Habitat, built by Morningstar and Randy Farmer for Lucasfilm, let players walk a cartoon character through a shared 2D town, chat, and trade — arguably the first true graphical MMO, years before the term existed. Morningstar borrowed 'avatar' from its original Hindu/Sanskrit meaning, a deity's earthly embodiment, to describe the on-screen body a player briefly inhabits. The word stuck, and outlived the game itself by decades.