Back in the day, MMORPGs were very rarely anything more than a constant lesson in abstract misery and pain. Leveling was often done in the most boring of fashions, making today's grinds look like rides on a candy-coated rollercoaster in comparison. If you wanted to reach maximum level, you really had to work for it. Achieving anything in these games was an exercise in superhuman willpower and determination, as not only did one have to have the time and the patience to achieve a goal, but they also had to ignore just how BORING the game was. Or was it? Maybe they only seem boring looking back. After all, at the time, online games were a new and exciting thing.

Let me tell you young pups something, though. We used to have to schlep ourselves across vast, bland, often 2D terrains to get to wherever it was we needed to go. Back then, we didn't have your fancy level designers and art directors and what have you. We had a bunch of nerds in a basement somewhere throwing down open spaces, drawing a few trees, and then focusing on designing the terrible tortures they could inflict upon the playerbase through the game mechanics. MMORPGs weren't games back then, no, they were like online S&M dungeons; you go in expecting, even wanting pain. Sweet, sweet pain.

Tibia - a Classic MMORPG Released in 1997

What about these “quests” you kids are always having in these new games, with your fancy minimaps and your fancy bonus experience points upon completion? Just try finding your way around the original EverQuest. It was damn near impossible since the game didn't have a map. Why, in the olden days, we didn't have any quests at all! If we did, they were hidden things, squirreled away in the dialogue tree of some obscure NPC no one really knew about, and the rewards were often pointless, or game breakingly important, so even though no one really knew about it, you HAD to know about it. We didn't walk along some well-lit, marked path to success. We had to wander around blindly like cave salamanders, groping for something, ANYTHING that could help us along in reaching our ultimate goals of video game ascension.

There wasn't any weird “soul binding” for items, no, we just grabbed things and used them, then sold them or whatever when we were done. Or in the case of Ultima Online, we'd just drop them upon death. That was it. None of these big brother-esque attempts at controlling the game's economy, no oversights or boundaries. Things were free and true, players were able to pursue whatever they pleased inside the game world without some smarty-pants, know-it-all developer telling them what to do. Open world PvP and Pking was the norm. Scamming was even allowed! It was the true MMORPG frontier, where men were men, women were women, and orcs were most often orcs, unless they were goblins.

Ultima Online Released 1997. No Quests. Open PvP. Scamming Allowed.

So what, you think I'm making all of this up? You think I'm exaggerating? Well, we didn't even have fancy cable modems either. We had to connect to the internet using a cranky little phone modem, and it made it so people couldn't call you, cause your line would be in use, and we didn't HAVE cell phones back then. That's right! When you were a shut-in online gamer in those days, you truly were cut off from reality. No one could bother you! If anyone tried to call you though, you'd get a huge lag spike in your game because the phone line was busy and likely get killed. What's more, computer screens weren't fancy flat screen monitors, no. They were radiation-projecting behemoths, and they weighed a hundred pounds each, cause their center was powered by uranium slugs. A good week in front of those babies deadened your skin to a nice, aristocratic paleness.

Chairs were less comfortable too, and parents were more annoying and paranoid about video games being the hands of Satan reaching through the TV screen to suck the souls of their children into Hell. It was a brutal, savage world. It was the early 90's. We didn't even have wide-mouth soda cans yet. So if I hear any of you youngsters complaining about gaming today, I'll just shake my cane and laugh. You don't know how good you've got it!

Unless you play some super grindy eastern MMORPGs, in which case I am in awe of your tolerance for pain.