Also, nice graphics. Really life-like.

Besides local multiplayer like Command and Conquer or Tribes, Asheron's Call was my first, and definitely my first experience in massive online gaming. I had just gotten to college and we had whatever was fast internet in 2000 in our dorm, so I tried it out, briefly. I think it was a 30 day free trial and then they'd start charging you monthly.. anyway Asheron's Call also introduced me to a new word: overdraft fees.

Obviously, there's not a ton of history on the subject to work on, but WoW might be around for quite a long time. Production/management hasn't even been sold to another company yet.

UO is still going, after being sold off a few times, and is going to celebrate it's 20th anniversary this year... which is like an arbitrary date because the open beta went on for like 18 months before the official release date.

I spent many hours playing Diablo, Diablo 2 and UO with the same group of people. I never knew their real names, but sometimes I wonder what happened to those people.

I haven't dedicated significant time to a game since then, but I do like Path of Exile.

Woah, UO has been sold a couple of times already? I thought EA still own and ran it.

I can still remember the day I got home and found myself jailed for unattended macro-ing.

Yeah, but "sold" isn't exactly the right term.

The game has been through a bajillion hands at this point. It's kinda nutty, actually. It's hard to imagine how it can remain profitable when several private servers have broken official production population numbers over the years. It's essentially a dead game and people still pay subscription fees to play it when there's hundreds of freeshards out there with more people and the ruleset wound back to before it was a completely dumb chat engine.

On a related topic, what is the longest running MMO? I know that Meridian 59 is still going (which blows my mind since it's such a shitty game IMO) and that's got to be nearly 20 years old at this point. Ultima Online is up there too, still being officially run through EA amazingly enough.

Yeah 18 years is a long time; Asheron's Call is old enough to drive and buy cigarettes, that's probably a longer relationship than many of these players have with their own children. As far as MMOs go Rust is about as far as I like to delve, which is great because there's zero attachment because you'll just have to start over anyway, but I feel kinda bad when I can't retrieve a saved file.

I think you're right with UO; there's older games for sure but those run on fan servers now, so to me that's more like an emulation than the real thing. But I think old BBS "Door Games" might still be the oldest and longest running with dedicated servers, like Trade Wars and VGA Planets

Well, what I meant was more MMOs still being run by a "company" that charges money for it. I mean, there's tons of stuff out there that's still around that's mostly on fan-servers for free with small communities. I think MUDs would technically be the longest running online communities, money not withstanding, and I know for sure a ton of super old MUDs are still running. Presumably you still have to use an FTP client to use them or some kind of web interface, but they are still out there. God knows why, they're terrible, but whatevs.

WHAT IS DEAD MAY NEVER DIE!

I'm amazed we're still here honestly. I remember watching every piece of PoE, from PoeRED, to PoeNews gradually die off. I never thought PoeTV would last this long.

I hope you're right.