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