Habitat, released in 1986 for the Commodore 64, is widely considered the first graphical massively multiplayer online game — nearly a decade before the term 'MMO' existed.

Built by Lucasfilm Games, it let thousands of subscribers walk cartoon avatars through a shared town, chat, trade items, and even get married or start businesses, all over painfully slow dial-up modems. Its creators later wrote candidly about the unexpected social dynamics that emerged — lessons that shaped how designers think about online communities to this day.