A Decade of Ultima Online

Recently, Ultima Online celebrated its Tenth Anniversary. UO will always hold a special place in my heart because it was my first MMO, both as a player and as a developer.

As part of the celebration, IGN has an article and speedman (my dev name on UO) got a mention.

I can't explain why, but I always look at my memories in UO through rose-colored glasses. I remember playing back in 1997 and getting PK'd all the time as I mined ore (which was always gone due to the now-defunct resource bank system). I took some time off for a few years but eventually found my way back. A lot had changed in my time away, but I found a good group of friends to help me through the transition.

UO was a sandbox in many ways. Origin Systems provided the world but the players were the content. There were no predefined quests, no raid encounters and no leveling. There were only a handful of skills and spells and a wide-open world. When I wanted to gain a higher rank in the guild (which wasn't defined in the game mechanics), my mentor sent me on a quest (again, not defined in the game mechanics) which I had to document. It was the most unique experience I've ever had in an MMO and I passed it down to other guildmates when I became their mentors. As a developer, I also had the opportunity to chronicle it for the players. The story of my guild quest is now available as two in-game books written by Autenil.

UO was also my break into the game industry. I was a bit of a hacker at the time and wrote a few utilities for UO. I never distributed them to anyone but my closest friends; it was mostly a learning experience. The crown of my collection was a DLL that would attach itself to the UO client and re-write part of the software to pass network messages to my applications after the client had decrypted them. All of my tools were centered around this hook DLL. I had message loggers, information sniffers, and a few useful tools. Yes, I even had tools that would make it easier to gain skills by automating some tedious tasks (my animal taming tool would keep retrying until something was tamed, rename it so that you wouldn't tame it again, and release it).

Anyways, the company I worked for at the time sent me on a business trip to Austin, TX which also just happened to be the city of Origin Systems, the very headquarters of UO. Turns out they were looking for a server programmer and I had passed the tech test with flying colors. Since I was going to be in Austin anyway, I arranged a meeting with the UO dev team. Over three hours at Cheesecake Factory they grilled me about programming and MMOs (some of my old friends might remember that night). They were having some bandwidth problems with their latest expansion and I (due to my tools) knew what the main problem was. I told them that I would fix the bandwidth problem within two weeks if hired. They hired me and I fixed the problem within the first few days. Within two weeks, it was live and players were rejoicing.

The development environment that UO required was challenging. The servers would only build and run on Linux and we used GDB for our debugging. All programmers and designers had and maintained their own Linux boxes. Getting a server up and running required a spider web of filesystem links and a delicate matrix of configuration files and scripts (of several different formats). Still, I loved the proprietary script language known as Wombat and the badly-written C++ code.

I don't work on or really even play UO anymore, and I don't always (ever?) agree with what Electronic Arts/Mythic does with the game, but I still think about the game (and the friends I made working on it and playing it) often.

Congratulations, UO. Here's to another decade. At least.