LucasArts’ long lost, 30-year-old MMO is now preserved on Github

Enlarge / World of Warcraft it ain't.

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 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.

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