I'm always eager to pay respects to the pioneers and originators of a great thing. In virtual worlds, Habitat was here over 20 years ago. Some things have changed a lot — we have rich 3D environments and versatile content creation tools which were a pipe dream back then. And some things are still the same —  as you'll see in this promo video posted by Randy Farmer (one of Habitat's founding fathers), there's a ongoing emphasis to stress that behind every avatar is a real person.

Watch for the the teleport booths and the avatar customization process, which is essentially Re-Animator-like decapitation (and not too dissimilar from how we can remove attachments in SL). And do observe what parallels connect the Second Life of now to the Habitat of then:

Wasn't that refreshing? I liked the old-timey intro and visual similarities to Maniac Mansion (also by Lucasfilm), but deplore the lack of guys playing girls.

Srsly, I also find it intriguing that Habitat's classified in Wikipedia as an "online role-playing game", used interchangeably with "virtual world". This was during a time before "MMORPG" ever became commonplace, and before businesses really considered using such a cyberspace for their ventures. Ah, the 80s. *puts on mirrorshades*