Justin Olivetti is Massively Overpowered’s resident Game Archaeologist; he never lets a good old game stay buried. [Follow this column’s RSS feed]
the game archaeologist
The Game Archaeologist: Pirates of the Caribbean Online
In 1967, Disneyland opened one of its most iconic attractions: a dark boat ride called Pirates of the Caribbean. A large fandom surrounding the...
The Game Archaeologist: PlaneShift, the poster child of open-source MMOs
As the character creation screen fades out, a dark vista fades into being. The fledgling adventurer looks around at dim shapes and sinister movements...
The Game Archaeologist’s ultimate MMO archives v6.0
And that's a wrap on this year in history! While everyone says farewell to 2022, here at TGA we're always looking way back at...
The Game Archaeologist: Wizardry Online, the short-lived permadeath MMO
While the Wizardry series may not have the cultural cache that Ultima or Final Fantasy ended up with, nevertheless the dungeon crawling RPG series...
The Game Archaeologist: The radically different design of early EverQuest II
Sometimes it's all about timing -- both good and bad -- when it comes to MMORPG releases. EverQuest II may go down as the...
The Game Archaeologist: Dark Ages, the weird lovechild of Celtic lore and Lovecraftian legends
While the online world was fascinated by "the Big Three" Western MMOs in 1999 -- that would be EverQuest, Ultima Online, and Asheron's Call...
The Game Archaeologist: The legacy of Ultima Online
Last week in The Game Archaeologist, we traced the history of Ultima Online’s origin, development, and testing -- not to mention one pesky in-game...
The Game Archaeologist: How Ultima Online got made
You know how there’s that yokel in every global chat channel that likes to troll players by claiming that World of Warcraft was the...
The Game Archaeologist: MegaWars, the Star Trek online sim from the ’70s
When we look at the early days of online computer gaming, it shouldn't be a surprise that the geeky crowd that was working on...
The Game Archaeologist: That time when EverQuest let you play as the monsters
It's a near-given that in every MMORPG, players assume the roles of heroes who are sent out to vanquish the evil, dark, or at...
The Game Archaeologist: The origins of Blizzard, Mythic, Funcom, SOE, and BioWare
A good origin story always captivates me, especially when it gives me a new perspective on something I've come to appreciate over the years....
The Game Archaeologist: The ’90s BioWare MMORPG that almost was
These days, if you mention "BioWare" and "MMORPG" in the same sentence, it's most certainly going to be about Star Wars: The Old Republic....
The Game Archaeologist: Six cancelled MMOs that I wish had launched
In my lengthy tenure writing The Game Archaeologist -- which dates back to May 2010, if you can believe it -- I've covered MMOs...
The Game Archaeologist: When EverQuest players killed the unkillable Sleeper
In many CRPGs and MMORPGs, there are bosses designed to be so crazy tough that, for most people, these enemies are straight-out unkillable. Developers...
The Game Archaeologist: Dark Zion, the brainchild of Tad Williams and Ultima Online devs
It has almost become a running joke in MMO circles that pretty much every new studio and new title these days was founded by...
The Game Archaeologist: Dark Eyes, a forgotten Japanese MMO from 1999
For a country that was the epicenter of video games (and, in many ways, still is), Japan never quite latched onto the MMORPG genre...
The Game Archaeologist: The history of Hi-Rez’s Global Agenda
This past week, former Global Agenda players woke up to a surprising reality: Their game, which went offline in 2018, suddenly was back. Hi-Rez...
The Game Archaeologist: Talking 25-year-old Tibia with CipSoft
It's not every MMORPG that can boast that it started back in the late '90s and is still going strong even today. However, Tibia...
The Game Archaeologist: The Blizzard Real ID fiasco of 2010
As we come off a year when Blizzard Entertainment's seedy underbelly of scandals and coverups was exposed, I thought it might be worth risking...
The Game Archaeologist’s ultimate MMO archives v5.0
It has been another thrilling year of exploring the relatively unknown or forgotten lands of MMORPG history here in The Game Archaeologist. From projects...
