Commodore Cruisin' Bonus: Habitat/Neo Habitat
0At the end of the last Commodore Crusin', I looked at Lucasfilm Games' (later LucasArts) Labyrinth. Lucasfilm Games would also later work with Quantum Link on a large online connected world for the Commodore 64. Yes, all the way back in 1986 Commodore 64 users could connect to the internet not only to check news and stocks but also roam around a digital world, meet and talk to other real people, play games against them, and invite them to their home. Habitat, later named Club Caribe, was one of the first Graphical MUDs and is honestly incredibly ambitious for the time.
So how am I playing with it? Well thanks to the fine work of "The Made" and developed as part of The Museum of Digital Art and Entertainment, Neohabitat is an open-source relaunch of Habitat for the C64 led by Randy Farmer, one of Habitat's original creators. At the below site you can either download a self contained auto launching emulator that will get you into the world of Habitat or you can actually play it within a web browser (I found that worked aa bit better). One day I'd like to do a deeper dive into this with a bunch of discord folks. Expect a video about this thing in the future.
https://frandallfarmer.github.io/neohabitat-doc/docs/
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