Porting Zelda Classic to the web

I had Graal on a shovelware CD, but back then we didn't have Internet access at home. I could start the client and walk around on some of the maps that were included, occasionally interacting with scripted characters, but mostly just picking up jars and throwing them around. I didn't know any of the back story and no documentation was on the disc, so it turned out to be quite boring after a while :)

Also when you went to sleep in a bed, your body disappeared and only your head remained visible, floating above the pillow. I found it pretty funny for some reason.

Edit: this was the Java version's homepage: http://web.archive.org/web/19990423103617/http://www.cyberjo...

Amazingly I had never heard of this! A link to the past was one of the first (and only) first party games I owned on the SNES and I played it until it almost fell apart. A multiplayer version would have been amazing!

Ultima Online was actually ahead of its time in many aspects (it sort of still is).

The concept of 'shards' which many MMO games embraced (sometimes not even supporting as many players). Only Eve Online really rejected the idea.

The in-game 'economy', by having player craftable items, done in a way that IMHO was way better than what WoW came up with. It wasn't restricted to crafting. Mages could charge for portals, ditto for healers. There was robbery - you could either demand money or pickpocket people.

Law enforcement was limited to cities and had to be called.

Housing! That was actually in world, not another instance. There was actually a real state market. And scouting for empty spots was a viable 'profession', even if informal.

Full PVP - in fact, I'd say that the non-PVP servers actually caused its demise.

One concept that was not embraced by later MMO games was 'no levels'. Only had skills and attributes. And items were not a big deal. Sure, you could yield a very rare magical sword, but are you really going to risk losing it? Most people would fight with cheap weapons and armor and only take out the special stuff in limited circumstances.

I could go on.

I think there's a modern 'Ultima' game that could be birthed from what Origin came up with decades ago.

Funny you should mention UO. I've been working forever to recreate the UO experience (it's called Gridia, you can find links to it on my website). Not too far from being ready, but still a lot of work to be done. Now that I've wrapped up this Zelda Classic project I'll return my focus to Gridia soon.

It reminds me: a decade ago, I had the idea of porting Baldur's Gate 2 to the web: http://lumakey.net/labs/battleground/demo1/

I initially played with EMSCRIPTEN as well, starting from GemRB, an open-source reimplementation of the engine. But that was boring, as I wasn't really getting any sense of how things were working under the hood.

So I started reverse-engineering the various file formats (a website called IESDP had most things figured out already) and converting them to PNG, JSON and other web formats. At that point I only knew PHP which made it a pain to work with binary data. Then, I started rebuilding the game from scratch: pathfinding, streaming huge maps using small tiles, animations...

10 years later, there's still that one single room and single character that were implemented, but it was still fun times.