Probably only the oldest of old-school online gamers can remember playing Habitat, an MMO that ran on the Commodore 64's Quantum Link online service starting way back in 1986. The early LucasArts classic (dating back to the days when the company was still called LucasFilm Games) went offline in 1988, living on briefly as the revamped Club Caribe and in a short-lived Japan-exclusive version under electronics maker Fujitsu.

Now, after years of work by the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) and some partners, the source code for that early experiment in online game design has been fully preserved and posted on Github.

The effort to revive Habitat began back in 2013, when MADE was researching a "History of LucasArts" exhibit for the 2014 Game Developers Conference. As part of that effort, MADE recruited original designers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer to help decipher old bits of PL/1 code and 6502 Assembly.

MADE then reached out to Fujitsu, which gave its blessing for the restoration project and was able to recover parts of the code that couldn't be read from the original C64 disks. The museum also had to track down a 300-pound vintage Stratus Technologies Nimbus server and then clean and restore it to the point that it could run the code designed to handle up to 10,000 players.

The restoration efforts got going in earnest during a 2014 hackathon, where a dozen participants were able to virtualize the old QLink protocols into versions that work over the modern TCP/IP standards (thanks to the assistance of the Quantum Link Reloaded open source project). Since then, the team has worked together over IRC to clean up the code and get it into a publicly releasable form.

At this point, MADE says it's still missing a few key server libraries controlled by AOL (which holds Quantum Link's old IP) and has had problems tracking them down. Even so, the museum hopes to getcompiled and running on a modern Linux server, a process it says "depends on how many contributors are out there, waiting to dive into 30-year-old PL/1 code, and to fill in the blanks left by QLink."

Trying to restore a little-remembered, 30-year-old online world may seem a bit quixotic, but MADE co-founder Alex Handy insists the project is important to help understand the history of a popular gaming genre. “A lot of the things that we see in modern MMORPGs originated in Habitat," Handy said in 2014. "The fact that people love cosmetic items, the fact that if you change things in the world, the user base will freak out…they created the ability to murder people in the game, there was a disease, there were quests…it’s extremely valuable for us to preserve the history of those things and this is doing that.”

The revived Habitat could also set important legal precedents. As Handy points out, the game's mere existence "has already been used to invalidate software patents around massively multiplayer online gaming."