Anarchy Online

Players assume the roles of new colonists to Rubi-Ka or the Shadowlands. The game world is occupied by human players and computer-controlled characters, both friendly and hostile. The game begins with the player creating a unique character, choosing its name, sex, height, weight, and facial features. Each character is also one of the four humanoid "breeds". The final choice is that of the character's profession, similar to the character classes of other role-playing games.

The game's multiplayer nature and "free-form" gameplay encourage creating personal networks, and cooperating and fighting with other players. Players interact with Anarchy Online's interface via a keyboard and mouse. The game's heads-up display consists of a series of windows, menus and buttons located on the periphery of the screen. Players communicate with each other by typing text in chat windows, and occasionally through emotive character animations.

Fighting for military and political power on Rubi-Ka are the Omni-Tek corporation (who own a thousand-year lease to the planet), as well as separatist clans, terrorist groups, extraterrestrial life, and ancient civilizations. The narrative was developed to be played out as a series of virtual "role-play" events over the course of four years, influenced by the actions of those taking part in the game.

According to the game's back story, the Source is the "essence of [all] life" deep inside the planet, which created the first forms of life, who called themselves the Xan. They began as a small, perfect, immortal civilization, living in peace and harmony. The Xans' eventual discovery and research of the Source changed this. It led them to create powerful technology and a great civilization, but this made them greedy and arrogant.

Preliminary development for Anarchy Online began in 1995 at Funcom's Oslo, Norway studios. Up until that point, the company had only developed offline video games for consoles, including the critically successful Speed Punks for the PlayStation. In a 2007 interview, former project leader Gaute Godager said Funcom's management wanted to put substantial resources into developing a new MMORPG; they believed the genre's user base would expand in the coming years. Unlike most other games in the genre, which had traditional role-playing fantasy themes, Anarchy Online featured a science-fiction theme.

The game would also feature a relatively large playable area, and graphics that were, at the time, more advanced than existing MMORPGs. Godager said he and many other developers saw the idea as "crazy", describing the project as "very ambitious". The project's team grew steadily between 1995 and 2001 to include at least 70 developers.

After the launch of Anarchy Online and the subsequent technical problems, Funcom issued a statement to reviewers asking them to hold back on a full review until the studio solved these problems. Some video game reviewers, such as Computer Games Magazine, published reviews anyway; others, such as GameSpy who described the game as "nearly unplayable", chose to wait one month before publishing a formal review. The troubled release has had a lasting effect on the game's reputation, and is nearly always mentioned in the generally positive reviews of later expansion packs as a juxtaposition.

While Anarchy Online's launch problems had a negative effect on initial critics, the game itself was generally reviewed favorably; it scored an average of 7.6 out of 10 from GameSpy, GameSpot, and IGN. GameSpy later described it as a promising game with some big technical flaws. IGN called it a "brilliant, engaging, profound MMORPG", but added it came with "atrocious" technical problems. PC Gamer magazine said that it "will be the next great MMORPG", but that the game needed "some serious work" before it would reach its potential; they would award the game with Best Massively Multiplayer Game the next year.