Habitat for humanity: how a classic MMO got a second life
Habitat, the world’s first MMO developed for the Commodore 64 personal computer, went offline in 1992. It came back online in 2017 through the efforts of MADE, the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment.
Founded by Alex Handy in 2011, MADE “seeks to legitimize the preservation of video games as both a historic and artistic medium within the context of our time.” To that end, MADE amassed a collection of working video game consoles and a library of old games for patrons to play.
“We do exhibits, we do preservation activities to preserve old systems, old code, and old games,” Alex Handy told The Verge via Zoom.
But what’s exactly involved in bringing an MMO back from the dead? A generous donation, a lot of luck, and an absurd amount of guts.
Habitat was an online world that could support upwards of 15,000 users who could run businesses, play games, solve mysteries, found religions, or just hang out. Released in 1986, Habitat predated the likes of Ultima Online and EverQuest (the games many people think of when they think of “the first MMO”) by more than a decade.
As online communities emerged from the primordial pre-modern internet soup of the late ‘70s and ‘80s, games that these communities could play together swiftly followed. MUDs, or multi-user dungeons, were the first online multiplayer games and were wholly text-based. Habitat was inspired by MUDs and took its concept of a shared online gaming space one step further.
“MUDs were a thing,” Handy said. “But the idea of a graphical world you could walk around that was static and interact with other human beings within it was a new concept.”
Developed by Lucasarts with the talents of video game pioneers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, Habitat ran on the Commodore
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