Lilybet Skatilar is a level 9 human bard wearing a shimmering rainbow cloak, fur-lined snow boots, a stylish purple scarf, sunstone earrings, baggy blue polka dot pants, a blue ruby ring, a jeweled engagement ring, and various other accessories accumulated in the town of Wehnimer’s Landing in 1997.
If you checked her out by typing “LOOK LILYBET,” you would get a large descriptive paragraph of text—no images, just words that made the world come to life.
I played this character in GemStone III, an early online role-playing game, for a precious six-month period when I was a 13-year-old learning how to relate to friends and strangers in my newfound teenage skin. What I didn’t know at the time was that GemStone and similar titles from Simutronics Corporation represented a pivotal moment in the history of gaming.
Simutronics’ GemStone and its sister game DragonRealms helped build a bridge between the primordial single-player text adventure and what we now call MMORPGs, massively multiplayer online role-playing games. When the internet was young, these games hit on a demand for shared alternate realities, a thirst that has since shaped online media as we know it.
The genre of text adventure games started with Colossal Cave Adventure from 1976, widely considered the first interactive text-based computer game, by Will Crowther and Don Woods. Through commands involving verbs and nouns, players could explore a written version of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.
Another early entrant in the genre was Zork: The Great Underground Empire from Personal Software, which allowed players to be more creative in the commands that they typed. Writing in Byte magazine in 1980, reviewer Bob Liddil wrote that he was “hooked” after he got a computer-generated response to typing “OPEN THE BAG AND GET THE LUNCH,” followed by “EAT THE LUNCH AND DRINK THE WATER.”
Those were simpler times. And, these early games didn’t have interactions with other human-controlled characters. But in 1978, University of Essex students Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw created Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD, which could be played by anyone who could connect to the school’s server. It is credited with being the first to spark the new genre, also called MUD.