Club Caribe was developed with Lucasfilm Games using softwa…

First released as Habitat in 1988, Club Caribe was introduced by LucasArts for Q-Link customers on their Commodore 64 computers. Users could interact with one another, chat and exchange items.

Although the game's open world was very basic, its use of online avatars (already well-established off-line by Ultima and other games) and the combination of chat and graphics was revolutionary.

Online graphics in the late 1980s were severely restricted by the need to support modem data transfer rates as low as 300 bits per second. Habitat's graphics were stored locally on floppy disk, eliminating the need for network transfer.

Users in the virtual world were represented by onscreen avatars, meaning that individual users had a third-person perspective of themselves, making it rather like a videogame.

Players in the same region (denoted by all objects and elements shown on a particular screen) could see, speak (through onscreen text output from the users), and interact with one another.

Habitat was governed by its citizenry.

The only off-limits portions were those concerning the underlying software constructs and physical components of the system.

The users were responsible for laws and acceptable behavior within Habitat.

The authors of Habitat were greatly concerned with allgowing the broadest range of interaction possible, since they felt that interaction, not technology or information, truly drove cyberspace.