Ear­lier this week I picked up the book Rogue Lead­ers: The Story of Lucasarts by Rob Smith. There’s an inter­est­ing his­tory that cap­ti­vated me from the get-go, pri­mar­ily because I’m a part of this fas­ci­nat­ing lineage.

Lucasarts & Quan­tum Link

Habitat coverLucasarts (then called Lucas­film Games) was founded by Peter Langston, a musician/game designer who hand-picked a group of young and eager game design­ers to cre­ate orig­i­nal game properties.

In 1985 Lucasarts was work­ing on a Com­modore 64 vir­tual com­mu­nity game (cou­pled with a 300-baud modem attach­ment) called Habi­tat.

In the game you were to cre­ate an “avatar” (yes, they coined the term in this con­text), pick­ing from a selec­tion of col­ors and clothes using the “GET” and “PUT” com­mands and then chat and inter­act with other peo­ple within a some­what graph­i­cal UI.

They part­nered with a com­pany called Quan­tum Link to pro­vide the on-line ser­vice com­po­nent and dis­trib­uted a beta test. How­ever, the game itself proved to be too pop­u­lar and their servers couldn’t han­dle the load, so it was can­celed never mak­ing it to retail.

Mean­while the tech­nol­ogy was sold to Fijitsu in 1989 and was later renamed Club Caribe.

Post­mortem

Lucasarts went on to cre­ate many orig­i­nal gam­ing prop­er­ties (suc­cess­ful adven­ture games like Maniac Man­sion, Grim Fan­dango and Day of the Ten­ta­cle) and Quan­tum Link even­tu­ally changed their name to Amer­ica Online.

The rest is history.

Addi­tional reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Quantum-Link
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Habitat-(video-game)