It’s always kind of cool to see Meridian 59 acknowledged. You must understand, the game was a small hobbyist game that never wracked up big numbers even when 3DO put their weight behind it. 3DO published it with very little in terms of development or marketing investment, and used the disappointing results to claim that Internet gaming would never take off. Oops.
So it was with some pleasure that, when I finally watched The Video Game Revolution on PBS, they began their MMO chapter with a 2 second footnote about Meridian 59 being the grandfather of them all. Which is an oft-quoted claim, but isn’t wholly accurate – games like Legends of Kesmai, the Realm, Underlight, Dragonrealms and a raft of Mythic properties came beforehand or about simultaneously.
Meridian was first at something, I’m sure. What that is, I have no idea – something like “First 3D, Flat Monthly Fee MMO By A Major Publisher.” Funny how that ‘major publisher’ was outlasted by ‘the little guys’ like Mythic and Simutronics. One wonders if 3DO had invested in online to make a game of DAoC’s quality, if they’d still be around now. We really need access to ‘What If’ universes to answer vital questions like that.
Of course, PBS is cool and all, but it’s even cooler to see Meridian acknowledged, even in passing, by the boys over at Penny Arcade, who mention that EQ2 seems to be moving towards a free client model that the smaller games like Meridian and Puzzle Pirates use. Oh yeah, Meridian’s still going, a labor of love by this lunatic, who I note still bitches to me about bugs I left in Meridian’s code-base nearly a decade ago.
Wow, a decade. I gotta go sit down.
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