Meridian 59 is a 1996 video game developed by Archetype Interactive and published by The 3DO Company. It was the first 3D graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and one of the longest running original online role-playing games. The development team included John Hanke, who later founded Niantic, Inc. and codeveloped Google Earth and Pokémon Go.
The game was launched online in an early form on December 15, 1995, and released commercially on October 7, 1996, with a flat-rate monthly subscription. Meridian 59 was later released as open source software, run by original developers Andrew Kirmse and Chris Kirmse.
Development
Meridian 59 (abbreviated M59) was developed by Archetype Interactive and published in September 1996 by 3DO. Meridian 59 is the only product Archetype Interactive ever released, and the company was acquired by 3DO in June 1996. Archetype was run by Steve Sellers, Mike Sellers, and John Hanke, with Andrew Kirmse and Chris Kirmse filling key technical roles. Damion Schubert contributed to the design along with a team totaling 22 employees and contractors. The game's technological base was initially inspired by Scepter of Goth.
The game was in an early beta stage in April 1996 when it was noticed by Kevin Hester and other game developers at 3DO. Trip Hawkins, CEO of 3DO, recognized the forward-looking value of the game and the company, and 3DO bought Archetype in June 1996.
The characters were structured so that faces are presented in the highest resolution, while the less important torso and legs use a lower resolution in order to increase access speed. Approximately 17,000 players joined the game's public beta that lasted up until its worldwide commercial launch on October 7, 1996, beating its next major rival, Ultima Online, by approximately a year. The servers divided players into parallel game worlds, each populated by a few hundred people, in order to keep each world from being overly crowded.
Prior to its release, the term "massively multiplayer" and the acronym "MMPRPG", "Massively Multi-Player Role-Playing Game", emerged in meetings within 3DO (beating out other monikers such as "large-n game"), as did the now-ubiquitous monthly subscription model. At the time, AOL was still charging per minute for online access, though a change to flat fees was anticipated. The game has received various updates throughout its life, each adding new monsters, spells, and areas. In its early years it was commonly conceived of as a graphical MUD, though this term, and Meridian 59s preferred "MMPRPG", was eventually displaced by the now-ubiquitous "massively multiplayer online role-playing game", a term coined by Richard Garriott of Ultima Online in 1997.
3DO shut down the game on August 31, 2000 and it was re-released by Near Death Studios, Inc. in 2002. Near Death Studios was co-founded by former Meridian 59 developers Rob "Q" Ellis and Brian "Psychochild" Green. A new rendering engine was added to the game in the Evolution expansion in October 2004, offering an alternative to its Doom-based graphics. This expansion also includes features like dynamic lighting, rebindable keys, mouselook, and other visual improvements.
Shortly after 3DO shut the game down on August 31, 2000 a developer of the game leaked the server software and the files for Meridian 59: Renaissance to a player, and since then there has been a thriving community of free-to-play servers.
Near Death Studios announced that the company would be ceasing operations on January 6, 2010, after which Meridian 59 would continue running, but not as a commercial concern of Near Death Studios. In February 2010, Meridian 59 was turned over to the original technical developers, Andrew and Chris Kirmse. On September 15, 2012, the team released the game to the public as freeware and most of the source code under the GPLv2 license. For a while, Meridian 59 had an international presence, with servers operating in Germany, run by the company MDO (active 2002-2009), and Russia, in addition to a Sacred Haven (non-PvP) server operated by Skotos. These are no longer operational.