Game addiction - possibly my part in its genesis?

I'm an commensurate geek still in the IT industry but have always been an avid computer gamer ever since the late 1970s and early 1980s with platforms ranging from my build-your-own Ohio Superboard, Acorn Atom, BBC Micro and finally an IBM PC. I even wrote some simple freeware basic games in the 1980s.

As an extension of my hobby, I had been writing articles for a gaming magazine in the early 1990s. One article I had published was come home to a warm LAN which was based on the Doom LAN Parties I had set up at home and for after-hours activities in the training center at work. As a result of my writing I received numerous invitations to test new games or review pre-releases. One of the more unusual invitations was from 3DO who were launching a new console game in mid 90s. I asked if one of my IT buddies could tag along and we dutifully trekked over to the 3DO HQ at Redwood City, CA. It seemed that we were by far the oldest play-testers they had ever seen since we were in our late 30s at the time but we found the games interesting, the pizza and cookies were tasty but the T-Shirts and hats were waaaay too small!

While most of the play-testers were teens or younger and simply interested in just having a blast, my buddy and I were more interested in the software development, marketing and commercialization. I remember both of us commenting on one particular shooter game that they were planning to port to the PC - the comments went something like - "*sigh* there's a ton of these type of games on the PC already and they are all better looking than this one is". The 3DO version was ok but not anything special so our conclusion was we did not think there's a viable market - UNLESS - they did something a LOT more creative like have the clients work with each other on a LAN and make a really good LAN party game. The final kicker was in the evaluation forms with a throaway comment like "surely it would be relatively easy to just port this to a client-server platform and have folks connect to it over the internet?"

We were never sure if this was already in 3DO's plan or if it was our evaluation that first germinated the seed but a little over a year later what most folks cite as the first MMO Meridian 59 emerged from 3DO! .... and darn me if it wasn't the spitting image of the game we had playtested!!

If we did indeed have an effect - to all those addicted MMO folks out there - we're really sorry :oops:

To everyone else who enjoys an MMO - see you online :lol: