The entire reflection on Habitat has an air of novelty and lawlessness. There were in-game, developer-created treasure hunts and user-created business ventures. There were stories of in-game currency arbitrage related to a bug that allowed a few enterprising players to buy underpriced game items from an ATM, and sell them at a higher price in a shop across town - resulting in the printing of hundreds of thousands of in-game tokens overnight. Habitat looked and felt different: a universe which grew to over 20000 regions, including player homes, shops, arenas, theaters, newspapers, houses of workshop, and a “wilderness” area where crimes like theft and murder could be committed (a practice which a Greek Orthodox priest, who led one of Habitat’s aforementioned houses of worship, preached vehemently against in his digital “Order of the Holy Walnut” church). Randall Farmer described the complexity of a world with an emergent form of politics, economy, and user-generated content. In a reflection on Habitat, published a few years after its launch, developers Chip Morningstar and F. Habitat was also arguably a forebear of what the now-contested (both definitionally and territorially) “metaverse” may one day become. In short, Habitat was a virtual civilization, with real-time player chat, trading, and interaction. Habitat was a departure from text-based MUD games (which were multiplayer but lacked graphics) and free-ranging USENET forums (which of course were text-based but lacked formalized gameplay) that dominated the early net-connected market at the time. In 1986, the early internet provider Quantum Link and the entertainment company Lucasfilm Games released what might be considered the first ever MMO: a social, avatar-based world called Habitat, which could be accessed via a 300-baud modem ($0.08 per minute) and a user’s Commodore 64 ($595, or roughly $1,670 in today’s terms).
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