Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-174.71.71.24-20160126205130/@comment-6697950-20160126210144

It's the first (and only) MMO game for the NerveGear, not the first game per se. There were other games released, but most of them were eons away from being "massively multiplayer". The majority of the games pre-SAO were puzzle, educational or environmental games, but you could only walk like 100 metres before hitting a wall, thus they weren't all that remarkable. SAO's the first game to go for a big scale.