Not sure if anyone has come across Lucasfilm's Habitat project before, but I found it quite fascinating! It was one of the first large-scale, commercial, multi-user online environments (a concept that seems to be growing in popularity these days...). The original authors have a website called http://habitatchronicles.com that gives some great insights into the development of the technology, and the many personal stories that happened along the way. The thing that struck me the most was how rich and wide-ranging this chronicle is: I wish more projects had an ever-evolving historical narrative to go with them! Does anyone know of any (perhaps more contemporary) versions of this kind of chronicle? "Dealers of Lightning" (XEROX Parc), "Dreaming in Code" (OSAF), and others come to mind.

The way you describe this reminds me a bit of how the book, Idea Factory: "Bell Labs..." was written.