From Snow Crash to today: a short history of virtual worlds

The word arrived before the thing. In 1992 Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash, a satirical cyberpunk novel in which people put on goggles and walk down the Street, a glowing boulevard that circles a black planet and is lined with buildings anyone can develop for a fee. Stephenson called it the Metaverse. The idea he described — a shared, persistent virtual place with its own property, economy and status games — was not entirely new, but the name stuck, and three decades later it would end up on the sign outside a corporate headquarters.

Before the name: 1960s to 1980s

The technical roots go back further. In 1962 the cinematographer Morton Heilig patented the Sensorama, an arcade-style booth that combined stereoscopic film with vibration, wind and smell. In 1968 Ivan Sutherland and his students built what is often called the first head-mounted display; it was so heavy it had to hang from the ceiling, which earned it the nickname “the Sword of Damocles”.

The social side of virtual worlds started in text. In 1978 Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex wrote MUD, a multi-user dungeon in which players typed commands to move between rooms, talk and fight. MUDs and their descendants established almost every social pattern that later 3D worlds would rediscover: guilds, griefing, player-run economies and endless arguments about moderation.

In 1986 Lucasfilm Games began testing Habitat, a graphical online world for the Commodore 64 in which players shared a cartoon town with its own currency. Its designers, Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, later wrote a much-quoted paper about the experience. Its central lesson still holds: a virtual world is defined far more by what its inhabitants do than by what its creators plan. Meanwhile fiction was busy naming things. William Gibson coined “cyberspace” in a 1982 short story and popularised it two years later in Neuromancer.

The 1990s: 3D goes online

The 1990s brought a wave of consumer VR hype — and its collapse, as headsets of the era proved heavy, expensive and nauseating — alongside the first serious attempts to put 3D spaces online. VRML, the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, was proposed in 1994 as a way to describe 3D scenes on the web. Active Worlds, launched in 1995, let users claim land and build in a shared 3D space years before that became a pitch-deck staple. Graphical online role-playing games such as Ultima Online (1997) and EverQuest (1999) showed that hundreds of thousands of people would pay a monthly fee to live a second life in a fantasy world.

2003 to 2011: Second Life and the creators

Linden Lab’s Second Life, which opened in 2003, was the closest thing yet to Stephenson’s Street. It had no game objectives at all. Residents bought land, built houses, ran clubs and shops, and traded in Linden dollars that could be exchanged for real money. Universities taught classes there, companies opened offices and magazines ran breathless cover stories. The hype faded, but the world never closed, and it still has a loyal population today.

At the same time, games kept getting more social. World of Warcraft (2004) peaked at around twelve million subscribers. Roblox (2006) and Minecraft (first public version 2009) took a different route: rather than building one grand world, they gave players the tools to build millions of small ones. That turned out to be the model with the most staying power.

2012 to 2020: VR returns

In 2012 a Kickstarter campaign for a headset called the Oculus Rift raised nearly 2.5 million dollars, and two years later Facebook bought the company for around two billion. Consumer headsets from several manufacturers followed in 2016. Social VR platforms such as VRChat and Rec Room grew small but intensely loyal communities, and standalone headsets that needed no PC or cables made VR far easier to try.

Then, in April 2020, with much of the world in lockdown, Travis Scott’s Astronomical concert inside Fortnite drew more than twelve million concurrent players. It was a short, scripted show, but it made an argument no white paper had managed: shared virtual events could be a mass medium. We look at what came next in our piece on virtual concerts.

2021 onwards: the hype cycle and after

In October 2021 Facebook renamed itself Meta, and “metaverse” briefly became the most discussed word in technology. A wave of announcements, virtual land sales and rebrandings followed. When interest rates rose and the promised users did not materialise, many of those projects quietly closed.

What survived is less glamorous and more interesting: steady growth of user-generated game platforms, a new generation of mixed-reality headsets, serious industrial use of real-time 3D, and a slow push towards open standards. The history of virtual worlds has always worked like this — loud promises, quiet progress — and there is little reason to expect the next chapter to be different.

Correction, 2 July 2025: an earlier version of this article said Habitat opened to players in 1985. Its pilot run began in 1986.