'Cybertown'
[BROWSER] [USA] [MAGAZINE] [2000]
"Colony City was started in 1996 as a showcase project of Blaxxun Interactive. Colony City made use of VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), a standard for displaying 3D content, including virtual worlds and avatars, on the Web. These VRML files became shared virtual worlds using Blaxxun's server technology, enabling people from all over the world to meet and interact in rich-media environments in real-time on the Web. In 1999, Colony City merged with CyberTown which dramatically increased the users to a few thousand. At the time CyberTown was mainly a portal site with categories of links, but Colony City was able to use the ideas from the categories to make 3D worlds and expand CyberTown. To allow this influx of citizens to have homes in CyberTown, new "colonies" - virtual places to live - were created. In 2002, Blaxxun Interactive sold CyberTown to Integrated Virtual Networks. As of February 2012, the CyberTown website was taken offline." ~Wikipedia
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Source: Top Deck, February 2000 (Vol. 02, #02) || Internet Archive; SomeOtherMars