Enthusiasts are reviving a 30-year-old graphic multiplayer game.
Game developer Habitat - LucasArts Entertainment
For 18 years before the appearance of today's most popular MMORPG World of Warcraft, LucasArts Entertainment developed and released a beta version of the game called Habitat. The company provided support for this game from 1986 to 1988. What is unusual about her? Habitat is a multi-user graphical gaming environment that allowed Commodore 64 users to visit new worlds, communicate with wanderers, dress as they were and act like they want. This, of course, is not about the players themselves, but about the game characters - avatars controlled by people.
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Thanks to the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, MADE), soon anyone will be able to plunge into the game world of Habitat. This organization announced the project to restore the game open, the source is posted on Github .
Network games in the 70s and 80s of the twentieth century already existed in the form of text-based online RPGs with the common name MUD . Instead of a graphical environment, the user saw descriptions of the environment. Interact with this medium and with each other players could only through text commands. In MUDs, there were already battles with monsters, explorations of worlds and quests. A character class system was also developed. Traditionally, the action in the game took place in a fantasy world, with battles and magicians. Such a world was inhabited by elves, goblins, orcs and other fairy-tale entities. Less common are MUDs with elements of technofentezi, cyberpunk, and science fiction. The rules of the game in such worlds are usually close to the rules of the Dungeons and Dragons (D & D) board role-playing games. Locations in MUDs were small due to the fact that using the text it is difficult to describe the big world - and even harder to imagine this world to the player. Graphic mode has simplified everything.
The plot in Habitat was not. There were no goals to accomplish, there were no missions. All that the player received was locations of a different type and the ability to give personality to their character. A bit later, new features were added: players could now rob other players and even kill. After the innovations, the players began to develop the rules and laws of the game, special characters began to follow the order: avatars endowed with power. The creators of the game almost did not interfere in the processes occurring in the world of Habitat. They assumed the duties of designers, designers and coordinators of the game world. Intervention in the gameplay occurred in very rare cases. For the management and development of the game world were responsible ordinary members.
Despite the novelty of the idea, Habitat did not become a very popular game. The main reason is the technical features of the network mode. His work was provided by the Q-Link service, which was later transformed into the well-known company AOL. At that time, the service could provide simultaneous work in the “network” for a maximum of 10,000 users who connected via dial-up telephone lines using modems. Q-link worked only in the evenings and weekends. The game was paid, hourly pay.
After exiting the beta test mode, a rebranding was performed. Habitat changed the name, becoming Club Caribe, and almost all elements of science fiction like robots, monsters and teleports were excluded from the game world. True, additional elements were added - for example, facial expressions of the characters' faces.
LucasArts licensed the game to Fujitsu in 1989. The Japanese, based on the old game world, created their own version of the game, Fujitsu Habitat. It happened in 1990. In 1995, Fujitsu made another version of the game based on Habitat, naming it Worlds Away. Both projects have become unprofitable, the Japanese company has lost millions of dollars. After that, the company decided to finish with the experiments and sell the projects. The buyer was the company Inworlds.com (later - Avaterra, Inc). She got all the rights.
Many years later, the game was remembered, in 2013 the Museum began preparations for its revival. In 2014, the organization agreed to cooperate with the creators of Habitat, and agreement was received to restore the game from Fujitsu. To work, I had to find and restore the hardware that allowed players to enjoy the network world: a 130-pound Nimbus server.
Participants are going to do something more than just posting the source code of a game on Github. It is planned to restore the performance and equipment, and the gaming environment. In this case, the game of 30 years ago will be able to visit modern gamers. There is only one technical difficulty left - the server is planned to be placed under the control of the Linux OS. And this is not so easy, given the antiquity of Habitat software and hardware. The time frame of the last stage of restoring the game world is difficult to delineate - it all depends on the activity of the Linux team to help the project initiators.
“Many things that we see in modern MMORPGs originally appeared in Habitat,” says MADE founder Alex Handy. "It is very important for us to preserve the history of the origin of these things, and our project is a way to carry out our plans."
For 18 years before the appearance of today's most popular MMORPG World of Warcraft, LucasArts Entertainment developed and released a beta version of the game called Habitat. The company provided support for this game from 1986 to 1988. What is unusual about her? Habitat is a multi-user graphical gaming environment that allowed Commodore 64 users to visit new worlds, communicate with wanderers, dress as they were and act like they want. This, of course, is not about the players themselves, but about the game characters - avatars controlled by people.
')
Thanks to the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, MADE), soon anyone will be able to plunge into the game world of Habitat. This organization announced the project to restore the game open, the source is posted on Github .
Network games in the 70s and 80s of the twentieth century already existed in the form of text-based online RPGs with the common name MUD . Instead of a graphical environment, the user saw descriptions of the environment. Interact with this medium and with each other players could only through text commands. In MUDs, there were already battles with monsters, explorations of worlds and quests. A character class system was also developed. Traditionally, the action in the game took place in a fantasy world, with battles and magicians. Such a world was inhabited by elves, goblins, orcs and other fairy-tale entities. Less common are MUDs with elements of technofentezi, cyberpunk, and science fiction. The rules of the game in such worlds are usually close to the rules of the Dungeons and Dragons (D & D) board role-playing games. Locations in MUDs were small due to the fact that using the text it is difficult to describe the big world - and even harder to imagine this world to the player. Graphic mode has simplified everything.
The plot in Habitat was not. There were no goals to accomplish, there were no missions. All that the player received was locations of a different type and the ability to give personality to their character. A bit later, new features were added: players could now rob other players and even kill. After the innovations, the players began to develop the rules and laws of the game, special characters began to follow the order: avatars endowed with power. The creators of the game almost did not interfere in the processes occurring in the world of Habitat. They assumed the duties of designers, designers and coordinators of the game world. Intervention in the gameplay occurred in very rare cases. For the management and development of the game world were responsible ordinary members.
Despite the novelty of the idea, Habitat did not become a very popular game. The main reason is the technical features of the network mode. His work was provided by the Q-Link service, which was later transformed into the well-known company AOL. At that time, the service could provide simultaneous work in the “network” for a maximum of 10,000 users who connected via dial-up telephone lines using modems. Q-link worked only in the evenings and weekends. The game was paid, hourly pay.After exiting the beta test mode, a rebranding was performed. Habitat changed the name, becoming Club Caribe, and almost all elements of science fiction like robots, monsters and teleports were excluded from the game world. True, additional elements were added - for example, facial expressions of the characters' faces.
LucasArts licensed the game to Fujitsu in 1989. The Japanese, based on the old game world, created their own version of the game, Fujitsu Habitat. It happened in 1990. In 1995, Fujitsu made another version of the game based on Habitat, naming it Worlds Away. Both projects have become unprofitable, the Japanese company has lost millions of dollars. After that, the company decided to finish with the experiments and sell the projects. The buyer was the company Inworlds.com (later - Avaterra, Inc). She got all the rights.
Many years later, the game was remembered, in 2013 the Museum began preparations for its revival. In 2014, the organization agreed to cooperate with the creators of Habitat, and agreement was received to restore the game from Fujitsu. To work, I had to find and restore the hardware that allowed players to enjoy the network world: a 130-pound Nimbus server.
Participants are going to do something more than just posting the source code of a game on Github. It is planned to restore the performance and equipment, and the gaming environment. In this case, the game of 30 years ago will be able to visit modern gamers. There is only one technical difficulty left - the server is planned to be placed under the control of the Linux OS. And this is not so easy, given the antiquity of Habitat software and hardware. The time frame of the last stage of restoring the game world is difficult to delineate - it all depends on the activity of the Linux team to help the project initiators.
“Many things that we see in modern MMORPGs originally appeared in Habitat,” says MADE founder Alex Handy. "It is very important for us to preserve the history of the origin of these things, and our project is a way to carry out our plans."
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/395829/
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