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August 03, 2004
The history of Habitat and Lucasfilm Games
Habitat was a Lucasfilm Games and QuantumLink (now AOL) joint project that could arguably be called the first MMORPG. Chip Morningstar was there in the beginning, and was responsible for much of the design and architecture of Habitat. He's written a great article discussing how Habitat came to fruition, and what things were like for Lucasfilm Games in the very beginning.
"Because of the phenomenal success of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, Lucasfilm existed in a weird kind of bubble that made it very different from other companies, especially companies in the computer games industry. Most of this weirdness had to do with money, or expectations about money. The basic attitude can be summed up as, "we are Lucasfilm, people will pay us." The fundamental business concept of making an investment in expectation of a future return was not part of the general mindset. The expectation rather was that people would pay us to do things, and then we would take a share of the profits of whatever resulted. In other words, we wanted a cut of the proceeds but were not interested in sharing any of the risk. This attitude is a luxury most business people would love to have, but quite correctly recognize for the fantasy that it is."
If you're interested in the game design side of things, there's a great, often cited paper titled The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat written by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer.
Via /.
Posted by jb at August 3, 2004 11:42 PM
