Matthew ("Matt") Mihaly (born June 21, 1972) is an American CEO/founder of Iron Realms Entertainment, a game designer, executive, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and former CEO of Sparkplay Media. He is known for pioneering the sale of virtual assets and virtual currency in online games, dating to the late 1990s. His MUD pseudonym is Sarapis.[1]
In 1997, he pioneered the Virtual Asset Sales (VAS) model, holding auctions for virtual weapons and armor in Achaea, the first business to use this business model.
In 1999, he built the first[citation needed] hard to soft currency exchange in an online game, allowing players to exchange earned in-game gold for purchased credits.
In 2000, he served as Senior Consultant to the Secretary-General of the United Nations-sponsored World Summit of Young Entrepreneurs, in New York, New York, leading development of a system with very low technology requirements to permit entrepreneurs in impoverished 3rd-world countries to participate.[3]
He served as technical editor on Richard Bartle's book, Designing Virtual Worlds,[7] and contributed an essay to Lee Sheldon's book, Character Development and Storytelling for Games.[8]
In 2007, Iron Realms announced it was spinning off Sparkplay Media[9] from Iron Realms to produce Earth Eternal, a 3D anthropomorphic MMO built to be largely streamed on demand under his leadership.
In 2008, he raised $4.25 million from venture capital firms Redpoint Ventures and Prism Ventureworks[10] in order to expand the development of Sparkplay's platform and games, and raised another $3 million subsequently.
In 2010, after never leaving Open Beta, Sparkplay Media ran out of money and sold Earth Eternal to a subsidiary of Time Warner in a joint venture in Asia. In the early morning hours of September 1, 2010, the Earth Eternal forums and game were taken offline. A Japanese version of the game, published by Sankando, who had licensed Earth Eternal from Sparkplay, was launched with some changes in 2011.
In 2014, he created Burn.Life,[12] a site and blog about Burning Man, notably including the History of Burning Man.[13]
In 2022, he created the Peter Mihaly Foundation, named after his brother who passed away in 1987, to award STEM scholarships to graduates of Ripon High School, in Wisconsin.[14]
A multi-user dungeon, also known as a multi-user dimension or multi-user domain, is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based or storyboarded. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, and non-player characters, and perform actions in the virtual world that are typically also described. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language, as well as using a character typically called an avatar.
Simutronics is an American online games company whose products include GemStone IV and DragonRealms. It was founded in 1987 by David Whatley, with husband and wife Tom & Susan Zelinski. The company is located in St. Louis, Missouri. It became part of the Stillfront Group in 2016.
BatMUD is a medieval fantasy MUD, established in 1990. BatMUD is Finland-based and operated and owned by a non-profit organization, Balanced Alternative Techniques ry, officially registered 1994 in Helsinki, Finland.
DikuMUD is a multiplayer text-based role-playing game, which is a type of multi-user domain (MUD). It was written in 1990 and 1991 by Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert, and Hans Henrik Stærfeldt at DIKU —the department of computer science at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Player versus player (PvP) is a type of multiplayer interactive conflict within a game between human players. This is often compared to player versus environment (PvE), in which the game itself controls its players' opponents. The terms are most often used in games where both activities exist, particularly MMORPGs, MUDs, and other role-playing video games, to distinguish between gamemodes. PvP can be broadly used to describe any game, or aspect of a game, where players compete against each other. PvP is often controversial when used in role-playing games. In most cases, there are vast differences in abilities between players. PvP can even encourage experienced players to immediately attack and kill inexperienced players. PvP is often referred to as player killing in the cases of games which contain, but do not focus on, such interaction.
Free-to-play video games are games that give players access to a significant portion of their content without paying or do not require paying to continue playing. Free-to-play is distinct from traditional commercial software, which requires a payment before using the game or service. It is also separate from freeware games, which are entirely costless. Free-to-play's model is sometimes derisively referred to as free-to-start due to not being entirely free. Free to play games have also been widely criticized as "pay-to-win"— that is, that players can generally pay to obtain competitive or power advantages over other players.
A persistent world or persistent state world (PSW) is a virtual world which, by the definition by Richard Bartle, "continues to exist and develop internally even when there are no people interacting with it". The first virtual worlds were text-based and often called MUDs, but the term is frequently used in relation to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and pervasive games. Examples of persistent worlds that exist in video games include Battle Dawn, EVE Online, and Realms of Trinity.
Raphael "Raph" Koster is an American entrepreneur, game designer, and author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Koster is widely recognized for his work as the lead designer of Ultima Online and the creative director behind Star Wars Galaxies. From 2006 until 2013 he worked as the founder and president of Metaplace producing a Facebook game platform.
Richard Allan Bartle FBCS FRSA is a British writer, professor and game researcher in the massively multiplayer online game industry. He co-created MUD1 in 1978, and is the author of the 2003 book Designing Virtual Worlds.
The Realm Online, originally known as The Realm, is a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) launched in December 1996 for Windows PC. It was designed in the tradition of graphical MUDs, before the usage of the terms "massively multiplayer" and "MMORPG".
TorilMUD is a MUD, a text-based online role-playing game, and is one of the oldest and largest of its kind.
Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands is a roleplay-focused, text-based multi-user dungeon (MUD) released on September 9, 1997. It was published by Achaea LLC, now known as Iron Realms Entertainment. Achaea is operated by collecting the revenue through a microtransaction system, which allows payment for the acquisition of in-game benefits.
Iron Realms Entertainment is a computer game development company that has created the MUDs Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands; Aetolia, The Midnight Age; Imperian, the Sundered Heavens; Lusternia, Age of Ascension; and Midkemia Online. Matt Mihaly is its founder and CEO and Jeremy Saunders is its president.
The Bartle taxonomy of player types is a classification of video game players (gamers) based on a 1996 paper by Richard Bartle according to their preferred actions within the game. The classification originally described players of multiplayer online games, though now it also refers to players of single-player video games.
The history of massively multiplayer online games spans over thirty years and hundreds of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) titles. The origin and influence on MMO games stems from MUDs, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and earlier social games.
Earth Eternal was a free-to-play browser-based fantasy MMORPG, developed by American studio Outblaze and published by SparkPlay Media. First announced on January 10, 2007, it was released for Open Beta on Oct. 7, 2009.
Virtual goods are non-physical objects and money purchased for use in online communities or online games. Digital goods, on the other hand, may be a broader category including digital books, music, and movies. Virtual goods are intangible by definition.
Laralyn McWilliams was an American game designer and video game producer.
Avalon: The Legend Lives is a text-based online multi-player role-playing game world that was first released on 28 October 1989 at the gaming convention Adventure 89. It has maintained a near-continuous on-line presence with consistent and intact persona files and player history since the late 1980s. Until regular outages began occurring in 2023, it was the longest continuously running online role-playing game in history.
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