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Hi Wave,

I'm an archivist and historian for all things Habitat, WorldsAway and other related virtual worlds. I came across your post on here when combing through Google for stuff.

I thought I'd clear some stuff up and provide some context if you were interested in this particular virtual space.

Chip Morningstar (notable for creating the first compiler for the SCUMM engine, as well as coining the term avatar for use in the MMO space) and Randy Farmer (alongside Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts legend Aric Wilmunder who I interviewed here: https://renoproject.org/aric-wilmunder-interview/) created Habitat for the C64 back in 1985 at Lucasfilm Games in a joint partnerhip with the ISP Quantum Link, who later became America Online. Once the team completed Habitat, the Habitat world which was essentially just a beta test was shut down in the summer of 1988. Quantum Link spent a year working on redesigning the individual rooms or regions from Habitat and released it a year later under the name Club Caribe.

During this time, Habitat had been getting a good amount of press in Japan and it caught the eye of Fujitsu. Fujitsu seemed keen to be innovators in the field and so they licensed the Habitat intellectual property from Lucasfilm Games and created their own version which they released in January 1990 on the FM Towns home computer, called Fujitsu Habitat.

Due to the success of Fujitsu Habitat, in 1993, Fujitsu sought to purchase the Habitat IP outright from then LucasArts. Chip and Randy helped to negotiate the deal between LucasArts and Fujitsu and were also then brought in to create a successor to Fujitsu Habitat to be released in the west. The codename for the project was initially Reno, but the final product shipped under the name WorldsAway. This was all done under a subsidiary of Fujitsu called Fujitsu Open Systems Solutions, inc. Chip and Randy put the team together to create WorldsAway and it was all built in the states, but Japan wanted a localised Japanese version also so they worked on that seperately based on the work the US team as doing. WorldsAway would go into beta in August of 1995 on CompuServe which was another walled garden like ISP similar to AOL and it was the only way to access the service. The Japanese version of WorldsAway was called Habitat II and it released in March 1996 on NiftyServe, which was the Japanese equivalent of CompuServe. Habitat II was also unique in that it had a Sega Saturn client version which connected to the same servers as Windows and Mac users.

WorldsAway would be in active development from its inception in 1993, up until May of 1999, when the WorldsAway Products and Services group (at this time under the control of subsidiary Fujitsu Business Systems of America) was sold to a guy named David Andrews under his company Inworlds.com, Inc which would shortly be renamed to Avaterra.com, Inc.

Fujitsu maintained ownership of the WorldsAway intellectual property, but they held a 10% stake in Avaterra and licensed the WorldsAway software to them. Avaterra also took over the physical server hardware and retained some of the original Fujitsu team members who stayed onboard too. Work on a newer version of the WorldsAway client happened under Avaterra, but for the most part nothing really happened there. Avaterra drastically increased the amount of advertising that was to happen inworld, trying to partner with radio stations all over the USA and other business, putting unique areas in the world for those companies where you could visit, engage in games and events such as meetings with authors and celebrities, or just hang out.

Unfortunately for Avaterra, whilst they grew the playerbase for the two virtual worlds they were operating at the time using the WorldsAway technology, they got caught out by the Dot-com bubble in the middle of the year 2000. Investors had promised money to Avaterra and at the last minute, they pulled out and rendered the company inert. It hobbled along for a bit whilst David Andrews and a volunteer who had been working closely with the business tried to work something out to keep it going. In late 2000, that volunteer was able to get Fujitsu to license everything to his company and he stopped the service from going offline. David Andrews would return in 2001 to work alongside him to keep the worlds going, with that volunteer eventually leaving and David taking over for good.

In 2006, David Andrews sold the company to somebody else, who kept the lights on until July 2014, when WorldsAway (by this point known as VZones since June 1999) closed down for good. The current VZones service was spun up in 2018 under different ownership, but as you mentioned in your post, it's terribly expensive, it's run by somebody who doesn't have any understanding of how to manage a community and it's really just an excuse to bleed people dry who loved this online service for so long.

Just to clarify, WorldsAway and VZones are the same thing, but VZones was just a name rebranding. The first virtual world under the WorldsAway banner that opened in 1995 was called the Dreamscape. There was also a LGBT oriented world that launched in October 1996 named Pride which was set on a space station and Pride was open until 2000. A later world opened in July 1998 named Club Connect which was rebranded as New Radio World and featured different american cities with a radio station partner in each. New Radio World would be renamed to VZConnections after the Avaterra era began. More stuff happens after that, but this is the most relevant.

The interview you linked with Sheryl Knowles is from my site and I recently moved everything over to a new CMS. You can find a link to the current version of the interview here: https://renoproject.org/sheryl-knowles-interview/. There's an interview with an anonymous artist who worked on WorldsAway and they also worked alongside Sheryl at some of the same game companies, working on unreleased games for the Mega Drive/Genesis such as Fireteam Rogue, Cybernauts and Lord of the Rings for EA (https://renoproject.org/anonymous-artist-interview/).

I've got some email conversations with Sheryl I never published where we discuss her iconic artwork for the Amiga workbench floppy disk that I keep meaning to add to my site so thanks for the reminder!

Anyway that was wayyyy too much of an infodump, but I wanted to give a clearer picture of what happened, who owns what and what the heck this thing actually was. Habitat might've been the first graphical MMO, but WorldsAway really refined it in a way that's magical and I've not felt the same sense of community anywhere else online since. VRChat was the closest I ever came to feeling similarities, but it's an entirely different experience in many ways.

I've got a ton of screenshots, development stuff, magazine articles, books and other ephemera about Habitat, WorldsAway and what came next over at https://renoproject.org/imagearchive. I've also been filling out a wiki with other stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else like interviews, chat transcripts, meeting minutes, internal development emails, monthly development reports and other stuff over at https://wiki.renoproject.org.

Not sure if you're interested or had already heard, but The Palace, OnLive Traveler and EC Habitats have all been made open source under a team led by Randy Farmer and I'm part of that project. We're working on removing proprietary data and source code from the archives so it can be released to everybody.

I also forgot to mention, someone has created an unauthorised private server emulator of the WorldsAway server and hosts it over at https://altaway.xyz for free if you want to play around with it. It uses the original WorldsAway client and the server acts in the same way the original did, with some added quality of life improvements.