#active worlds

The aspect of the platform that appealed to us was you could build using the game's massive library of objects. Every object was basically a seed that pointed to the filename of a 2D or 3D model. You could right click on any object and a property menu would appear with the filename of the object model displayed as well as any special action code the object would execute.

Every wall texture was its own model, you'd just copy walls and move them with your arrow keys so they connected at the ends, flipped them to flat so you could make a floor and ceiling and voila you had a little house. Right click one of the walls and change its object code from wall12.rwx to something like arch01.rwx or door27.rwx, and now you had an entrance.

Despite the platform intended to be a 3D chatroom where people could meet in these prebuilt worlds and have conversations, and later evolving into something like a 3D internet browser where your avatar could walk into a building, click on a service or object to buy, and have your internet browser open up to complete the transaction, we just wanted to build.

Objects like picture frames or televisions you could embed an image or gif link into or buttons you could click on to execute the code inside another object meant we could build these elaborate houses. You'd approach the home and a mission impossible midi would play the moment you crossed an invisible threshold, you click a button near the front door and the door would rotate 90° on the Z-axis to show it "opened", but then intangible, shrunken cylinders colored red with a texture rewrite in the object properties would move back and forth each going in a different direction: security lasers! If your avatar came into contact, a different midi of an alarm would play and the door would close behind you. So that's what we did, we built elaborate homes and towns 11000+ coordinate units away from the main spawn areas.

Active Worlds is still a thing; Wikipedia lists its latest stable release in the middle of 2022. There are also some YouTube videos of people crawling through some of the abandoned worlds.

Active Worlds June 28, 1995

The first virtual world was Active Worlds. Perhaps there is still an opportunity to register here.

Sometimes I think what could happen if it was this world that took the leadership position, and not the modern SL.

Or... Alpha World?

First time of Second Life (Linden World)

And this: