MMOs
In 3D, thousands of people are in the same world at the same time. The first to succeed commercially was Meridian 59 (September 27, 1996), and Ultima Online, the following year, brought this way of playing to the wider world. What UO attempted wasn't just a battlefield but a "living world" — animals grazing, breeding, being hunted. How that ambition actually played out is covered above under Myth. A word on the name too. The term "MMORPG" is often said to have been coined by Garriott and his team, but Garriott's own phrasing is "often credited with" — there is no surviving record of anyone using it first. This map doesn't say they "coined" it; it says they were "among those who established it while developing UO."
The myth, corrected
In Ultima Online, players hunted animals to extinction and the ecosystem collapsed
The person who designed the system denies it. According to lead designer Raph Koster's own account, the real cause wasn't the ecosystem but a clogged economy. Players hunted sheep, mass-produced shirts from the wool, and hoarded them. That drained the wool from the system's resource-distribution mechanism — "the central bank ran out of wool, and sheep stopped respawning." They weren't hunted to extinction; the system just stopped being able to supply them. The story remembered as a broken world was really a story of a broken ledger.