Gamasutra is running an excerpt from Rogue Leaders, a new book on the history of LucasArts. The excerpt in question is about Habitat, which is of course one of the seminal virtual worlds. It’s short and worth a read, especially just to marvel at the reason givn for the project’s shelving: fear of success.

Essentially, if 500 users were so committed to playing Habitat that they remained online long enough to eat up 1 percent of the network’s entire system bandwidth, a full-run production that could attract Rabbit Jack’s Casino numbers could boost that bandwidth number to 30 percent. “The way the system was built, the server software wasn’t capable of hosting that population while still being successful,” recalls Arnold.

Ultimately, these business challenges caused Habitat to be cancelled after the launch party, but before it had gone into full production and reached retail shelves. It would simply be too popular, and the necessary server fix would be too expensive to make the project viable. And so this massively original, inventive, and cutting-edge project was shelved for U.S. release.