Published Apr 25, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT

A nostalgic trip that showed me what I have been missing in online games

I played this 24-year-old MMO every day for a month. Here's what it taught me about modern games

Image: Gravity/Warpportal Brasil via Polygon

The first time I played Ragnarok Online was in 2005. A year earlier, a friend had flooded my mind with stories about a kind of PC game the two of us had never seen before, where you could become a thief after passing an exam that involved stealing mushrooms. It took a year for my parents to buy a computer that could run the game, and for me to convince my dad that paying a subscription to play it on the family PC was a good idea. 21 years after I first heard about the game, I returned to Ragnarok Online with the steel resolve to play it for a month straight. Reader, I have done so.…