The Realm Online is an early MMORPG that was part of the foundation that holds up great titles like Final Fantasy 14, The Elder Scrolls Online, and even Diablo 4.
Starting up in 1996, it was made by the fine folks at Sierra Entertainment. It’s finally getting the plug pulled.
A little history about The Realm Online
If you played games back in the 1980s and 90s, you likely stumbled across Sierra’s library of games at some point, including titles like King’s Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and (yes, they even published) the original Half-Life. The Realm was their foray into MMOs and earned a pretty hardcore cult fanbase over the years.
The Realm Online was a graphical multi-user dungeon (or MUD for short) that had turn-based fighting. This would be helpful during that particular era (seriously, it was 1996) due to internet speeds being not so great. However, it earned its place in history by being credited as the first use of “instances”.
Not long after its release, the competition started to come out and shine.The Realm Online had pretty horrid character creation options due to optimization necessities. If you didn’t make your character a certain way, it’d never achieve full potential in the game. As time went on, it began to get pretty rough criticism when compared to other MMOs like Everquest and Ultima Online.
By 2003, it was abandoned by Sierra and left for dead. But, alas! It somehow survived! They kept it running on life support under various subdivisions of Sierra and Vivendi, which are now all under the thumb of Activision Blizzard.
Back in 2018, Norseman Games (the current hospice of The Realm Online) got Rat Labs, LLC to continue to develop and handle the game. Rat Labs, now named Realm World LLC, handled a private server for the game prior and absolutely understood the assignment. They brought an official free-to-play server, as well as tons of updates and content. Five years later, talks have finally broken down.
The Realm Online is going offline
The year is 2023. The Real Online has been “online” for 27 years. Norseman Games and Realm World LLC have parted ways.
Since this past March, Realm Worlds has been in talks to fully take ownership of the entire IP. Unfortunately, during negotiations, Norseman Games never gave any offer with “no path to acquiring the IP”. The money dried up and here we are.
Image: GameCrate / Arthur Collins
The Realm Online will officially shut down on June 30th, 2023, at 6 PM EST. They’re offering partial refunds to current subscribers until then.
You can see their post on the official website for now. If it disappears with the website, the forums have the full body of the goodbye text as well.
If you like classic Sierra games, you might also be a fan of old Lucasarts games as well. Did you know that Monkey Island is coming to Sea of Thieves next month?
We also dove this week into YouTube’s potential upcoming gaming platform on their website with Playables.
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Arthur Collins
Arthur Collins likes collecting titles. Some call him Dungeon Master, some call him Pokemon Professor. He's been a journalist off and on for over a decade and a half, which means he's almost Level 2 in journalism. You can find him yelling at his screen while playing Halo or curled up playing games like Animal Crossing. Or on Twitter. He has one of those at @professorchime
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Avenir Light is a clean and stylish font favored by designers. It's easy on the eyes and a great go-to font for titles, paragraphs & more.
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Avenir Light is a clean and stylish font favored by designers. It's easy on the eyes and a great go-to font for titles, paragraphs & more.