Habitat

Habitat, produced by Lucasfilm Games in 1986, is one of the strangest records you will find in any Commodore 64 catalogue. It is not a game in the ordinary sense but a shared graphical world for many users at once, reached over a telephone line with a modem, where participants met each other as figures moving around a screen.

The year matters enormously here. An eight-bit home computer with a modem in 1986 had bandwidth that would not carry a single photograph today, so the artwork for the world was stored locally on each user's machine and the line carried only who stood where and what they said. That split was unusual for its time and marks one of the earliest attempts at a visual online space at all.

The view shows a scene from the side, with figures walking through it, talking to one another and handling objects. The record correctly lists it as multiplayer: without other people the environment loses its purpose, because most of what happened inside it was produced by the users themselves through conversation and improvisation.

For a visitor today the interesting part is what survived into later software: the layout of the controls, the text window, and the notion of an avatar that dozens of nineties online worlds took over wholesale. Historically it sits between text-based conferencing systems and the graphical online games that followed.

This piece of history can be tried right here - OldGame.cz runs it inside the browser window with nothing to install.