I'd heard of M59 back in my EQ days, but never even saw a screenshot of it before, so the article was interesting. EQ was much more a PVE game (with PvP certai

I'd heard of M59 back in my EQ days, but never even saw a screenshot of it before, so the article was interesting. EQ was much more a PVE game (with PvP certainly present), and as others have said, inspired by MUDS. Having never been much interested in MUDS, we shipped "Prince of Destruction" a multiplayer (LAN) 2D RPG in 1994 which had many of the features of later games (including persistence between sessions). I say this because these ideas were all "in the air", and it's silly to suggest the EQ guys based their stuff on M59. D&D (RPG concept), RuneQuest (skill systems), Rogue, Akalabeth, Wizardry, etc. had established the basic concepts by 1982, and the idea of making giant servers with hundreds of players or whatever was merely a question of execution. One of the underappreciated aspects of EQ was the rather sophisticated (for the time) monster AI from which a lot of gameplay emerged.