Legends of Kesmai: The first MMORPG

So, back in the 1980s, there wasn’t the internet as we think of it today. Back then, if you had a computer, the only way you had to exchange files with another computer was by writing your file to a floppy, walking up to whomever it was you wanted to give it to, and handing it to them. And then both of you could enjoy trying to get the floppy to work in a different computer.

The local computer store in Portsmouth, NH had an Atari 800 user’s group. That being my computer, I went there, traded games and stuff, and in general learned how cool my computer could be. But then… they were selling an entirely new computer, the Epson QX-10, and it was just incredible.

Two floppies! A really solid and fun keyboard. Cool graphics! And it ran the hot new CP/M operating system, which I used at work (and would later go on to help develop after I moved to California). And I think it was able to talk to other QX-10s if you had a modem.

So I got one. Slow, clunky, but I could dial up other QX-10s and exchange files. I didn’t know anyone else with a QX-10. People still thought Apple IIs were cool back then.

I used to read BYTE magazine, a magazine for computer hobbyists. Best thing about that magazine, aside from the Robert Tinney covers, were the advertisements. They had places to call where you could talk to other people, play games, post about books and movies, they had everything. For $12/hour, you could connect your computer to the world.

The world of CompuServe, that is. There were other similar services — The Source, The Well, Delphi. This was before Prodigy and AOL. CompuServe was the one I used, and it was so expensive, I used it as little as I could, but I couldn’t resist the games.

Most of the games were multiplayer arcade-like games, like Sub Hunt. But my favorite was the Island of Kesmai.

I’d played Rogue before, in college, so this really was right up my alley. It was much better than Rogue; even leaving aside the joy of playing with actual other people you could talk to, there were stores, dungeons, traps, all sorts of good stuff. It was so slow. Everyone was on a ten second timer. Move a square — ten seconds. Swing your sword — ten seconds. It was agonizing because every single minute meant more dollars. It was so slow that every battle was like a horror movie where the guy with the chainsaw hands would just keep coming and you couldn’t run away fast enough.

It was just incredibly compelling, though. I met a lot of friends through that game and others, some of whom I ended up meeting in real life.

Still, as much as I liked it and as much as I enjoyed meeting new folks and being part of something I just knew was going to end up taking such a big part of my life later on, it cost too much and there were new services coming up that were cheaper and had better games. Better multiplayer games at that. GEnie, AOL, Prodigy and so on, with their graphical interfaces, were just about to blow the legacy services away. BBSs were about to bring the same kinds of things the big services had, right to your town. And my super cool QX-10 would be replaced first with an Atari ST (I wrote a graphics CompuServe client for that computer), and then later, DOS boxes.

But that one magical year, when everything was text based, and MMOs let you move your character six whole times in a minute, I’ll never forget.

Island of Kesmai would go on to get a graphical refresh, change its name to Legends of Kesmai and move to America OnLine. I never played that version, as I was not an AOL subscriber. By that time, I was deep into BBSs and FidoNet and had the actual nascent internet at work in the form of “netnews”, AKA UseNet. I didn’t see a real need to pay for what I was getting for free.

I regretted that, later. AOL and GEnie had some really cool MMOs that I never got to play. But, money. Being online was expensive and I was anything but rich. It wasn’t until I got local dialup service that I stopped being charged by the minute.

Anyway. Legends of Kesmai had great success as one of the first graphical MMOs before it was bought by Electronic Arts and canned. EA will always be EA. And that was it, it was dead and buried and gone… but it’s been brought back to life.

Stormhalter, AKA The Legends of Kesmai, is an attempt to recreate the original LoK for a new generation. It retains a lot of the elements from the old Island of Kesmai. Moving is slow (but thankfully, not one move every ten seconds slow). The game has a hybrid action key/typing out commands interface which is a little frustrating.

Creating a character was easy. Choose a name, look and class, allocate your stat points, and you’re in. It’s what comes next that is confusing.

It took me well over an hour, with the wiki open next to me, to figure out how to move, get out of the city, die and resurrect. There’s a lot of dying, especially so when you don’t know how to fight. Three orcs moved on top of me and did things I will not talk about. While they were doing what orcs do, a herd of boars came over and helped. I flailed my sword around, but it was too much.

So, looting was its own little thing. In modern MMOs, looting is easy and fun. In this one, you have to drop into hex view, then click on corpses, then TYPE IN commands to loot each individual thing. The game hasn’t stopped while you’re doing this, either.

Eventually I reached level 5, kinda was getting a handle on this. If I could figure out how to use the store, maybe I could get better gear and not die so often. (The NPCs say to type ‘show prices’. This results in an error.)

I appreciate the effort the developers have put in to resurrect this piece of history but… I’ve moved on, I really have. Real time games that rely on typing commands just doesn’t work for me anymore.

I went online today wondering if the original Island of Kesmai was still running in any form, found this project, played it, but didn’t really connect with it and probably, if I had found the actual, ASCII, Islands of Kesmai running somewhere, the move six times a minute thing would have driven me crazy.

Still, it was nice to remember how things felt forty years ago. FORTY YEARS. OMG.