n the beginning, there was nothing, just geeks with 20-sided dice. Then, in the late 1970s, text-based multiuser dungeons sprouted up on university servers. Productivity halted and mainframes crashed from overuse-even then, apparently, gamers had way too much time on their hands. Later, games such as LucasArts' Habitat in 1987 and 3DO's Meridian 59 in 1996 made the move to graphically represented communities (with a limit of 35 simultaneous players for the latter), while Ultima Online scored the first big commercial hit and ushered in the monthly subscription model commonly used today.

As far as the genre has come, though, MMO gaming has still only barely grown out of its infancy. Blizzard crows that 4 million users globally are hooked to World of WarCraft-but that leaves 6-billion-plus people on Earth yet to be reached. Are MMOs doomed to continue fishing from the same pond of players over and over? Major publishers are asking themselves that very question right now. So are we.
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