Before the recent wave of excitement around new virtual reality technology convinced everyone that the future was inside of a headset, people longing to escape the constraints of their everyday lives invested their hopes and dreams in ugly looking worlds housed on distant computer servers. Massively multiplayer online games offered a meaningful substitute to the real world not because of how faithfully it could duplicate it, but because of how little it tried to.
Source: Kotaku – Remembering The Brutality Of Meridian 59 On Its 20th Anniversary