Playing the first 3D MMO - Meridian 59

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Let's go back to 1996, spice girls, power rangers, tazo's.

And the very first 3D graphical MMO, Meridian 59.

I spent a few hours playing the pioneer of the 3D MMO genre and, it's held up surprisingly well, I can only imagine what this was like with more people.

The music still rocks.

Thanks to my Patreons and Twitch subs for supporting the channel!

#MMO #MMORPG #Meridian59 #joshstrifehayes

[JB-bqmt]

Meridian 59 vet - You can solo the door puzzle at the end of the tutorial by putting /use to hot keys and strafing between the two really fast. Used to be an old trick we'd use back in the day. It'll take awhile but it's doable

[SilverKnight]

It's always impressive when games from 25+ years ago got the basics down so well that they're still pretty translatable even now. This game is old school as hell, but truthfully, it looks pretty fun to play. Playing a game for fun, at this stage, almost feels like it's been forgotten.

[harrycelentano]

I had the oldest character in the game. In fact, I was awarded the title "The Elder" because of it. A title that I still use to this day in other mmorpg's. That was the only way you could size up your opponent, by looking at their bio and their in game age. Every month equaled 1 meridian year. When I stopped playing I was 40 meridian years or 40 months. Crazy! I finally was offered a guide position which I was paid to "police" the other players. You would put them in a virtual jail if they broke game rules or swore. The most fun was being able to teleport to any location as a guide. There were secret areas that you can teleport to which contained sprites and the most rare objects in the game like the golden sword and helm. After that, the game became boring because I now saw everything that there was to see. Becoming a player guide ruined it for me. Oh, and Everquest didn't help either.
Last thing to add, my in game "best friend" was a character named Bronx. towards the end he revealed that he was actually the late actor Gary Coleman. RIP Buddy!

[MrDrus]

I remember seeing Meridian 59 ads displayed during Might & Magic VI installation - and my disappointment when I learned I needed the internet to play it (mind this was when the modems sounding like Monty Python ping machine having a stroke were ubiquitous).

Time passed, I forgot about this title (the GOG installer doesn't have the old ads), tried Everquest driven by nostalgia but something in my head kept on telling me this wasn't it. Aion, GW2, WoW - you know how it goes.

And now I see this video popping up in my recommended list and, unironically shedding the tear of nostalgia - thank you, Josh. From the bottom of my heart, thanks for taking me back to my childhood.

[scotmcpherson]

Hi Josh, a couple of things I would like to point out. You mentioned the lack of players, but you forgot that you specifically chose the server that was decidedly more quiet and with fewer players on it. You could have chosen the other more populated server. PvP isn't enabled until one reaches 30 HP, so you could have had a PvP free experience up until that point. Also regarding logging out while in the wilderness was how the developers discouraged people from logging out of the game midfight. A death like penalty for logging out in the wilderness was an effective way to discourage that sort of behavior. Also, keep in mind your experience was rather short lived, and you probably don't realize that pretty much no matter where you are in the game, you are withing 2 minutes of walking distance to an Inn. you just have to know where they are, and people who played the game long enough to reach 30 HP (the point where this makes a difference), probably already know where most of them are.

Regarding the tutorial and getting behind that wooden door, it is possible to open the door by yourself, however it is a pain in the neck with repeated failures until you get it, but the reward for doing so isn't necessarily worth the effort. You didn't really miss anything there. Additionally, there is very little group only content, just content that is EASIER to finish with a group.

The guards surround the flags are actually part of the faction mechanics of the game. When you reach 40 HP you have the choice to join one of three factions which grant some light buffs, but if an area is controlled by an opposing faction, those guards will chase you and fight you like the monsters will. Opposing factions players can fight the guards and tear down the flag in a capture the flag type mechanic bringing the captured flags to your faction leader for favor.

The lots of dead-ends were part of the design, as well running away from something (or someone) you could get yourself stuck in one of those dead ends accidentally.

As you mentioned the music is rather iconic and still enjoyed by past and present players. It was adventure music like you just don't have anymore in MMO games. When the game was at it's height, there were enough players to require I think it was almost 15 servers to support the entire player base, and at that time a player was locked to a server so you couldn't bounce from server to server to avoid running into a player that you wronged. Everyone was assigned to their server permanently for the most part, though you were allowed to have characters on multiple servers, you just couldn't move your characters back and forth between them. People would FREQUENTLY start over a experiment with builds and it was part of the fun for a majority of the player base at the time.

Regarding the Underworld (where you die), those portals don't really give you a fast travel option. The taverns that you spawn in through those portals rotate and every second or so (I don't really remember what the exact time frame is), the portals would shift to other taverns. You could therefore look at a portal, see The Limping Toad Inn, but when you walked through it, you ended up some place else because they had already shifted. The world itself was small enough that you could get from one end of the world to the other end within a few minutes of running, you just needed to know you way around.
The mini map is useful in the beginning, but again because the world is so small, people learn to navigate through the main first person window. It gets easier to recognize where you are from memory. Also, that Chalice of Tears you could in the Orc Cave....That is actually a fast travel tool. You can pick it up, but it's a puzzle requiring a lot of fighting of Orcs, clearing out the cave and casting a spell which opens a portal BEHIND the chalice, but also allows you to pick the Chalice up.

Meridian 59 was full of puzzles, not just monsters and exploration. There is lots of things to solve that aren't apparent at first, and some puzzles were never solved until the source code of the game was finally released to the public some years ago. Even so it's still a fun game to play, and as discussed in a previous conversation Meridian 59 is the inspiration for my MMO which is trying to recapture some of the lost spirit that modern MMOs just seem to lack.

[Patrick-goub]

I'm going to rally up a group of friends and give this game a go. Everything about it just seems so wholesome and charming to me.

[guysmith]

The best thing about Meridian, and I missed it when I moved to Everquest, was the sense of community combined with a healthy pvp dynamic. I remember ducking in and out of the pub because the town was taken over by a group of pvpers. And everyone being rescued when a guild coordinated attacking them.

[KubinWielki]

I don't quite understand why, but videos like this one always plunge me into a sense of nostalgia for something I have never participated in, and had pretty much no chance of doing so.

By the time Meridian59, or even the original Everquest (3 years after Meridian59) came out, I was very, very young and didn't know English yet, so there was no way I could've played those games, but seeing the footage now makes me deeply regret that I haven't had the chance to experience the MMO genre as it was budding, and all the games were designed with that "you need a group, you need to talk to people to be good at the game" mentality.

I think the driving force behind that faux nostalgia is that today, many MMOs are more or less "together alone", where the only time you *need* to interact with people is either in PvP or some high-endgame content (like raids), but even those are more or less micro-communities - many within a single game. The oldest mmos tended to have one large community, split up into guilds and even if said guilds warred with each other, a new player was usually very welcome by all of them.


Dunno, maybe I just miss feeling like the other players in a game are a part of the world that I can talk to, to learn about the secrets of said world, like talking to a mentor. Nowadays you get directed to wikis or youtube tutorials, and other players feel more like interactive decoration rather than an important part of the game's world.

[chrisevans-nodd]

I remember when M59 first came out in the '90s. My buddies & I spent hundreds of hours playing. We had a guild hall, got our skills/magic up enough to adventure on the Island, had all the cool gear. It was a fantastic experience. Alas we eventually moved on to "newer" games like EverQuest & so on. Fast forward a quarter century & I noticed M59 was available on Steam! I had to give this another go for nostalgia's sake. The game seemed both worse & better than I remembered. The graphics were... way more chunky than I recalled but the game mechanic, that is in many ways superiors to many modern titles. For example the skills/spells system is just fantastic. This really did set the standard for many MMOs to follow. Anyway, once again I've moved on to other games but it was a fun trip down memory lane to get to play this again, this time as an old man :-)

[wolframsteindl]

Man, imagine playing that game back in the days, with dozens of old-school roleplayers running around, making their own adventures. It must've been loads of fun.

[iceghost]

I'm an old fogey that used to play on MUDs a lot over telnet in the mid-90's. When games like Meridian 59 and EverQuest came out, they were really exciting for me because it was essentially a graphical version of MUDs. Great video, Josh. Very nostalgic for me.

[Rengarsus]

Ahhh, this is such a refreshing video. No scammers in sight, no chinese corporations, no cashgrab games... Just a gameplay of a work of passion, a glorious relic of the past we should all be thankful for

[Trigarta]

Thank you for this video. This takes me back. Meridian 59 is how I started my MMO journey many many years ago and fell in love with the genre to this day.

[pinewolfpresents]

"Death is essentially a realm where you can pick where to respawn from. Sort of like fast travel, but the cost is...well...dying."

In America, that's called a Greyhound bus

[PrettyGuardian]

I love how so many of these classic MMOs are actually still online. Ultima Online, Everquest, Everquest 2 (this one is starting to get into the modern iterations of MMOs like WoW), Meridian 59 etc.

[teos]

Okay. so. i downloaded this for shits and giggles. and holy hell it was amazing. this is by far the best game i've played this whole year or the past 5 years! i got in, struggled for 10 minutes to figure out how to talk, then 3 other guys popped in and we were all trying to figure out how the game works (it's f, the talk key is f) and then i went on an adventure with my newly found friend. a guy named "El Diablo" and i went off killing rats just outside the village gates, we got lost in a maze, found some dudes ring, chucked it away, since we don't know the guy and we are not charity, then i got separated from my friend and ended up getting gangbanged by like 6 frogmen. i did not survive. i spawned in HELL. yes literally. and went through the wrong door and got lost in a mountainous area. 10/10 El Diablo if you see this, i will remember you buddy. and i still owe you 2 gold coins for daring you to eat the giant turd pile in the starting town.

[robertwright]

Me and my brother Beta tested this game, we were on the original 102 server. I had one of the oldest characters on 102 because I never rerolled my character after the server updates. It seemed like every time there was an update everyone would redo their toons to try to take advantage of some "new" options which would only be nerfed out on the next update. I just left my character the way it was when I started. We played the game until they switched the billing model to some outrageously priced time blocks model which drove a huge portion of their players away. Never looked back and eventually went to EverQuest when it released in early 1999. I still play on EQ.

[keksittynimi]

Josh’s videos are in the rare category of ”like the video as soon as you start to watch it”

[MagicAlfi]

Just seeing places like that city, and the guestbook, and how players really played their character just to do that, and experience the wonder not to maximize a system and abuse it or get everything handed over but out of their own intrest, made me shed a tear. I also remember the time... when you could have a guestbook, and it was a great time to play an RPG. Because it wasn´t an MMO, it was an MMORPG.

[natecw]

Considering I was obsessed with Legend of the Red Dragon at the time, this game would have BLOWN ME AWAY in 1996.