DragonRealms
DragonRealms is a medieval fantasy MUD set in the world of Elanthia. It was developed from 1992-1995 and released in February of 1996. It was originally intended for the Ziff-Davis online service. When Ziff-Davis failed to create said service, DragonRealms was offered instead on GEnie and later AOL , Compuserve , and Prodigy . While in development, the DR team called its as yet unnamed game many things. The most popular name, though, was "Project Bob".
The game was built from a design put forth by Simutronics founder David Whatley and his penguin-hating sidekick John Donham. It was implemented by a team of off-site and on-site employees who included Eric Slick, Tina Hill, Elonka Dunin, Stephanie Shaver, David Dean, Barbara "Babs" Halberg, Jim Penrose (aka Moonshadow & Elvanion) and now- GemStone IV producer Melissa Meyer. Like its sister product, GemStone IV , DragonRealms is one of the longest-running and most popular online text games in existence. It is currently produced by Eric "Bubba" Latham.
During the first half of 2004, the staff of Simutronics and DragonRealms engaged in a major overhaul of the system to make it work with the newer game engine (IFE2). This project was dubbed "DR2" but, unlike GemStone IV , the actual name of the game was not changed.