The Island of Kesmai

The Island of Kesmai was one of the earliest Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (late 80s) that ran on the Compu Serve dial up online service. It could host 100 players at a time, cost 7 bucks an hour to play, and used an overhead perspective, representing everything with ASCII characters. (So it might actually be called the first graphical MMORPG, depending on how you define "graphics".) This Troper well remembers getting his first job and handing over every one of his paychecks to his mother to go straight to her credit card in order to support his habit.