In the early hours of April 2nd I heard via Twitter that Game Neverending, the online game that never launched but which gave rise to Flickr, had come back. I played it for about an hour and loved it but then had to go to work. When I got home, the game had been shut down again—I guess it was just an April Fool's joke.
Digging around I found the GNE museum which had a fair amount of information about the game mechanics. It occurred to me that it would be fairly straightforward to implement most of the concepts as a Django-based website.
So yesterday, I started django-mmo at Google Code Project Hosting. So far I've implemented the basic location system and support for some aspects of game items (player inventory, picking up and dropping, spawning but not the making system yet). I haven't paid any attention yet to UI (sort of looks like Web pages did in 1993) and the whole thing so far is played in a kind of "God-mode" where you can control any player. In a way, the UI is just there for testing the model at the moment.
But I'm making good progress. The initial goal is parity with GNE (or at least what I can glean from GNE museum) and then I can think about ways of extending it.
UPDATE (2008-04-13): Making and chat are now implemented. The UI is getting close to parity too.