Island of Kesmai

Island of Kesmai was one of the earliest Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games that ran on the CompuServe dial up online service, released in 1985. It could host 100 players at a time, cost $7 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".)

A 2D graphical spin-off, Legends of Kesmai, was launched in 1996 on AOL. Both games shut down in 2000.