Dragon's Gate
Dragon's Gate was an interactive, real time, text-based multi user online fantasy role-playing game, sometimes referred to as a MUD. It was one of the longest running pay-for-play online games in the world, it opened to the public in the spring of 1990 on GEnie. In the summer of 1996 the game was moved to AOL. Later the game was moved to Mythic Realms, and finally to independent server, where it ran until the summer of 2007.
History
At its creation, the core of Dragon's Gate was based on the AUSI-entitled game Aradath, which was programmed and designed in 1985 by Mark Jacobs. Dragon's Gate was originally developed by Mark Jacobs and Darrin Hyrup, who had joined AUSI from Simutronics where he had been a programmer on GemStone II and lead programmer on Orb Wars. Dragon's Gate was launched on GEnie in late 1989 and was eventually taken up by AOL as an online product.
Hyrup's initial work on the game was to help port the game to GEnie's Mark III operating system, though in the end, the resulting game was more of a new creation than a port. That partnership led to Hyrup becoming an integral part of AUSI as well as the evolution of the game from Aradath to Dragon's Gate on GEnie and to its other homes.