WorldsAway

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

~ the obituary ~

WorldsAway sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it ran on compuserve when i was eleven, three years before i first got online with a 14.4k modem in turkey. by the time i had a ttnet account, the world had already moved past per-hour walled-garden chat. fujitsu's avatar city was the kind of thing american compuserve subscribers paid by the minute to wander around in, and that economic model never reached turkey at any meaningful scale.

the technical story is short. fujitsu cultural technologies launched worldsaway on compuserve in september 1995. you logged into a place called dreamscape and picked a 2d sprite avatar. the chat happened on a tiled grid that looked like an isometric apartment with too many doors. the system descended from lucasfilm's habitat experiment but shared no code with it. for about a year worldsaway was a real hit by compuserve standards, ranking inside the top twenty most-visited forums on the service with around fifteen thousand paid subscribers across one hundred forty-seven countries.

then the air slowly leaked out. fujitsu was losing money on the project and divested. an outfit called inworlds.com bought the licensing rights and renamed itself avaterra. around 2003 the property changed hands again to stratagem corporation, by which point the brand was vzones rather than worldsaway. the worlds kept running for another decade as a quiet legacy product. on the last day of august 2014, the vzones servers finally went dark.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

worldsaway was not a 3d world like cybertown or the kaneva projects that arrived a decade later. it was a flat tiled grid you walked through with a custom avatar, with a token-based economy you could use to buy in-game property or run a virtual nightclub. dreamscape was the main world. the platform later spawned five more, the longest-running of which were newhorizone and seducity.

the design feels older than 1995 if you look at screenshots today. it sits closer to lucasfilm's 1986 habitat aesthetic than to the gpu-rendered worlds that would arrive five years later. a small group of users built a real social life inside kymer over twenty years, and showed up to closing-day events when the worlds finally retired.

~ what got buried with it ~

the paid-by-the-hour walled garden died long before worldsaway did. the model that built compuserve in the 80s and worldsaway in 1995 was already obsolete by 2001, but the world kept its small loyal audience for another thirteen years on inertia. when stratagem finally pulled the servers in 2014, the closing was reported nowhere outside a handful of community blogs and the reno project virtual-world archive. that quiet exit is what walled-garden avatar chat looks like on its way out.

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