Meridian 59

About Meridian 59

Meridian 59 (1996) is Archetype Interactive's online fantasy RPG for 3DO, the first 3D graphical MMORPG and one of the first games sold on a flat monthly subscription, launched about a year before Ultima Online.

Meridian 59 in Depth

There are no character levels or classes. Each skill and attribute develops on its own: hit points grow by killing monsters that challenge the player, and mana comes from finding mana nodes around the world. Characters learn skills from seven schools, weaponcraft and six schools of magic tied to the world's gods, from Shal'ille's healing and Qor's curses to Faren's elemental attacks, Riija's illusions and Jala's songs, and they can mix schools freely, limited only by intelligence.

The game is set in the 59th provincial colony of an ancient empire, cut off centuries ago when something went wrong with the magical nexus linking its worlds, and its six towns include the rebellious mining town of Jasper and the royal city of Barloque. Players can side with one of three political factions fighting for territory and tokens of power, join player-made guilds that vote on their leaders, display sigils on shields and win or lose guild halls, and read in-game bulletin boards and mail. The game came to focus on player-versus-player combat, with a player-run justice system to deal with player killing.

Making Meridian 59

Mike and Steve Sellers founded the studio as Terra Nova Interactive in 1993, renaming it Archetype Interactive and the game Meridian after the legal letter. Run by the Sellers brothers and John Hanke, with Andrew and Chris Kirmse in key technical roles and a team of 22, it drew technical inspiration from Scepter of Goth. 3DO noticed it in early beta in April 1996, and Trip Hawkins bought Archetype that June. It went online in an early form on 15 December 1995, around 17,000 players joined the public beta, and it launched commercially on 7 October 1996 with a flat monthly fee, at a time when AOL still charged by the minute.

At the 1996 Online Game Developer's Conference, heads of online services called flat-rate pricing "naive", but Next Generation's Christian Svensson later wrote that a fair flat rate had proved the only way to win subscribers. CNET Gamecenter named it its role-playing game of the year. Retail sales were small, 14,359 in the US by June 1999. 3DO shut it down on 31 August 2000; Near Death Studios relaunched it in 2002, and in 2012 the Kirmse brothers released it as freeware with most of its source code open.