Bartle test score card at home) really appealed to me.

The Game Archaeologist crosses Meridian 59: A chat with Brian Green (part 2) (Massively)

Meridian 59 has been described as a transition game between the games on the large networks (like GEnie, AOL, and CompuServe) and the games available on the internet. It was the first game to use the monthly subscription-based model, which influenced many games for years afterward. These are probably its more enduring legacies.

I'd prefer that people remember it as a different type of game that demonstrates it's possible to create a game that doesn't focus on levels and loot. At least, that's the lesson I'll use in my future projects.

[Morreion]

The Game Archaeologist: Meridian 59 (MOP)

A colony founded through a magical nexus, Meridian 59 had it all going on — until, that is, the portal to the colony collapsed and it was left to fend for itself. Monsters swarmed over the land, politics split the community into factions, and adventurers were called to rise up and become the heroes that were desperately needed. And all it took was $10.95 a month and an internet connection.

Welcome to 1996 and one of the very first graphical MMOs to hit the scene. Meridian 59 may not have been one of the biggest games in the genre, but it was arguably one of the most important, the John Adams to World of Warcraft’s Abraham Lincoln.

While bigger titles have toppled and fallen, Meridian 59 defied the odds to continue to operate even today. This week we’re going to look at this fascinating title and how it helped to pioneer the graphical MMO industry back when the world wide web was still a newfangled toy to the public.

In fact, Meridian 59 blazed a whole heck of a lot of trails, even if you dismiss its highly debatable claim of being the first true graphical MMORPG. The game was the first internet game from a major publisher, the first time that an MMO got covered in major game magazines, the first graphical MMO to move beyond 2-D, the first MMO to have a flat rate monthly subscription, the first MMO sold in a retail box, the first MMO that was accessible via the internet instead of a service provider, and the first MMO that used the web to handle accounts and deliver a client download.

Meridian 59 was littered with clever concepts, including in-game email and bulletin boards, guild voting, a chess minigame, guild halls, PvP arena, guild logos, and political appointments. Kirmse said that even emotes were key to bringing the title to life: “The game’s character gestures, such as waving, added a personal feel to an impersonal network.”

The Last Survivors of Meridian 59 (The New Yorker)

The royal city of Barloque was once a bustling virtual place. Its streets were filled with a babble of voices: residents visiting Joguer’s Herbs and Roots store, tourists settling down for a tipple at the Browerstone Inn, griping criminals en route to the old jailhouse. Barloque is the capital of Meridian 59, the first computer game that allowed people from around the world to gather and quest together via the Internet. At the peak of its popularity, soon after the game’s release, in 1996, tens of thousands of players lived among its crudely rendered scenes, filled with pixelated trees, shifting lava, and tired mountains. They’d battle over resources, form and break alliances, loot and terrorize one another, and assume new identities for hours at a time. As with any place where humans gather, friendships and rivalries blossomed. Two players who met in Barloque got married: a relationship seeded in fantasy, consummated in reality.

The idea for a “massively multiplayer online game” (M.M.O.G.) came from two brothers, Andrew and Chris Kirmse, who developed Meridian 59 in the windowless basement of their parents’ house, in Virginia. The name refers to its setting, the fifty-ninth provincial colony of an ancient empire. More than twenty-five thousand people joined the game’s public beta version, and the pair sold the game to the now defunct 3DO Company for five million dollars in stock. Meridian 59 created the template that subsequent online worlds followed, but it enjoyed only a fraction of their success. The 3DO Company encountered financial difficulties in 2001, and sold the game’s rights to two of the company’s developers. They maintained the game as a commercial venture until 2009, but it was always a niche title.

Today, almost eighteen years after Meridian 59’s launch, Barloque’s streets are quiet and vacant, its cobblestones buffed and rounded by little more than a digital breeze. They are rarely visited by more than twenty people in the world at any one time. With the release of each new M.M.O.G., like World of Warcraft (a game that, at the height of its popularity, had a population of more than twelve million), more residents left Meridian 59’s servers, an exodus inspired, as is the case for so many émigrés, by the promise of a more interesting life, with greater opportunities—new types of monsters to do battle with, perhaps, or more vivid spells and bigger swords.

A handful of faithful residents still remain. These players decided that their investment in this world was too great to give up. “I’ve tried to leave the game many times over the years,” Tim Trude, a thirty-three-year-old player from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who first started playing the game at the age of fifteen, said. “But I always return. Some of these people I’ve grown up with. We have been enemies or friends forever.”