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Chip: Part of it was drawing on ideas that were kind of in the air. A lot of us at Lucasfilm Games and the technically inclined folks of my generation grew up playing tabletop war games, Dungeons and Dragons, and things of that nature, and those people had done the sort of world creation activities that you do to set up those sort of games. The idea to do something kind of like that with the computer as a moderating medium was not a new one.

However, I was having lunch with my officemate, Noah Falstein, and I was talking about my thoughts on generating what we were originally thinking of as universes – something out in space with planets and continents – then be able to zoom down to arbitrary levels of detail. All of these items would be created then allow for multiple people to interact through the medium of a network connection. That’s when we started kicking things around a bit.

The way Lucasfilm Games worked at the time was that anyone that had a game proposal would do a two to four page write up that would get circulated to everyone in the group. You’d then take their comments and revise it into a nice tight document. However, any of the original content that we devised wasn’t going to be made using exclusively Lucasfilm money. It had to be done as a partnership with somebody else. Basically, somebody else had to pay for it.

So what would happen with these various ideas is that they’d get filed with our general manager, Steve Arnold, who kept a big filing cabinet full of all the various ideas that were bubbling in the group. Then when someone would come shopping for a game, he could pull whatever seemed relevant and make a pitch.

Lots of companies came to Lucasfilm because it was sexy to go to Lucasfilm and people just wanted to go there. So a lot of these companies that came, we actually were able to make deals with them. It was probably late spring or early summer in 1985 – it may have been earlier – when Clive Smith (who was then the head of strategic planning for Commodore) came by. He had just gotten Commodore into a couple of strategic things – being the strategy guy – one was the acquisition of Amiga and the other was getting Commodore involved with an online service that was just starting up called QuantumLink, which was a consumer oriented online service. This was very different from the mainstream of the day, which was like Compuserve and very business focused.

So Clive came to us an asked us if we had anything that used modems – because they wanted to sell modems – and also if we have anything that would use high-end graphics machines.  Our general manager pulled out my proposal (it was then called Lucasfilm Universe) and another proposal for a space game that would exploit the graphical advantages of the Amiga. We pitched these two projects to him, laid out our ideas, and he thought they were both swell. Then the whole deal making apparatus kicked in and one thing led to another, but when all the dust settled they decided not to do the space-based game but that QuantumLink was quite interested in my proposal.

They signed up for the deal, and then the project was underway. At that point, the whole thing started rolling. However, I actually got about a six month design ahead because the lawyers had to spend an inordinate amount of time going back and forth getting all the contract paper work figured out. It was a completely different style of deal then anything anyone had done before, so they didn’t quite know how to structure it. While all the lawyers were doing their “lawyer dance”, I worked on design because it was pretty clear that the whole thing was going to happen.  So we were able to really hit the ground running.

Chip: One thing that I’m alternately proud of and embarrassed by is the propagation of the term “Avatar”, which has really become the common term to use when describing your character in one of these worlds. It was my coinage, and it’s certainly expanded to take on a life of its own in ways that I continue to be bemused by.

I think there are two big contributions that Habitat made to the MMOG industry. One is the things in Habitat that people emulated, and then the things in Habitat that we told people about and they believed us.

Randy: I would list “Lessons of Habitat” as really one of the biggest contributions to MMO gaming.

Chip: The “Lessons of Habitat” in particular is a huge contribution to MMO gaming. One of the things that we’re in a habit of doing when we have one of these adventures is to do a postmortem where we’ll get in front of the world and tell everyone about all of our screw-ups. We try to give everyone else the benefit of our mistakes.

It turns out that people respect that.

We’re being sort of non-linear here, but another thread of thought that really led us into Habitat was that in 1985, one of the great topics of discussion in computer gaming was AI. How do you program the computerized opponent that you play against in a computer game?

It was a hard problem, but one of the initial solutions that I articulated via Habitat was to not even try. We don’t know how to program an automaton that is as rich, clever, or innovative as a human being. So let’s not even attempt it! Let’s just let you interact with a real human!

It seems really obvious in retrospect, and a lot of the ideas in Lessons have that flavor, but it’s all about making the social component a central part of the gaming experience.

Another one of our Lessons – don’t trust the client – is an idea that people still continue to violate to this day! (Editor’s Note: You can read an expanded version of this lesson here.

Randy: It’s very interesting to look at these things in retrospect. There are a couple of things that really stand out in my mind. One was acknowledging that the people were actually in control; the idea that when you created a virtual world, you were entering into a partnership with the customers.

This is something we dealt with all the time.

Chip: And it continues to be something that game companies continue to have to learn every time one of them does an online game.

Randy: It took a while for some of the lessons to really sink in. Several years had to pass before people really began to believe that you couldn’t trust the client. People spent a lot of time – even after Habitat – continuing to believe the client. Whatever you do – don’t believe the client! The client will lie to you.

If you look at early multiplayer versions of Diablo, those folks trusted the client to tell them how much money the user got, for example. You add a simple patch to the game and you could buy things for nothing and sell them for insane amounts, generating users endless money. Even though you were playing with other players, it was never a global market; it was always just an instance.

My daughter and I actually used this patch because we wanted to get through the game, but we didn’t want gear to be getting in our way. I didn’t cheat anywhere else, but we didn’t want to be held back by gear issues. This was an example of a development team trusting the client.

It took a couple years for other developers to begin writing papers and telling other developers not to trust the client.

The benefit of being early means that it allows people to use you as a reference. The “Lessons of Habitat” document has been cited in an enormous number of books, because it gave people an anchor to focus their ideas around. They might propose an idea with a subtle difference to our own lessons and advance the state of the art.

It’s really like a much beloved reference.

Randy: Well, some of the didn’t turn out to be as true as we thought. That’s why we wrote “Habitat Redux”. But the majority of the lessons turned out to be pretty solid.

The challenges actually came depending on our situation. If we were observing what had happened, the lessons seemed to hold up very well. However, where we prognosticated a little bit, that’s where we ran into more trouble.

It’s important to remember that Habitat was pre-Web, and there were things about how people would advance with the technology. I mean, Habitat was debuted in the age when people were paying per minute for online time. And – I kid you not – people could actually type faster than the speed that the data was being delivered over the wire.

In that universe, prognosticating about the future is perilous.