The project seeks to relaunch the Habitat server on original Stratus Technologies hardware from 1989, and to allow users on the Internet to connect to the game server for free using a Commodore 64 emulator.

The MADE is the first videogame museum to attempt such a relaunch. In fact, there has never been an attempt to relaunch a 28 year old, dead MMO before, primarily because MMO's are mostly a phenomenon that has existed only over the last 15 years.

As the first MMO, Habitat invented a lot of the terms used today, such as Avatar. The game was hosted on the Quantum Link service, which eventually became America Online. Other companies involved in our Habitat resurrection project include Fujitsu, which owns the rights to the game, KIXEYE, the leader in online and mobile combat strategy games, which is sponsoring the effort, and Stratus Technologies, which donated the vintage server.

Habitat will remain online and playable, provided the hackathon to bring it online on September 28th is successful. Given a successful relaunch, Habitat will remain online until we are able to replace it with a modern code base and modern server hardware. More information about the technical efforts involved in this work are online here, and here.

“Lucasfilm Games, and the work of Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer on Habitat were extremely far ahead of their time. In an era where the online service that hosted the game was only available on evenings and weekends, these two men built a completely new type of online interaction, and they built it in such a robust way that we anticipate, almost thirty years later that this 1989-era server hardware can support up to 10,000 users,” said Alex Handy, founder and director of the MADE.

Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections at Stanford University Libraries and founding member of The MADE's board of directors, said that "Digital games without a doubt have become one of the central creative media available for entertainment, art and other forms of expression. So much so that contemporary cultural history is difficult to talk about without including digital games. As a result, not only will the history of this medium be lost if we do not preserve the history of digital games, but there is more at stake: we will be unable to provide a complete cultural history of our times.”

Donors interested in supporting the MADE can donate on the official website.