Worldforge, which first emerged onto the scene back in 1997, bills itself as “the original open-source MMORPG project.” And that’s certainly a fair descriptor of what it is. It isn’t, strictly speaking, an MMO in and of itself, but is rather a framework for the creation, hosting, and playing of MMO-type games.

From the project’s site: “The WorldForge project is about building tools to allow the construction of online role-playing games. The original community came together over a decade ago, out of a desire to create a game that was better and freer than Ultima Online. But as the aims of the project evolved and became more ambitious, the overall goal changed. Instead of one game, we instead decided build a flexible framework that would allow everyone to contribute their own unique ideas and goals to the Worldforge project, allowing a multitude of games to be created.

Our core focus is the construction of a complete system with all the tools, technology, content and artwork required to build complex persistent online virtual worlds.”

At present, no actual game has been built with Worldforge, although a sort of persistent tech demo — dubbed Mason — is online and playable. An alpha version of a terrain toolkit, built with GTK, is also available. Clients are available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, and the server software is available for Windows and Linux. These are all available from the newly-created project entry.