A while back, Peter Edelmann wrote to us about the early days of Real Money Trades (“RMT”). He said:

“I came across this in one Mark Wallace's Escapist pieces:

"Out-of-world sales of gold and other virtual items have been going on since the early days of text-based "multi-user dungeons" and other online spaces, in the late 1970s."

Which got me to thinking about the earliest documented cases of RMT. The late 70's seems a little early - and it would seem widespread external markets didn't emerge until Ultima Online (post 1997/98). I wouldn't be surprised if there was some informal RMT taking place much earlier - possibly even the mid-1980s (like in Habitat or the GEnie worlds) - but I haven't seen any documented cases. Any thoughts about this?”

Well we thought that it was a perfect question to ask our resident gurus who were there at the beginning of this thing and who are responsible for much of what we take for granted in MMOGs and VW design. So we decided to have a fireside chat with our very own Richard Bartle and Jessica Mulligan. For those who don’t know them, Jessica and Richard claim to be extra-terrestrials from the far future, sent to our Earth to interfere with the timeline and prevent the galaxy-wide RMT wars of the 39th century. However Richard is best know for programming the world’s first multi-user dungeon—MUD1—with Roy Trubshaw between 1978 and 1981. Jessica’s worked on numerous online games including the original NeverWinter Nights on AOL, Warcraft II Online, and Ultima Online. We grabbed them on their way back from holidaying at Richard Branson’s private island.