Cult Flox, Holy Brotherhood, Murder of Immortal – the story of one of the oldest graphic mmorpg

Once a long time ago, 11 years before Ultima Online and 4 years before Neverwinter Nights (no, not the same: the game from BioWare with the same names was only 11 years after the original Neverwinter Nights), Habitat, which soon became the legend of the gaming industry, but now almost completely completely forgotten, like many other MMORPGs of those times
Yes, yes, this is not a mistake, mmorpg existed until the 90s. Unless only most of the MUDs were textual or pseudographic. But definitely not Habitat, which has become one of the first graphic games of the genre.

She was taken to a paid beta test with permissible payment ($ 0.08 per minute) in 1986 by Lucasfilm Games (so Lucasarts was called) for Commodore 64. The connection between the players was carried out through the online service Quantumlink. Their number could have been up to 20,000 (which was a lot for those times). Although it was possible to play only in the evenings on ordinary days and a full day – on the weekend.
Outwardly, the game resembles the quests of the 80s from Lucasarts: a rather cartoony graphics style, side view and thousands of separate screens as a game space, which, by the way, was a typical American town of those times.
But then there are great differences. To begin with, the player at the very beginning created a character for himself, choosing the floor and appearance. Further, the character was transferred to the game where he could get his house (which could be furnished with his liking) and a bunch of different objects to the inventory: from vases to weapons.
Yes, it was possible to score each character to death with his hands, slaughter or shoot, then to completely rely on him. However, in a greateride there was a murder during an official duel on magic sticks.
Later, nevertheless, the PVP zones were taken out of the city, as the newcomers were simply pumped out, even with the introduction of sheriffs hunting in the city for the killers.
In general, the developers added a huge number of activities to Habitat. With a neighbor, for example, it was possible to talk, and after that it was quiet to climb into the house of this moron and take out all the valuable. And then, with the proceeds, buy a new thing to participate in the first wedding of the game as a lawyer (a little later – in the first divorce). In general, there was complete freedom in choosing entertainment.

The game administration also loved to https://nonukcasinosites.co.uk/casinos-not-on-gamstop/ pamper players with various events. I would conditionally divide them into 2 categories:
1) large -scale public events about which people were informed by intra -game newspapers (because then there were no twitter, no forums, no blogs).
For example, somehow organized a search for treasures in the maze of the Death Dungeon in the form of a race between players and administrators. The latter could kill with one shot and dragged with them the attending magic sticks.
2) moments when the developers lost control of some aspect of the game. Traditionally, the most carbon monoxide and interesting thing that can happen in MMO.
At the same event in the labyrinth, one of the gammasters forgot to take the attending stick with him, which was why he managed to die in a shootout with several players (yes, something similar was during the murder of British). At the site of the shootout, the corpse of the administrator’s character remained, who became a tapeen of prey for looters: the developers during walking on Habitat always took a bunch of unique objects with them.
And instead of just taking advantage of your administrative capabilities and select the loot, a meeting was organized with that gang. Negotiations were held on it with witnesses, at the end of which the exchanged items were exchangeed for a tidy sum of local currency.

And long before the creation of Dune II, which inspired the creators of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, whose universe at some point gave rise to World of Warcraft, Habitat already had an analogue.
At some point, Lucasarts decided to add fleas to the game. So the administration during the beta test deliberately infected several characters with fleas. They settled on a person’s head and infected with some chance a close player (one of the ways to ruin life to a hypothetical neighbor). The problem turned out to be that the infection took place with a probability of 100%.
In the end, most of the entire population went with fleas. For those who did not catch the fleas, they made a hunt. The avoiding infection tried to even shoot off from fleas, but most often suffered defeat.
The flea cult began to form, when the administration decided to move this feature from the game from sin away from sin.

Since there were quite few similar games then, the creators of Habitat had almost no experience in the fight against griffers – players who intentionally destroy the rest of the rest. Most often they were not banned – they simply sent a bunch of spam in the form of intra -game messages. The need to respond to them slowed the activities of the characters.
But players are a people who are not so easy to win, if they intended to troll others. They found a variety of loopholes in the game for their dark divisions. Particularly sophisticated were called “bustle hunters”.
In Habitat, the characters’ heads were replaced. That is, instead of adding sprites of some hat to the sprites of the head, the head just changed to the head with a hat. At the moment between the shifts of the head, in the very place, a little higher than the neck, the void gaped.
That’s just this feature and used the fullest on their heads. They approached newcomers in the game and in various ways forced them to put something on their heads. At the time of this putting on “something”, the hunters specially made so that the place usually occupied by their heads, something suddenly blocked. There was a bug, and the character’s head generally stopped displaying. The headless was congratulated on the entry into the brotherhood of the people who rejected their heads.

The less fierce type of griffers were those who managed to become a millionaire overnight, having mistakes in pricing, thereby Rusha the economy of the game. The earned was spent on mansions, cars and prostitutes (at one time and it was).
At the end of 1988, the game was closed. But a couple of months later, they revived in the form of Club Caribe for the same quantumlink. And in the 1990s, Habitat completely became the Japanese exclusive, called Fujitsu Habitat. The only differences from the original were Japanese and all sorts of new skins with objects, like tentacles.

In 1995, she returned to the United States with WorldSaway heading. True for a short while. In the same year, the project server was turned off, and the Habitat era ended. But there was a huge influence from her that she had on online games. The ghost of the game blew somewhere in Vzones with a subscription price of $ 11.
In 2014, the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment announced that Habitat is an important part of the game heritage and that the museum, having settled a number of issues with copyright holders, will resurrect this MMORPG with the same software and hardware, as before.
The main difficulty was the search for documentation and various materials on the game from developers. The samulated version of the game is in public access now has become available.