History of Meridian 59
The Beggining
The History of the game begins with a game called Sceptre of Goth, in the mid 80s. Chris and Andrew Kirmse (The two creators of Meridian) spent many hours playing it. It was a multiplayer RPG, wih levels, monster and spells. After Andrew had finished his junior year at MIT, both brothers decided to code a graphical version of Sceptre.
Fun Fact: The brothers used the same names on both Sceptre and Meridian (Zaphod and Zandramas)
They spent lots of money in two top of the line machines "Pentium 66's with 16 megs of memory and 500 meg hard drives", they setted up on their parents' basement and started to work on it. It's good to notice that they had no knowledge about computer graphics and the game industrie.
Improving Days
After design their own scripting language called Blakod, and getting the networking done, they had the foundation for the game. But the game wasn't like it is today, it was a simple 2D tile-based map with a few connected rooms. It all changed in the Christmas break, when Andrew found a graphics programming book with a raycasting engine similar to Wolfenstein's. So he rewrote the client based on that.
The game was slow, The horribly draw walls and trees looked even worse in 3D. But just seeing another player walk up to you in gave the feeling of potential. Andrew spent a part of early 1995 playing Doom II with Keith Randall, they started talking about its graphical engine. After that, Keith wrote the BSP-tree based engine that would power the game.
Alpha Time
The brothers went back to the basement for another summer of work. The World Wide Web was spreading fast across homes, and they did not knew, but the game was away from anything made at that point. They hired Damion Schubert, who worked on laying down the maps with a modified Doom map editor (First city was Tos).
They uploaded the game to the Archetype website. It had one quest, no spells, neither ranged weapons or character progression, but for 1995, it was magic seeing and interacting with other people on a computer screen. They released the game in beta stage some time after with now supporting up to 100 players at the same time (We need Meridian like this! Current count is 14-17 at peak).
Lots of things happenned after that, Meridian had a few different owners. But somehow, yet somehow after the game was forked, killed multiple times, it, like a phoenix, woke up from the ashes, and lived on.
"Meridian was ahead of its time in several areas. For many people using the Internet for the first time, Meridian was how people actually “saw” people on the other end of their chat messages." - Andrew Kirmse