Meridian 59

» see meridian59.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

meridian 59 was one of the names in the MMORPG lineage i heard about but did not play. UO was the one i played, on turkish private servers around the 2003-2006 window (sylveria and overdone were the ones on our friend group's list). meridian 59 was a couple of years older than UO and it never had a real turkish player base, either official or private (as far as i know). it existed as a reference in the UO forums as "the first 3D MMO" rather than as a place people were actively logging into.

the game launched commercially on 7 october '96 through 3DO as publisher. the developer was archetype interactive, a small team led by andrew and chris kirmse on the technical side plus steve and mike sellers on design (john hanke sat on production). hanke later went on to co-found keyhole and then niantic. really though, the meridian 59 codebase is where he got his start in networked worlds.

the launch price was a monthly subscription (around $9.95 usd) on top of a $30 boxed retail purchase. the public beta from april '96 pulled in about 17,000 players before the commercial launch. by mid-1997 the population was well under that, mainly because ultima online was arriving on the same schedule with better isometric art and a bigger publisher push behind it. 3DO carried M59 through the late 90s and shut it down on 31 august 2000.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

meridian 59 was a persistent-world 3D game with texture-mapped walls, first-person view, and PvP combat between fifteen "servers" (worlds) at peak. each world could hold a few hundred concurrent players. the graphics engine was closer to doom than to quake (walls only, no proper polygonal terrain), but the fact that it rendered in 3D at all was a genuine novelty in '96. everything before it (neverwinter nights on AOL plus the various gemstone descendants) had been text or 2D tile-based.

the world was called "the meridian" and had a set of factions with permanent rivalries (arguably the first modern MMO faction PvP system). guilds were called "guilds" from day one. cities had housing before UO shipped its own housing system. really though, the design was ambitious, and a lot of the primitives that later MMOs treated as canonical (persistent PvP plus city-scale faction warfare) had their first shipping implementations here.

~ the 3DO fold ~

3DO shut the game down on 31 august 2000. by that point the population had been in slow decline for two years. everquest had launched in march '99 and taken the "big shiny 3D MMO with a monthly subscription" slot definitively. UO was still holding its niche but growing more slowly. anyway, 3DO itself was in trouble as a publisher (would file for bankruptcy in may 2003) and could not justify carrying a five-year-old MMO with a small monthly-subscription revenue stream.

the shutdown was an ordinary MMO death of the period. servers dark, boxes off the shelves, community migrated to the M59 message boards and to whatever the next server up the chain was. for a lot of the veteran players that was UO or EQ. for some, it was the sign that they were done with the whole category.

~ the near death revival ~

in 2002 the license went to near death studios, a small studio founded by two m59 veterans (rob "q" ellis and brian "psychochild" green) explicitly to keep the game running. this is one of the earliest examples of a beloved-but-orphaned MMO getting picked up by a fan-team-turned-studio to keep it live. they ran two servers commercially through the 2000s. an updated graphics rendering engine landed in october '04.

near death announced closure on 6 january 2010 after eight years of small-scale commercial operations. the code plus the game rights were handed to the kirmse brothers in february '10. they ran the servers on hobbyist basis until 15 september '12, at which point they released the source code under GPLv2 and the game became open-source freeware. small community servers keep running in 2026, but the commercial product died with near death studios in january '10. anyway, that is the cleanly-dead entry for this grave.

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