Thirty years ago today, on September 27, 1996, Meridian 59 officially launched online after nine months in public alpha and beta testing. The development team was all in their early twenties and had never made a commercial game before. Players connected using their dial-up modems on Windows 95 with 16 MB of memory. Almost no one had a 3D graphics card. Online PC gaming had arrived!

In 2000, the original servers shut down, but Near Death Studios acquired, relaunched, and expanded the game. In 2010, the game returned to us, and in 2012 we released it as open source, spurring the creation of player-run versions of the game. Its 2018 launch on Steam brought in a wave of new players. Today, a small team of volunteers maintains and improves Meridian.

If you’re a longtime player, thank you for helping to keep the game alive all these years. If you’re new, give it a try. You’ll find an MMO that set the standard in some ways and still hasn’t been matched in others.

Zaphod and Zandramas
Meridian 59 co-creators