The MMO granddaddy you've never heard of is celebrating its 35th anniversary, and it still pulls in 'a few thousand active players' and needs a staff of over 40 to run: 'We want to be able to survive for another 35 years'

A party of adventurers preparing for battle.

If any one thing can claim responsibility for sending me down the dark, dark path of writing for a living, it's probably MUDs—text-based MMOs from an era before 3D graphics that somehow still endure today. It wasn't school, it wasn't uni, it wasn't a mentor's encouragement or some precocious childhood proclivity. I just spent most of my adolescence typing a lot and it just kind of kept happening as I approached adulthood.

And one of the granddaddies of MUDs as a genre is GemStone IV, currently marking its 35th anniversary. It's bigger than you might think: after starting "on the early ISPs—Genie, Prodigy, AOL" all the way back in 1990 and finally moving to the web proper in 1997, it still manages to pull in "a few thousand active players" in the modern era, per product manager Wyrom.