Sorry for the link to a machine translation but here's an article in "Web3D-fr" ("3D Web France") about an immersive 3D MMPORG community platform... launched in 1994.
Very interesting account of the business model, the politics behind the scenes (browser war anyone?), the content providers wanting standards, the money-backers wanting proprietary platforms... how they won, and consequently the whole thing died.
Of curse that's what I got scanning the machine translation...
