Sounds very much like LambdaMOO. Back in the day there were mirror sites you could use if your ping was absurdly high its possible that sapporo host was just a mirror. Snow Crash sounds familiar, but it reminds me of an area inside LambdaMOO. That world was huge, I remember several times ending up in brand new areas that I would spend hours exploring because I never knew how to get back -- I jumped out of a helicopter once, landed on a remote island that had a HUGE underground complex. Another was a party room in the clouds... the imagination could run wild there. I also remember things that could "playback" events (like you could look into a mirror and see who used to be in that room)

This sounds entirely right. Because I also have a recollection of that party room in the clouds. Actually, it's further refreshing my recollection---I think the main area was called "the Sprawl" or something like that? Maybe it WAS just a mirror, and the reason I haven't ever been able to find anyone else talk about it is that I was under a teenage misimpression about the name.

EDIT: AHA. Sensemedia apparently had a virtual community consisting of MANY themed MOOs, termed "The Sprawl," of which Snow was one; ChibaMOO was I guess the famous one, and was based on Neuromancer. This is more progress than I have made on this in years, so thanks!

:D

What blows my mind is that all of this existed almost 30 years ago and nothing quite like it exists today (maybe second life... maybe).

I remember snow crash but I don’t remember much about it. I spent virtually my entire dialup childhood on lambdamoo. Lambda was a giant mansion and you would start in a closet. One of the bottom floors of the mansion had a mirror which replayed things that recently happened in the room. The mansion was huge but I would constantly leave and explore the street. That’s how you ended up in crazy places like a helicopter or random ass island. Still don’t remember how I ended up in someone’s self built house. All I remember is they were having a party and it was freaking awesome reading through everything at 4am hoping my parents wouldn’t barge in and yell at me lol. Good memories :)

If anyone with the handle “dags” sees this, hello from your helicopter buddy

Check out Sindome: https://www.sindome.org/ it's a cyberpunk MOO been online since '97 and is running a modified LambdaMOO.

I remember the Snow Crash MOO! I spent a while there around 1996-1997: it was (despite the name) sort of William Gibson themed - I vaguely remember it being distributed across multiple hosts, and being impressed at the time that it was running on an SGI box. I think the language was standard MOO.