Created in 1994 by Electronic Arts, MPBT has been in beta every since. It's been on a number of different services (including but not limited to: gEnie, AOL, Solaris, and EA.com) over the years but the principal behind it remained the same: To have a persistent world (universe?) BattleTech game, where clans and battles have an effect on the surrounding world. EverQuest, only with mechs (or mechas, depending). Back in the day, around 1997, AOL had MPBT as a public beta and people loved it. It was great fun, to play BattleTech online with a clan and cause havoc around the worlds...But then AOL started charging for it, and shortly after that the game left AOL (due to lack of members). Solaris, an online game network similar to Ten (now pogo.com) had it for a while but membership wasn't as popular as it was on AOL. EA.com had MPBT during the last bit of it's life...and it was on the way to release, until EA started "reevaluating" the title, and yesterday (November 6, 2001) it was announced that EA had finally killed MPBP (largely in part because of EA's current lack of funding after great mismanagement). So many years, so much money...just down the drain. I hope all involved has learned a valuable lesson in game development, wish as much money was spend on this one project.