In 1989 the Beyond Software team started working with SSI on Dungeons & Dragons games using the Gold Box engine that had debuted with Pool of Radiance in 1988. 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). At the time AOL was a Commodore 64 only online service, known as Quantum Computer Services, with just a few thousand subscribers, and was called Quantum Link.

ĭon Daglow and the Beyond Software game design team began working with AOL on original online games in 1987, in both text-based and graphical formats. It was the first multiplayer online role-playing game to display graphics.

Neverwinter Nights was a co-development of AOL, Beyond Software, SSI, and TSR. When combat occurred, gameplay switched to full-screen combat mode, in which a player's characters and enemies were represented by icons which moved around in the course of battle. After creating the character, gameplay took place on a screen that displayed text interactions, the names and current status of one's party of characters, and a window which displayed images of geography marked with various pictures of characters or events. Neverwinter Nights was developed with gameplay similar to previous games in the Gold Box series. Neverwinter Nights was an early multiplayer online role-playing game to display graphics, and ran from 1991 to 1997 on AOL.

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