William Figures FICTION WRITING FICTION WRITING 274 TEST Kelton Flinn is an American computer game designer who is a major pioneer in online games He is a co founder with his University of Virginia classmate John Taylor of the seminal online game company Kesmai which they began in 1982 His best known title is the first graphical multi player online game offered by a major service Air Warrior 1987 1970s university mainframe games Like Marc Blank Will Crowther Don Daglow and Gregory Yob Flinn and Taylor were key innovators in the 1970s university gaming culture where students played for free on college mainframe computers Flinn took advantage of his pursuit of an advanced degree a PhD in applied mathematics to build a long series of games across his undergraduate and graduate school career Most students lost all access to computers after graduation in the days before personal computers were invented but Flinn s extended years of study gave him the chance to build a large body of major works Key games Flinn and Taylor created during this time include Air 1977 1979 a text air combat game that foreshadowed Air Warrior The first version was created in 1977 and worked on through 1979 As Flinn has said If Air Warrior was a primate swinging in the trees AIR was the text based amoeba crawling on the ocean floor But it was quasi real time multi player and attempted to render 3 D on the terminal using ASCII graphics It was an acquired taste S a multi player space colonization and combat game 1979 Flinn and Taylor wrote the game over their summer vacations at the University of Virginia MegaWars III would be based on S after they founded Kesmai Dungeons of Kesmai 1980 a text adventure game with very little puzzle solving and an emphasis on exploration and combat The game s name would also appear later as a text based online adventure from Kesmai Flinn and Taylor had seen and played Adventure and Zork but chose to emphasize action in their title again written during their summer vacations as college students Island of Kesmai 1981 expands on their gaming system in this case trying to use all the power of the university s new VAX computer They added rich text descriptions to the ASCII graphic maps and minimal combat feedback text of their prior games The university reported to its dismay that the game did indeed use all the processing power of the new VAX Founding of Kesmai In 1982 Flinn and Taylor founded the game developer Kesmai and began working with CompuServe to offer multi player games on a fee per hour basis But once they began porting their code it turned out that the code that ran for free on the university s computer was hugely inefficient and they burned 100 000 USD in computer time on CompuServe s system in three days before concluding they needed to rewrite their engine Kesmai s major titles include Mega Wars III 1983 Ironically it was the chance to create Mega Wars III for CompuServe in 1983 that allowed Kesmai to adapt S for the system and make it available for online play Another irony Not one of the Mega Wars games are related to each other except by name the original was based on the old university mainframe game DECWAR Island of Kesmai 1985 The rewrite of Flinn and Taylor s old text action adventure game went live at the end of 1985 after a long internal test cycle It cost 6 an hour at 300 baud the slow dial up modems of the day 12 for 1200 baud the fast dial up modems Stellar Warrior 1985 This rewrite of Mega Wars III introduced substantially simplified game play to expand its potential audience and debuted on the GEnie online service the same day that Islands of Kesmai went live on CompuServe Air Warrior 1986 This game offered on GEnie is a key milestone in the history of computer games because it was the first commercial multiplayer online game to add graphics displaying a 3D airplane dogfight environment The original Neverwinter Nights which was the first MMORPG to use graphics was not to debut until a full five years later in 1991 The original game was on the Apple Macintosh and was followed by Amiga and Atari ST versions the IBM PC version debuted in 1987 In another major innovation Kesmai combined Mac Amiga Atari ST and IBM PC players all in the same game flying against each other Multiplayer BattleTech EGA 1991 This title takes the Air Warrior concept to land based Mech combat The game had some problems with frame rate and latency due to the need for the computer to draw more terrain in land based displays than it needed to draw when planes are flying in the air and much of the background is plain blue sky In the 1990s Kesmai was acquired by News Corp which later sold it to Electronic Arts The studio was disbanded but EA continued to use the Kesmai name as a brand References External links Flinn s rap sheet at MobyGames