The history of massively multiplayer online games spans over thirty years and hundreds of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) titles. The origin and influence on MMO games stems from MUDs, Dungeons and Dragons and earlier social games.
In 1982 Flinn and Taylor founded the game developer Kesmai, and began working with CompuServe to offer multi-player games on a fee-per-hour basis. But once they began porting their code it turned out that the code that ran for free on the university's computer was hugely inefficient, and they burned $100,000 USD in computer time on CompuServe's system in three days before concluding they needed to rewrite their engine.
