WorldsAway

WorldsAway

Developer(s):	Fujitsu Cultural Technologies Division of Fujitsu Open Systems Solutions, Inc. (FOSSI) and Fujitsu Limited
Publisher(s):	Fujitsu Cultural Technologies
Director(s):	TBA
Producer(s):	Randy Farmer, Jeffery Douglas
Designer(s):	Randy Farmer
Platform(s):	Windows, Mac
Released:	(Beta): August 1995, (Launched): November 1995

Origins

In 1993, Fujitsu had shown interest in bringing Fujitsu Habitat to the west. The plan was to backport the Fujitsu Habitat software to Windows computers. However, the source code for Fujitsu Habitat revealed major architectural problems and so minimal progress was made on bringing this to fruition. It was instead decided that development efforts would be better focused on writing something new from the ground up. The original creators of Habitat, Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer were already involved at this time because Fujitsu had requested their aid in negotiating with Lucasfilm Games (then LucasArts) to purchase the Habitat IP outright.

The Fujitsu Habitat source code that was sent to Electric Communities by Fujitsu shows dates of August 1993 being the time the project had started to backport the software.

In 1994, Electric Communities was contracted by Fujitsu to build WorldsAway.

Development

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The original WorldsAway development team as taken from the Reno Team "First Look" image in May of 1994 is as follows:

Tony Christopher, Motoo Chiya, Jeanette Rosado, Dana Timbrook, Kevin Oltendorf, Bob Schumaker, Ed Hodapp , 
Perry Tucker, John Onusko, Norman Morse, Alex Griffiths, Maria Douglas, Eric Miller, Paul Willis, Joyce Harada , 
Paul Taylor, Mary Seabrook, Sophie Kim, Randy Farmer, Chip Morningstar, Yoshi Matsumoto and Alicia McCurdy

Regarding this image, Norman Morse is quoted as saying this:

It was a photoshopped image which was presented to all the team members, to celebrate the first internal release of Fujitsu WorldsAway.

The names of the dev team members were included, and their head pictures attached to avatar bodies.

This was created before DreamScape was released, so we were mostly developers and support staff, we didn't have oracles and community staff until later.

The WorldsAway 1.0 development team as taken from the 1.0 client is as follows:

Fred Atton, Diane Bancroft, Carol Lyn Bowman, Hunter Brown, Motoo Chiya, Anthony Christopher, George Chiu, Jeff Crilly, Mike DeNicola, Clark Dodsworth, Jeff Douglas, Wendy DuBois, Mike Elola, Christopher Flake, Kazutomo Fukuda, Melanie Gendron, Alex Griffiths, Joyce Harada, Carolly Hauksdottir, Tom Hayes - Big Sound, Edward Hodapp, Naohisa Kawaguchi, Rena Keslar, Andrew Keim, Sheryl Knowles, Sophie Kim, Sean Kunkel, Lou Leonardo, Ron Lichty, Lambert Ma, Mary Madaras, Karen Mangum, Jason Mathews, Mark Mathews, Kazuki Matsui, Alicia McCurdy, Garth Minette, Scott Moore, Norman Morse, Bob Moss, Charlotte Nader, Sean O'Brien, Kevin Oltendorf, John Onusko, Amy Or, Kazuhiro Ouchi, Christopher Parry, David Peterson, Janet Richardson, Judith Rubin, Robert Schumaker, Mary Seabrook, Carmen Segovia, Tammy Sims, Chris Simmons, Larry Shelley, Greg Specht, Sharon Stambaugh, Eddy Sumardy, Tadayuki Tahara, Paul Taylor, Dana Timbrook, Michael Torgersen, Satoshi Tsuchiya, Vaserius the Wise, Karen Williams, Paul Willis, Judy Wilson, Rick Wong, Manabu Yanagida, Cathy Yih, and Joe Zona

Special recognition to:

Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar whose cyberspace expertise was the foundation of our technology and world design.

Maria Douglas for the Dreamscape story and World design direction.

Yoshi Matsumoto who carried the WorldsAway flame from Tokyo to California and continues to fuel it today.

Localized Versions

Placeholder for Habitat II and Glass City.