Midkemia is a virtual world created by a bunch of UC San Diego grad school buddies 28 years ago. We did it for fun, as a pastime. This was around the time that Dungeons & Dragons was all the rage. But D & D was underdeveloped for our tastes; we decided to draw on our knowledge of medieval history and our love of fantasy to build a fully realized gameworld: Midkemia. We made up characters, countries, political alliances and disputes, a system of magic, a pantheon of gods -- a wonderful, magical place that didn't exist anywhere except in our heads. We brought it to life when we got together on a regular basis (every Thursday night for a while, then Friday nights), mastering games or playing characters. Game players understand this sort of world-building, but for a lot of people it may seem like a weird thing to do. And maybe it is -- but in my opinion it's no more weird than driving buckets of golfballs in the rain, collecting every pressing of every LP the Beatles ever made, or buying every stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service. Later, my friend Steve Abrams suggested that I tell the story of how Greater Path Magic (Don't know what that is? Read the books!) came to Midkemia; from that came my first novel Magician, published in 1982. In order not to conflict with the gameworld we'd created, I set Magician, the first of my Riftwar novels, 500 years before our game. I write the history to the Midkemia the Friday Nighters created.

What we never imagined all those years ago was that this world would take on a life of its own beyond anything we could have imagined; that Midkemia would find its way into homes all around the world -- not just our student apartments. I hadn't begun writing back then, and the possibility of a computer game was nil since the personal computer didn't yet exist. We created Midkemia solely for the sake of fun.

those games

Don't forget Persistent Realms.  They're making a game on the Rapture engine - can't remember the name right now - and what i've seen looks pretty good.  The CTO is Anatole from Imperian, if any of you remember him, and the rest of the company are IRE gamers as well.