Ultima Online is, of course, still very much alive. But that didn’t stop us from doing a Classic Game Postmortem at GDCOnline this past fall. The GDCVault has posted it up for free here:

GDC Vault – Classic Game Postmortem: Ultima Online.

No embed, alas.

The session was very informal — don’t expect a lot of actually useful development takeaways, five things that went well and five poorly in Gamasutra-approved format, any of that. Instead, it’s mostly war stories and anecdotes.

A thing you cannot see in the vid — when at the very start Starr asks how many people in the room worked on UO, a lot of people in the room stood up. And when asked who played — it was almost everyone. A nice moment.

Well, we basically winged it, but it was a blast. We told stories, mostly out of order; fessed up to bad code and goofy decisions and being painfully young; and lamented the loss of that sens of crazy freedom.

Luckily, Gamasutra has you covered if you weren’t in the full house.

In the alpha, the team had wolves that chased rabbits across the map as part of its emergent gameplay system.

In those early days, the rabbits would actually level up if they got into a fight with a wolf and managed to escape.

“People would wander off in the alpha and try to kill a rabbit, and pretty soon they were playing Monty Python: The MMO,” joked Koster.

The game was tweaked to disallow this, though Koster confesses that they left one monster rabbit in the world when the final game shipped.

I wore my original UO shirt… and forgot to point it out! Doh!

Basically, during the period when we were skunkworks and ignored by the company (it was mutual, we ignored them back) we did our own marketing. So that meant we made our own t-shirts with a made-up logo. And I still have that shirt, in surprisingly good shape for being from 1996. All credit to Clay Hoffman for making it, way back when…

Read them here: Ultima Online UO General Article: The Making of a Classic Part 1 and part two.

I wasn’t able to really sit down with Adam Tingle, the author, but he did run around the blog archives a fair amount. There’s some inaccuracies here and there, but it’s a decent overview.

Some things I spotted:

Throughout 1979 Garriott would design his computer role-playing game, revising it, adding to it, showing his friends, and finally when “D&D 28b” was finished, he renamed it Aklabeth…

It’s “Akalabeth” not “Aklabeth” — you can actually play it on your iOS device these days.

Read the rest of this entry »

Turns out there’s an MMO Part 4: End Game Content video that I didn’t know existed. I haven’t watched it yet, but here it is!

I was sent a link to this set of YouTube vids on the history of the MMO genre from MUDs forward. It’s worth a look, even if only to get  a rare glimpse of actual video footage from some of the older games that many folks today don’t even know existed (after all, WoW invented the genre, right?)…

Among the oddities, errors, and omissions:

• Leaving out Kingdom of the Winds, which predated Lineage.
• Leaving out kids’ MMOs entirely, especially Club Penguin.
• Saying that the Ultima Online team had never made anything multiplayer before (Ken Demarest, mentioned in the documentary, left very shortly after UO actually had a team put together — and the original core team that was assembled on the programming and design side was all MUD/MUSH/MOO veterans except for one guy).
• Saying that Meridian 59 going flat fee was what opened up that business model… I’m fuzzy on this, but my recollection is that M59 was not flat fee at launch… it happened later. And for a while they had a weird complicated fee structure…
• Leaving out Kart Rider, the genre explosion, and the rise of free-to-play in Korea… it just sort of stops short at Lineage there. Instead F2P seems to all be attributed to Runescape, which is a real misread of where the lines of influence actually flowed, I think.
• No mention of key non-game worlds like Second Life and Habbo Hotel. I suppose this is excused by the emphasis on game worlds, except for the mention of Habitat.

As a side note, on the graphical MMO explosion — even though a bunch of titles launched in a very staggered way that is covered in the documentary, I think that in practice just about all of them started development around the same time. It’s just that some of them finished faster.

There’s definitely a book to be had about everything in this history… someone (not me) should go write it.

Vids after the fold:

Read the rest of this entry »

The GDC Vault has posted the full video of “It’s All Games Now!”, my talk from GDC Online. And it’s one of the free ones!

I have a brief precis of it here, if you don’t know what it is about. But hey, it’s only an hour of your life, right? So go check it out even if you don’t know what it is about.

Carey Martell, whose interview of Richard Bartle I blogged about not very long ago, stopped by the office here and did an hourlong interview with me, after we failed to connect at GDCOnline. There’s a little ancient history, some talk about the lecture I did at GDCO, and a brief sidebar on gamification in there, and I don’t remember what else.

RPG Fanatic: Raph Koster Interview – YouTube.

Funny how this sort of thing happens… two years after the big kerfuffle over ThresholdMUD’s Wikipedia article being deleted (see here and here and here), we get a Wired UK article on Wikipedia and MUD history.

Eventually, the community decided to move on, and founded MUD Wiki, a Wikia dedicated to the genre. Wikia was introduced in 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, and allowed free web hosting for third party Wikis. It made it easier than ever to make niche Wikis on the most obscure or insular topic possible, and let Wikipedia get on with talking about things that are truly notable.

And maybe, in the grand scheme of documenting gaming history, a dedicated Wikia makes sense. Individual MUDs might be better suited to a Wikia, and its also promising to see Wikipedia’s own page on the genre in general is large, comprehensive and bibliographically diverse.

“Wikipedia is not a directory of everything that exists or has existed”, the site explains in a manifesto detailing its scope. And It would be near impossible for Wikipedia to be a complete and thorough repository of gaming history, with Deus Ex or The Legend of Zelda sharing the same word count as something obscure like Biomotor Unitron on the Neo Geo Pocket.

Amaranthar in the comment thread on the last post referred to “rares” in Ultima Online as a feature. They weren’t really, though. They were a bug.

First, a definition of rares. These were simply items that were incredibly uncommon. Often they were near unique. They couldn’t be found via loot  — they were only spawned once, really, when the server came up. As a result, they were immediately collectible. Most of them had no use whatsoever — they were simply uniquely colored objects, like a red vase that a crafter couldn’t replicate, or an object that was outright not craftable at all. A few were obvious bugs, like “water tiles” — a literal patch of water that you could pick up and stuff in your backpack, which because of how the simulation layer behind UO worked, actually functioned as water. You could fish in it, or pull a jug of water for cooking from it.

Needless to say, collectibility alone was sufficient to drive these to have immense value in UO’s economy, which was largely player-driven. Rares began to show up on eBay going for substantial dollar amounts, sometimes in the hundreds.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sad news. There.com has some of the best social interaction design of any virtual world. Be sure to check it out while you can so that its many design innovations are not forgotten.

But, at the end of the day, we can’t cure the recession, and at some point we have to stop writing checks to keep the world open. There’s nothing more we would like to avoid this, but There is a business, and a business that can’t support itself doesn’t work. Before the recession hit, we were incredibly confident and all indicators were “directionally correct” and we had every reason to believe growth would continue. But, as many of you know personally, the downturn has been prolonged and severe, and ultimately pervasive.

We’re very sorry to announce that There.com will be closing to the public at 11:59 PM on March 9th, 2010.

via There – There.