Kesmai

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kesmai was a pioneering game developer and online game publisher, founded in 1981 by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor. The company was best known for the combat flight sim Air Warrior on the GEnie online service, the first graphical MMOG, launched in 1987. They also developed the first ASCII-based (or Roguelike) MMORPG, Islands of Kesmai, which ran on CompuServe.

The company was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. in 1994. The company continued to develop massively mulitplayer games such as Air Warrior 2 and Legends of Kesmai, distributing their games through AOL and eventually their own gaming service, GameStorm.

In 1999, the company was sold to Electronic Arts, and the company's studios were subsequently closed in 2001. Upon closure a number of the Kesmai staff went to work for Lodestone Games, also located in Charlottesville, Virginia.