Neverwinter Nights (AOL)

~ the obituary ~

In March 1991 I was seven years old and about seven years short of my first modem. Neverwinter Nights lived inside America Online, which billed by the hour against American local phone numbers, and there was no arrangement under which a house in Turkey dialed into that. This one is written entirely off the record left behind.

SSI held the Dungeons & Dragons license from TSR and had spent a few years shipping the Gold Box games on floppy disk. Beyond Software, which later became Stormfront Studios, took that same engine and pointed it at a server. Don Daglow led the project and Cathryn Mataga wrote the code. What shipped in March 1991 was the first online role playing game that drew you a picture instead of describing one in text.

The world was small by any later standard and enormous next to the thing it replaced. A server held fifty players in 1991 and five hundred by 1995. People formed guilds and argued about politics inside a fantasy town. The guilds put on events for each other that AOL had nothing to do with and no way to bill for.

By 1997 there were 115,000 registered players, with something like two thousand of them logged in at once on a weekday evening. Those figures read as quaint until you remember that every one of those people was paying for the privilege by the minute.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

The client was a DOS program you installed off a disk. The network was AOL. The world was the Forgotten Realms city of Neverwinter and the country around it, drawn in the same tile-and-portrait style anybody who had played Pool of Radiance would recognize on sight.

The part that had never existed before was that the other adventurers were people. Text muds had been doing that since 1978, but they made you imagine the room. Here the room was on screen and so was the stranger standing in it, and the whole social apparatus that later MMOs would take as given showed up almost immediately without anyone designing it.

~ the money ~

It cost by the hour. Depending on the plan you were on that ran to six dollars, or eight during the premium daytime window against four when nobody else wanted the phone lines. A long dungeon crawl was a line item. People logged their session times the way you would log a long distance call, because that is what it was.

Then AOL went flat rate at the end of 1996 and the game eventually became a plain part of the subscription. That sounds like a gift to the players and it was, but it removed the reason AOL had for keeping a fantasy world staffed. Hourly premium content was the business. Once the hours stopped being counted, the world was a cost center wearing a castle.

~ the day it died ~

AOL closed the world on 19 July 1997. The plan was a new games channel called World Play at two dollars an hour, and every other title in AOL's lineup went across to it. Neverwinter Nights was the single exception, stranded by a disagreement between AOL and the license holders over where the game should go next.

There was no offline mode and no export. Six years of characters and the guild politics built around them existed only on AOL's machines, and stopped existing on the same afternoon. In 2008 the game took a Technology and Engineering Emmy for pioneering the form, sharing the award with EverQuest and World of Warcraft, which is a strange honor to hand a world that had already been unreachable for eleven years.

BioWare put the name on a completely different game in 2002 and that is the Neverwinter Nights most people mean now. The name survived. The town did not.

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