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There is no one agreed family tree of video games, arranged and pruned by consensus. There is no single progenitor that sits at the top of that tree, the seed from which all other video games originate. The video-game family tree is knotted, tangled and grimly contested. We can all agree that Donkey Kong begat Super Mario Bros. But did the modern role playing games flow from Adventure, Wizardry or Black Onyx? Historians can't even agree on who first put a game onto a computer. There were, rather, multiple, dispersed inventors, people who eureka'd in darkened bellies of universities, where the comically large mainframe computers of the mid-20th century hummed with potential and electrical warmth.
One branch of the family tree, however, is different. This lineage is ordered and unchallenged. The modern MMO, those vast, complex online worlds where players can socialise and quest together, can be cleanly traced back through Wildstar, World of Warcraft, Everquest and all the way back to MUD, the primordial earth from which almost all virtual worlds sprouted. Richard Bartle, the 54-year-old co-creator of the game is unequivocal. "There is obviously a difference in style, but nevertheless, in the same way that the latest 3D movie today is fundamentally the same thing as a Charlie Chaplin short, so today's MMOs are MUDs," he says.
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