Habitat Chronicles

FACT CHECK: Lucasfilm's Habitat in Rogue Leaders

Recently, GameSetWatch published an excerpt from Rogue Leaders about Lucasfilm’s Habitat which includes several new images and wonderful details.

Unfortunately, it also contains several factual and categorical errors that need to be corrected in the public record since this book’s account has already been used to incorrectly update Habitat’s Wikipedia page.

This article will block-quote the relevant sections of the book, followed by factual corrections marked as FACT CHECK: or commentary marked with either Chip: or Randy: as appropriate.

Q-Link, as it was known, undercut that price to around $3.60 an hour by renting out spare, unused server space during low-usage times.

FACT CHECK: The underused, and therefore discounted, resource was not servers, but off-peak packet-switching network bandwidth.

Through this partnership a deal was hatched to produce an online game, with Lucasfilm Games creating the front-end game — Habitat — on the Commodore 64, and Q-Link producing the back-end, server-side software.

FACT CHECK: Lucasfilm also developed a large portion of the backend. Q-Link, lead by Janet Hunter, did the stuff that had to interface with their system, but Lucasfilm did the game-specific stuff.

Designer Noah Falstein had been working with one of the team engineers, Chip Morningstar, on the game concept.

Chip: That’s a little backwards. The original concept emerged from a collaboration between Noah and me, but the design itself was mine. We were all peers with the same title, “Designer/Programmer”, with an equal emphasis on concept and implementation.

Randy: See Chip’s post on the beginnings of Habitat for a detailed account those early days.

The game debuted internally at Lucasfilm Games at a company meeting in early 1988.

…

It looked like Habitat was a huge hit-in-the-making, and so in the fall of 1988 the beta was taken to a New York nightclub for a launch party as Lucasfilm Games and Q-Link prepared to revolutionize gaming.

FACT CHECK: Summer and Fall 1986, after the game had first been shown to selected industry and press people at the Chicago CES in June.

Randy: Watch the Habitat Promotional Video and it’s copyright date for verification.

Essentially, if 500 users were so committed to playing Habitat that they remained online long enough to eat up 1 percent of the network’s entire system bandwidth, a full-run production that could attract Rabbit Jack’s Casino numbers could boost that bandwidth number to 30 percent. “The way the system was built, the server software wasn’t capable of hosting that population while still being successful,” recalls Arnold.

Ultimately, these business challenges caused Habitat to be cancelled after the launch party, but before it had gone into full production and reached retail shelves. It would simply be too popular, and the necessary server fix would be too expensive to make the project viable. And so this massively original, inventive, and cutting-edge project was shelved for U.S. release.

From a business perspective, however, Habitat wasn’t a failure. The game was licensed to Fujitsu for use on its FM Towns PC-like platform, and the successor to Habitat was recast (with several of the original planned features now cut) as Corpe Caribe, described as an online Club Med, where it enjoyed some success.

FACT CHECK: The shipped product was Club Caribe, not “Corpe Caribe”. :: sigh ::

Chip: While there were some performance tuning issues that needed to be addressed, the cost of operations was never really the issue. Statements about performance considerations were a face saving way of covering for the what Q-Link perceived as the real problem, which was marketing risk. Basically, the product was so weird and out of the mainstream that they didn’t think they knew how to sell it. In particular, for some reason they felt that people would be put off by the fantasy and science fiction elements. We argued that this defied everything we knew from the history of computer games, but they believed their typical user was far more conventional and unimaginative than the typical game purchaser.

FACT CHECK: Club Caribe was Habitat and it was released commercially by Q-Link. It opened in January 1988 with the name change and a different marketing spin. Literally the only difference between the original Habitat client software and the Club Caribe software as shipped was the title screen image.

Chip: Basically, Q-Link reworked the world database to remove any of the objects that had any kind of fantasy or science fictional flavor. The idea was to make the world seem more ordinary, pitching it as a virtual resort. Notably, they didn’t use any avatar heads that were non-human.

Chip: Over the course of the first six months of operation, as they grew more comfortable with their users, all these pointless restrictions were eventually abandoned.

The licensing to Fujitsu for the FM Towns happened a couple years later.

Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, the two programming gurus who had built the system infrastructure

Chip and Randy: That’s a slight mischaracterization of our role. While we certainly programmed it, we think it’s more noteworthy that Chip designed the whole thing, and Randy ran the world. Both the design itself and our operational experience with it are arguably quite a bit more important to the historical significance of Habitat than was its implementation.

Randy: Well, except that we managed to get a virtual world client shoe-horned into a 1-megahertz, 300-baud, 64k-memory computer with a 165k floppy disk! Certainly not a fact of wide ranging repercussions, but still pretty damn impressive.

History | Posted by Randy at 2:45 PM | You can comment. Trackbacks are closed.