Raph Koster has posted embeds of a three-part video series by All Your History which purports to examine the history of MMOs. However, Koster (an experienced MMO dev in his own right, who has written much of the genre’s history himself) had a vew issues with the videos. Here they are, first, so you can judge for yourselves:

As noted, Koster spotted several inaccuracies (“oddities, errors, and omissions”, as he puts it) in the videos, which he detailed in a handful of brief points:

• Leaving out Kingdom of the Winds, which predated Lineage.
• Leaving out kids’ MMOs entirely, especially Club Penguin.
• Saying that the Ultima Online team had never made anything multiplayer before (Ken Demarest, mentioned in the documentary, left very shortly after UO actually had a team put together — and the original core team that was assembled on the programming and design side was all MUD/MUSH/MOO veterans except for one guy).
• Saying that Meridian 59 going flat fee was what opened up that business model…I’m fuzzy on this, but my recollection is that M59 was not flat fee at launch…it happened later. And for a while they had a weird complicated fee structure…

And it goes on from there. Do pop on over and see the rest of what he had to say.

Oops: Turns out there is a fourth part: