Neverwinter Nights was the first Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) to display graphics, and ran from 1991 to 1997 on AOL. The genre had previously been pioneered by the all-text GemStone series created by Kelton Flinn at Kesmai. NWN is the predecessor to BioWare's 2002 game, Neverwinter Nights.
Neverwinter Nights was a co-development of AOL, Stormfront Studios, SSI, and TSR (which was acquired by Wizards of the Coast in 1997).
Don Daglow and the Stormfront game design team began working with AOL on original online games in 1987, in both text-based and graphical formats. At the time AOL was a Commodore 64 only online service with just a few thousand subscribers, and was called Quantum Computer Services. Online graphics in the late 1980s were severely restricted by the need to support modem data transfer rates as slow as 300 bits per second (bit/s).
In 1989 the Stormfront team started working with SSI on Dungeons & Dragons games using the Gold Box engine that had debuted with Pool of Radiance in 1988. Within months they realized that it was technically feasible to combine the Dungeons & Dragons Gold Box engine with the community-focused gameplay of online titles to create an online RPG with graphics. Although the multiplayer graphical flight combat game Air Warrior (also from Kesmai) had been online since 1987, all prior online RPGs had been based on text.
In a series of meetings in San Francisco and Las Vegas with AOL's Steve Case and Kathi McHugh, TSR's Jim Ward and SSI's Chuck Kroegel, Daglow and programmer Cathryn Mataga convinced the other three partners that the project was indeed possible. Case approved funding for NWN and work began, with the game going live 18 months later in March of 1991.
Daglow chose Neverwinter as the game's location because of its magical features (a river of warm water that flowed from a snowy forest into a northern sea), and its location near a wide variety of terrain types. The area also was close enough to the settings of the other Gold Box games to allow subplots to intertwine between the online and the disk-based titles.
The game originally cost USD$6.00 per hour to play. Some users bragged about monthly game bills of $500 or more. As the years progressed, connection costs dropped, AOL and NWN membership grew, the servers became faster and the hourly cost charged players declined. As a result of these upgrades, the capacity of each server grew from 50 players in 1991 to 500 players by 1995. Ultimately the game became a free part of the AOL subscriber service.
The original Neverwinter Nights was expanded once, in 1992. At about this time AOL’s subscriber growth started to expand exponentially, as the adoption of email by everyday Americans drove new sign-ups. AOL diverted all its efforts into keeping up with the exploding demand for modem connections and online capacity. All game development at AOL other than NWN was suspended, and the game's player capacity was enhanced through server-side improvements but not through the addition of new playable areas. Nevertheless, the original game remained one of AOL's most active areas until its then-ancient technology forced its retirement in 1997.
Much of the game's popularity was based on the presence of active and creative player guilds, who staged many special gaming events online for their members. It is this committed fan base that BioWare sought when they licensed the rights to Neverwinter Nights from AOL and TSR as the basis for the modern game.
NWN gained incremental media attention from AOL tech and marketing staff by appearing in the Don't Copy That Floppy campaign by the Software Publishers Association.
Following Neverwinter Nights in 1991, the early major graphical MMORPGs were The Shadow of Yserbius in 1993, Ultima Online in 1997 and Everquest in 1999.
A persistent-world module, Neverwinter Nights: Resurrection[1], has recreated the locales in the original game, along with new areas, and has attracted some of the original player base. A stand-alone online recreation of the original NWN has also been created by players called Forgotten World [2].