Back in the 1990s, we had Lucasfilm's Habitat on QLink, for Commodore 64 users, and Fujitsu's Habitat based on that. In 1993, they Fujitsu started work on WorldsAway, and partnered with CompuServe to launch the first world, the Dreamscape, in late 1995. It was going to be the future of online communications. User customisable avatars could wander around an expansive world and interact with each other, buy sell and collect various objects, and join in community games and activities. It was even pitched as hosting business meetings. I was a subscriber and a very passionate user of the service. This was fun, and I made many friends. For a detailed history, I recommend looking up the RenoProject website (No connection to me, I'm just a fan!)

Now in early 1997 Fujitsu published details on their Affinity programme, whereby worthy causes would be sponsored to run their own worlds.

Affinity Program
Under the WorldsAway affinity program, you may be eligible for FSC to waive your fees for virtual-world licensing, support and hosting. If we think you have an excellent potential to develop immersive, growing communities in a virtual world, WorldsAway will act as executive producer and transform your website into a cutting-edge kingdom. Contact WorldsAway for more details. We will only offer this program for a short time, so if you think you qualify, contact us immediately. Time waits for no world…

A group of us put together a proposal and tried to take advantage of this, but due to workload and changing priorities at Fujitsu, we kept getting deferred, and eventually the programme was dropped.

As a consequence, we started work on our own server software, with a view to just doing it ourselves. We loved the WorldsAway aesthetic, so wanted to maintain compatibility with the current client that everybody already had installed. The communications between the client and server were not encrypted or obfuscated, so it was trivial to write a small logging proxy to grab the network traffic. With the data so obtained, we managed to get a small proof of concept server working. I was the main programmer, but unfortunately, with the tools available at the time, and no details on the custom image format, and a subsequent breakdown in my marriage, I had to step away from it all by the end of 1999. Around the same time, Fujitsu finally lost interest, and sold off the subsidiary responsible for running WorldsAway, the new company formed being Avaterra. Avaterra rebranded the WorldsAway service itself initially as Virtual Zones, then later simply VZones. Fujitsu maintained ownership of the WorldsAway software and images, evidenced by their ability to licence it out to other companies after the Avaterra deal.

The history of VZones is long and convoluted, but boils down to the domain name and physical Sun servers being handed around multiple owners and companies, with the service closed down and reborn phoenix-like several times. I have my doubts that the current owners are operating under a legal licence, either from Fujitsu or Oracle, (The Sun server operating system licence was non-transferrable) however, that's no concern of ours.

Fast forward to 2016, in a bit of nostalgia, I did some web searches and found that WorldsAway was gone, Avaterra was gone, VZones had gone. I did find Metroworlds, a new service using a licenced copy of the original server and client. Filled with renewed enthusiasm, I dug out my old code and revisited it. 20 years of additional experience and advances in technology made it only a few evenings work to produce something that worked somewhat better than the code that had taken months before it was abandoned. With the old logs, it was easy. I even managed to recover the original Dreamscape and other world locales that had been recorded in the log files. But again I shelved it for time based reasons.

Onward to 2019, and I discovered Metroworlds had vanished without trace, and Vzones had appeared like a phoenix from the ashes.

Not wishing to pay the VZones exorbitant subscription rates, and fancying a challenge, I revisited my 2016 code, made enough improvements to put together a simple demo world and posted some details on Facebook. I was quickly overwhelmed by users wanting an alternative world, and decided to make this a permanent project. The website was created, and the world has been running, more or less, ever since. Having a bit more spare time as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic (still ongoing since March 2020) meant I was able to develop this a lot quicker than might otherwise have been the case.

With the offers of help I received, we now have a small team building the world itself, and contributing to the software and network infrastructure. However I, Amanda, remain the project lead responsible for the service as a whole.

We are still technically in beta-test mode. Software development is ongoing, changes are frequent, and new facilities are added at frequent intervals. The world is continually expanding, and special occasions and events are celebrated in-world. Our visitors definitely seem to be enjoying the experience. We hope you do too.