Massively.com scored an interview with Tabula Rasa's Producer Starr Long who talked about the development and launch of TR, and more:

Massively: Are we correct in thinking that the development cycle for Tabula Rasa started in 2001?

Starr Long: 2001, that's right

2001... before there's a World of Warcraft... in the era of Ultima Online and EverQuest. What gave you the idea that MMOs were the way to go at this point in time?

I think we knew MMOs were the way to go back when we did Ultima Online. We had no idea that it was going to scale as quickly as it did, but I don't think that it was MMOs specifically: it was more, for us, about multiplayer games. That was really where our passion lay as far as being players ourselves. And then the massive part of it came from the idea of everyone sharing this other reality with each other. I think it was less focusing on it being the next big thing and more on it being the new frontier. It really was, "Only a few people have done this before." There were prior examples like Habitat, Air Warrior, and Neverwinter Nights... it's not like Meridian 59, it's not like we were the first, but it was still pretty uncharted territory. A few islands had been discovered, but no major continents yet.

And we felt that, given time, it was going to dominate as much of a section of the marketplace as any other platform. We saw massively multiplayer games as a platform. It's like Xbox 360 or PC or Wii -- it's just its own platform. Versus a genre or anything like that, because it's already diversifying within itself. There's RPGs, real time strategy, shooters, and blends between RPGs and shooters... I think you're seeing as much genre diversification, and that's why we think of it as more of a platform...

Read the full interview on Massively.com