The internet was a very different place in 2000. That’s true in countless ways, but one of the biggest is how much the feeling of connecting with other people online was one of hope, rather than tiresome and frustrating as it so often is now. Even if your view was less utopian, the internet was something so new that the possibilities felt endless, and that was as true in online games as it was anywhere else. At the tail end of 2000, Sega launched one of the most ambitious online games ever at that point, one that embraced the optimism of the early internet, paving the way for the massively multiplayer online games that are commonplace today while capturing the limitless feeling that’s been drained from the internet in the 25 years since.
Phantasy Star Online hit the Sega Dreamcast on December 21, 2000. Announced at Tokyo Game Show a year before, Phantasy Star Online was a pioneering project from the Dreamcast that drew on games as different as ChuChu Rocket and Sonic Adventure while delivering something that no console game ever had. While games like EverQuest (which launched a year earlier) brought massively multiplayer games to PC players, internet access on consoles was still severely limited — something that Phantasy Star Online would be on the vanguard of changing.
