Ultima Online and the World That Fought Back

Ultima Online did not launch the idea of a shared online fantasy world, but it was the game that made the notion visible to a large audience. Released in September 1997 by Origin Systems, it is regularly cited as the first graphical online RPG to pass 100,000 subscribers, a milestone it reportedly reached by the end of 1998. In the context of the time, that was an extraordinary number for a game that asked people to pay a monthly fee to live inside a persistent map.

The team included Richard Garriott, the creator of the Ultima series, as a producer and public face, with Starr Long as director and Raph Koster as lead designer. Garriott’s own coinage, “massively multiplayer,” is often attached to the project, and while he is widely credited with popularizing the phrase, it is best treated as an origin story that has been told many times rather than as a settled fact.

What set the game apart was its ambition toward simulation. You were not assigned a class in the modern sense. Skills rose through use, so a character became a blacksmith by smithing, a tailor by sewing, a fighter by fighting. Houses could be built and placed in the world. Shopkeepers were other players, and a community of merchants and crafters formed on top of the adventuring economy. It was a sandbox in the truest sense, and a lot of what the genre later left behind is easier to see with this game in view.

It was also famously rough with its players. Player-versus-player combat was open, and the risk of being ambushed and looted was real. A well-known beta-era story tells of players killing Lord British, the in-game avatar of Garriott, which was not intended to be possible. The details of such tales have grown in retellings, but the underlying point is sound: a world that lets players surprise its designers will be surprised often.

The most argued-over decision came in 2000. The Renaissance expansion split the world into two parallel copies, Felucca, where the older rules of open conflict continued, and Trammel, where players could not be attacked without consent. It is well documented that the change was designed to keep the game welcoming to people who found the original ruleset too punishing, and that it was controversial. My view is that the split was probably necessary and also cost the game something hard to name: a sense that every road had stakes. Both opinions are held by plenty of veterans.

The publishing story afterward is less dramatic than the design story. Origin Systems closed in 2004, after which the game was handled by Electronic Arts, then by Mythic Entertainment, and in recent years by Broadsword. Subscriber numbers are said to have peaked in the low hundreds of thousands in the early 2000s, which is remarkable for an aging technology.

What makes the game unusual today is that it is still around. The official service continues, and it offers both a classic client and an enhanced one, plus a free-to-play option. Community-run “free shards” also exist, though they sit outside the publisher’s approval and their legal standing is uncertain.

If you want to understand where a lot of online design started, and how many of its earliest arguments remain unsettled, Ultima Online is worth a visit. It is less a relic than a still-running experiment.