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Meridian 59 opened commercially in September 1996, offering a first-person persistent world shared by many players for a fixed monthly charge. It is frequently cited as the first commercial 3D massively multiplayer role-playing game.
The subscription model that funded online worlds for the next two decades was proven here, along with the basic proposition that a game could be a place people pay to visit rather than an object they buy once. Both ideas outlived the game itself by a very wide margin.