The Constellation Past Its Prime, or The Asset Flip MMOs That Could

October 13, 2025 • 3 min read

It is early 2001. Internet Explorer 5 is the most popular web browser in the world, Destiny’s Child are topping the Billboard Hot 100, and you can still legally bring a small knife on an airplane.

Somewhere along the way, RuneScape gets released in open beta. Unlike EverQuest, it is free and can be playable in any browser*. It allegedly gets 30,000 signups in the first three weeks. Unlike Concord, this is considered a great achievement.

*Any browser, as long as you have Java installed.

If we got inspired and went to make a similar “massive multiplayer adventure” with “full 3d engine” that would run in the browser, we’d need to use some kind of a plugin. Unity and Silverlight are not a thing yet, so that leaves us with Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Shockwave, or Sun^[1] Java. Nobody cares that the iPhone can’t run those, because iPhones also haven’t been invented yet.

But what if we REALLY wanted to go plugin-less? 2D sounds difficult without at least <canvas> (2004- in Safari). 3D sounds impossible without at least WebGL (2011-). That idea is out then. We need worse graphics and I’m not kidding.

Fortunately for us, text-based MUDs have existed for a long time and seem somewhat popular still. Could we adapt those for early 2000s browser tech?

The OG(ame)

Attack of the Clones is not the only “star war” of 2002. Alexander Rösner’s OGame (short for Online Game) debuts its first “universe” on October 3rd.

Wait, is that really what the name stands for?

Yeah! Talk about temporary solutions being the most permanent.

Now, OGame is not the first browser-based game. Hell, it’s not even the first German space-themed browser game, as Galaxywars has beaten it to the punch by over a year. It is, however, received well enough to warrant incorporation. Gameforge GmbH, the newly founded online marketing company game publisher, localizes OGame to English, Spanish, French, Turkish and many more. By February 2006, it has over two million active players.

Pretty decent for a PHP project initially done by a single dev in two months, huh?

The Copy

The browser game market is booming. On one hand, huge hits like Tribal Wars and Travian open more and more worlds. On the other, small open-source projects like gamers-fusion allow people not only to run their own games, but also to modify them.

It is obvious that there is a demand for a good quality clone, the best of both worlds. Some people might want a “private server” experience, with the leaderboard limited to their group of friends only. Some people may not like parts of the gameplay and would prefer to play with mods. Others just want ad revenue from the few players lost in the web.