Neverwinter Nights is a third-person role-playing video game developed by BioWare and published by Atari. Interplay Entertainment was originally set to publish the game, but financial difficulties led to a change of publisher. It was released on Microsoft Windows on June 18, 2002. BioWare later released a free Linux client in June 2003, requiring a purchased copy of the game to play. MacSoft released a Mac OS X port in August 2003.
Neverwinter Nights is set in the fantasy world of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, with the game mechanics based on the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition rules. The game engine was designed around an internet-based model for running a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), which would allow end users to host game servers. The intent was to create a potentially infinite massively multiplayer game framework. This game was named after the original Neverwinter Nights online game, the first ever graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), which operated from 1991 to 1997 on AOL.