Recently, four videos related to the history of MMo are popular. The videos include reviews of MMO games from MuD to MMORPG. Information about early Korea games The Kingdom of the Winds and NC soft are also presented on the video as well as partly charges mode.
Besides the author shows worry about the situation that new MMOs focus more and more on the vision of the game and finish works within a short time.
MMO Part 1:Crawling Through The Mud
Throughout the Nineteen Seventies, many new technologies were emerging out of research into what computers could accomplish. One was computer gaming, using the simple graphics and low memory of the time to make an interactive entertainment experience. Another was less exciting, but wildly more ambitious: networking, the ability to let two different computers in different locations share information. Inevitably, the time would come when these two technologies would cross with one another, to allow two people on two different computers to play the same game.
Early works such as Nineteen Seventy-Four’s Maze War proved that the model could work. But games like Maze War were made by academic or corporate research institutions, and were never meant for general distribution. As time passed, however, and both personal computers and the modern internet began to take shape, online gaming exploded. In time, the science-fiction dream of a second, virtual world, inhabited with millions of people interacting around the globe, began to take shape. Games that feature persistent worlds, huge areas, and giant populations have become some of the most powerful, and profitable, forces in all of entertainment. But while they seem incredibly complex and sophisticated today, the seeds that began the Massively Multiplayer Online Game genre were just about as simple as they could get.
MMO Part 2: Expansions
Throughout the Nineteen Eighties, the technology behind networking became more sophisticated. Slowly, the ability of one computer to communicate with another shifted away from closed-off, proprietary networks, and towards the modern, open internet. Of course, the introduction of the internet changed business and culture the world over. Like everything else, gaming adapted to the new opportunities as well. Early experiments into a single, shared gamespace, like MUD and Neverwinter Nights, had proven that thousands of people around the world wanted to play together.
In Nineteen Ninety-Five, Meridian 59 brought this philosophy into the open internet, and became a phenomenon with twenty-five thousand paying customers. Since anybody could access the internet, and the internet was rapidly being adopted globally, the style that Meridian kicked off had limitless potential to expand. As it happened, the Massively Multiplayer Online genre would reach unparalleled heights by a team that had never worked with multiplayer before.
MMO Part 3: High Level
At the start of the new millennium, the Massively Multiplayer Online genre was growing fast. Big hits like Ultima Online and EverQuest had gathered hundreds of thousands of players in North America and Europe, and Lineage had gained millions of followers in Asia. While these numbers didn’t reach the same heights as the biggest selling titles of the day, their unique business model proved profitable to an extent unheard of before. Where other games only received money from their customers from the initial purchase, MMOs would continue to charge customers a monthly fee. These games kept making money for us long as gamers played it. Going into the next decade, the business model would hit a fork in the road, as one game drove the old model to its furthest extent yet, while another would make a fortune without charging a cent.
MMO Part 4: End Game Content
The Massively Multiplayer Online genre is one of the most profitable in all of entertainment. In this fourth and final episode of our retrospective, watch and see how the success of WOW and the free model forced a change through the whole genre.
（videos from www.machinima.com)
