12
The End of the Beginning of the World
I have been credited, somewhat inaccurately, with inventing the term and category of games known as MMORPGs, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, because Ultima Online was the first to become a major success. Before Ultima Online, every online game was played by a solo player. It was the player against the game, so everyone could be the hero who defeated the bad guy and won the game. And it didn’t make any difference that their best friend also believed they were the hero who’d won the same game. People would talk to each other about where they were on the quest and trade tips about how to get past a certain point. No one felt less special because a friend was ahead of them, because they couldn’t see the friend unlocking a door in front of them or beating them across the finish line.
But in fact, long before the existence of the Internet, people were linking computers to communicate with each other. They got together through dial-up services like the original America Online, and they paid for access by the hour or even by the minute. A decade before we produced Ultima Online, we were already dreaming of producing a game that allowed many people to play in the world of Britannia at the same time and interact with each other.
We were not the only people with that dream. Since the availability of computers, some people were producing text MUDs, or multi-user dungeons. These were text-based games, although a few of them had very simple graphics. These multiplayer role-playing games were quite simple, and the level of player interaction was about as basic as it could be. Players could chat; one could write, “Hi, Richard,” while another could write a command like, “Go north.” And on the screen, sure enough, a figure would move to the north. But these games had user bases in the few hundreds or low thousands, and were not competitive with “mainstream” games. These games never really appealed to me nor did they inspire me beyond seeing the potential they offered for something much more exciting.
We watched this segment of the gaming industry very carefully for at least a decade. We’d meet regularly with the companies making the best dial-up games to discuss producing a multiplayer Ultima. But with the fee structure that existed at the time, we couldn’t figure out how to make a business out of it. These games were expensive to play; they required a subscription to a dial-up service and the game itself generally would charge as much as a few dollars an hour to play. It quickly would cost considerably more than a boxed game purchased in a store.
The availability of the Internet, which allowed people to be online for extended periods of time without being charged by the minute or hour, completely changed the economic structure. Suddenly, a million people could be online at the same time! Two million! A hundred million! The potential was almost incalculable. We knew it was the right time, investment costs notwithstanding. So we set out to create a game that would appeal not just to the few who played MUDs, but to the millions of people who were playing any type of computer game.
While the original Ultima Online was not the first online role-playing game, it was the first widely successful massively multiplayer game, and its success proved that a huge market for multiplayer online games existed. As a result, I was identified as the person responsible for bringing MMORPGs into existence, and have even been called “the father of online gaming.” I’ve never described myself that way, but it sort of caught on—much to the chagrin of those hearties who had been making MUDs for many years.
A few years after the successful launch of Ultima Online, for example, I was asked to speak at a computer game developers’ conference in Austin. I was in the green room picking up my credentials when a man I’d never met in person, Mark Jacobs, approached me. At that moment all I knew about Mark was that he was the creator of a very good MMO called Dark Ages of Camelot, which had been published a few years after Ultima Online and had done very well. As I later found out, he had also made some of those dial-up games, those text MUDs, which predated any online game I had done. “Richard, Richard Garriott!” he said.
It’s not unusual for people I’ve never met before to approach me at events and I usually enjoy the conversations that follow. So I smiled at him and acknowledged that yes, I was Richard Garriott. “What’s up?” I said.
“This is outrageous,” he said far too aggressively.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He held up the brochure for the event. “Have you seen this? Have you seen what they’ve written about you?”
“Uh, no, actually I haven’t,” I said. “In fact, I just got here. I haven’t even gotten my badges. What’s this all about?” Apparently I was in the middle of an argument and I had no idea what it was about.
He introduced himself, then said, “It calls you ‘the father of online games’ in here. That’s ridiculous. I demand that you retract that.” He said it quite loudly, and all the other developers and businesspeople in the room stopped whatever they were doing and began watching us.
I was with my friend, our corporate publicist David Swofford, who tried as politely as possible to defuse the situation. I said as calmly as I could, “It’s not up to me to retract it. I didn’t write this, I haven’t even seen it. I just got here.”
That made him even angrier. “You can’t claim that title. It isn’t true. There were lots of online games before you.”
As far as I knew I hadn’t claimed anything, much less a title. Of course there were others before mine, I thought to myself. “I had nothing to do with this. The show produced the brochure. You should go talk to them.”
But he had no interest in talking to anyone else. He continued ranting, “You need to publicly deny this right here in front of your peers.”
“Look,” I said. “I still don’t have the slightest idea what you’re upset about. But I didn’t write this and, truthfully, who cares?” In fact, it made no difference to me.
Well, he told me who cared. As he continued berating me, David Swofford wisely grabbed my arm and basically rushed me out of the room. But that was not the end of it. Mark and I both served on several panels, although fortunately never on the same one. And at the end of each panel he stood up and said something like, “I just want to bring it to everybody’s attention that this booklet says Richard Garriott is considered ‘the father of online games.’ Whoever wrote that should be chastised. I think it’s an outrage that he should get this credit when in fact there were a lot of us, including myself, who . . .”
This confrontation had the exact opposite effect that he’d intended. After Mark Jacobs decided he was my nemesis, I began receiving notes, stickers, and even handmade certificates congratulating me on being “the father of online games.” Before he started this debate, I don’t know that anybody cared at all about this, or even took it very seriously; I certainly didn’t know about it—but after he made it an issue, my place in the history of online games was solidified. People thought I must be the father of online games if someone was making such a big deal out of complaining that I wasn’t.
In the ensuing years I’ve had several far more pleasant encounters with Mark Jacobs, who turned out to be a good and very competent guy. I suspect (until reading this) he may have completely forgotten about that incident. And ironically, after EA shut down Origin, they needed someone to manage Ultima Online, and for a period of time Mark Jacobs became the head of Ultima Online.
I like Mark, he does great work, and I wish him the very best. He beat me by decades into online games. But UO still wins the crown for the first true MASSIVELY multiplayer game. So I will happily accept the honor of being known as the creator of MMORPGs and the father of online games.
Maybe UO wasn’t the first, but it was completely different from any game that had been created before it. It was obvious to me that when we put many thousands of people in the same online world, we couldn’t write the same old story in which everyone was victorious. Not everyone could defeat the one evil lord. Not everyone could drop the one ring in the fire of Mordor. This was no longer a story that froze in place when a player turned the game off for the night and resumed when it was turned back on; rather, it was a world that existed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year whether you were playing the game or not, and more than that, it was continually changing. Ultima Online has no linear story. There’s no quest line that drives you forward. It isn’t about winning or losing, it is a world in which people can live a virtual life. Players make up their own goals and objectives within the greater context of the world we place around them.
In fact, it was so different that initially EA had no interest in developing it. Solo games were selling millions of copies, while the rudimentary MUDs were selling a few thousand at most. My team and I explained to EA, for whom we were then working, that this new concept, massively multiplayer online gaming, was the wave of the future and they needed to be prepared to ride it.
No interest. They pointed out that there was no data to support my belief that anyone would want to play an online game. They said, “Nice idea, Richard, but there’s never been a successful game of that type. That’s just not the way people want to play games. And we’re not interested in getting in that business.”
EA had a very formal process that its developers had to go through before the company would even consider funding a game. To make a case for funding, we had to put together a huge set of documents that demonstrated why it would be a success. The sales department did an analysis based upon the sales of similar games in the past. So while they were comparing the potential of Multima to the small numbers of MUDs that were selling at that time, we were trying to get them to make an investment in the future. It was easy to understand why there was so little enthusiasm at EA for this type of game: since no one had ever earned a penny selling the type of Internet game we wanted to create, the sales projection was essentially zero.
EA also pointed to the widespread belief throughout the industry that medieval fantasy had lost its luster. While The Lord of the Rings had been popular years earlier, the movies had not yet come out, there were no Harry Potter books, there were no good medieval TV shows. Instead, it was pointed out to us, sci-fi fantasy was what was selling. Everybody wanted some version of Star Trek or Star Wars.
While the sales department contrasted fantasy and sci-fi, I have always believed they are effectively the same. I can’t think of a fantasy story that couldn’t be told in a science-fiction setting, and the reverse is true. I think that most of the people who love The Lord of the Rings also love Star Wars. But the sales department pointed out to us that none of EA’s competitors were producing any fantasy games without sci-fi elements. Someone in the sales department essentially told me, “Richard, we’re not going to give you good sales projections if you keep insisting on doing medieval fantasy games. No one wants to run around in a medieval world wearing tights like Robin Hood. They want to wear dark glasses and trench coats and shoot guns like Men in Black. So if you want a good projection, you have to drop this no longer popular medieval fantasy stuff and convert your storytelling to science fiction.”
Of course I wouldn’t do that. I told them flat-out that they were wrong, that the only reason fantasy wasn’t selling was because no one had made anything good in that genre for the past few years. It was a lack of quality, not the popularity of the genre. I made the comparison to King Kong. Several schlocky big monster movies came out and didn’t do well, so people decided the King Kong franchise was not a valuable intellectual property. Then Peter Jackson made a great movie and suddenly King Kong was hot again.
But EA wouldn’t budge.
There’s a lot about running a business that I don’t know or that I’m not very good at, but when I have an idea I believe in, I am tenacious. Six months later we went back and told them, “Hey, take a look at that Internet thing, it’s really starting to catch on. Now is the time to get moving.”
For the second time we were told no.
Six months after that we went back again. I literally would not take no for an answer. This time I went into CEO Larry Probst’s office and told him, “Look, we spend five million or more on any game we develop. Give me $250,000 to prove to you this is viable.” Larry was a fine businessman who believed the numbers told the story; I tried to convince him that there were times numbers didn’t paint a complete picture. He truly was not interested, but I wouldn’t leave the office until he agreed. Finally, he agreed to sign a note I’d already written out that said basically, “I hereby grant Richard the ability to go over budget by $250,000 in pursuit of this Multima thing that he wants to do.”
EA gave us the minimal funding, but no other support. We were last on the list to get any resource. We only got to see the resumes of potential hires after every other project had passed on them. There was a reason for that beyond EA’s MMORPG skepticism: When Ultima VIII was published, it hadn’t reached expectations. Instead, our game Wing Commander had become the most prominent money earner for the Origin division of the company. Because Wing Commander was doing so well, and it needed resources, when resumes came into Human Resources that team had first pick. And second pick. So our team became the ragtag group of rejects. We were like the Bad News Bears of gaming.
To make matters worse, EA wouldn’t give us proper office space. The building was being refurbished and every other team was given new space as it was completed. The team my long-time creative partner Starr Long and I built was literally put out in the hallway; our desks were in the corridor facing floor-to-ceiling plastic sheets. Behind those plastic curtains the walls were being demolished and rebuilt. We were working in the middle of a construction site, and we had to learn to live with the bangs and screeching of hammering and sawing and way too much dust for computers. Everything came together to make us feel unimportant and unwanted.
In 1996, while we were making Ultima Online, another potentially “first” massively multiplayer game, Meridian 59 was published. Visually it was nicely done and it was produced by a competent developer; it looked good . . . but it didn’t do very well. I felt it was just a little shy of the critical mass necessary to take off. It wasn’t a deep enough, rich enough virtual world to meet the next-step expectations. At the time, it had sold only about thirty thousand units. That was very scary for us. It certainly didn’t help us make our case to EA executives, who were already skeptical and used that as a data point to reinforce their Richard is an idiot and don’t waste our money listening to him argument. As it turns out, Meridian 59 developed a loyal following and is, notably, one of the survivors from that early era. Its fans and original developers still keep it going on an open source basis.
Still, for the $250,000 we managed to build a nice little prototype. We then put up one of EA’s very first websites to introduce the game. Basically we introduced ourselves: Hello, we’re the Ultima team, and we’ve spent $250,000 making a prototype for a new game and we need people, a lot of people, to help us test it. “We can’t download it to you,” we wrote, “because it’s too big. We need to send you the game on a CD, which is going to be expensive for us to manufacture and mail. So if you want to volunteer to be a beta tester and help us develop this game, please send us $5.”
This was a marketing strategy no one had tried before: ask people to pay for the privilege of volunteering. We were hoping to find enough people to populate our small world so we could see what worked and what needed improvement, but we didn’t know what kind of response to expect. The EA marketing team had projected lifetime sales for Ultima Online at about thirty thousand units—which they thought was wildly optimistic. They made that estimate based on the fact that the largest-selling MUD in history had sold about fifteen thousand units—and they doubled it. Of course, in this industry even thirty thousand units is irrelevant in a financial sense.
This wasn’t the launch of a game. There was no advertising. This was a search for paying volunteers. The only publicity was its website. We put it on the Internet and held our collective breath—within a week or so fifty thousand people had signed up to pay $5 for the disc!
Finally, EA got it. Ultima Online instantly became the most important thing happening in the EA world. The floodgates opened; we got all the money and the development people we needed. After practically ignoring us, EA now decided we needed considerably more management oversight, so we inherited an entire level of EA management people. We were making things up as we went along, but these executives sensed that something important was happening and wanted to have a stake in it. While having money made the situation much better, the managers who came with it often made it worse. We were just trying to keep our heads down and make a game, but other people started playing company politics. Everybody wanted answers to questions we hadn’t yet decided on: when could we ship the game, how much money did we need, who would be in charge after the game was online?
In the past, once we’d shipped a game, it was done, it was out. It was time to focus on “what’s next?” This was completely different; we were going to be running a live service. It was like producing a TV show and having to continue producing episodes or your audience would go away, except it wasn’t really like that at all. Or it was like being in an airport control tower without ever being able to leave and landing an endless string of planes, except it wasn’t really like that either. There was no one in our group with this level of experience. We didn’t even think about this when we were working; we were too busy just running around. But during beta testing we realized we needed someone to “moderate” the world we were creating. We needed a “community manager.”
In fact, we hired what may have been the very first person in the industry to have the official role of “online community manager.” We hadn’t even created a title for that position when we hired the first one. My brother Robert tried to figure out what this person would do: “We know they aren’t going to make art, they aren’t going to write code, they aren’t going to build maps. You’re telling me they’re going to be the person who sits on the Internet and talks with your players? Really? You want to hire someone to talk to players and the game’s not even generating revenue yet? That sounds like idiocy.”
After creating the position of community manager we tried to explain what it was. An online world has no political infrastructure, so the people in it have no means of communicating with whoever is in charge and no clear voice to represent them. We needed a way for them to register their complaints, to express their needs, and to offer suggestions as we moved forward. We also had to find a way to speak to them. At that time there was no website or other place where we could contact them. What happened next was amazing. The players and the company combined to invent many of the same solutions used in the real world, meaning that in addition to the people in the community employed by the company, the community self-organized and selected its own leaders. And at the center of all of this was our community manager.
We built UO one piece at a time. The first prototype that showed any aspect of multiplayer interaction was pretty simple: It was a grassy plain where I could move one figure and another member of the team could move their player—and we could see each other moving and we could talk to each other through cartoon-style text balloons. Then, naturally, we gave them simple weapons so they could club each other.
That fun turned to pure terror the first time we let in other players during beta testing. When I describe this moment, I ask people to imagine the city of Austin, which has a cozy population of just over one million. It’s a big small city. Imagine that you invite thirty of your best friends to a dinner party and everybody sits down and over the course of a year those thirty people, with no input from anyone else, create an entire new city of Austin. Not just the architecture, but every aspect of it, right down to the candy bars on the shelves of the supermarket. Everything in that city, from the height of its tallest building to the price of a candy bar, has been created by one of those thirty people. Somebody decided where every pothole, every road, every fence would be. They decided how much power each building would need to operate, and then breaker boxes had to be installed to fulfill those needs.
The result is a beautifully pristine, completely empty city. All the lights shine brightly. When those thirty people explore their creation, everything works beautifully. They can go into any building and walk around, buy a candy bar, or cross a street without incident. There are no cars moving yet, but the roads are there. It is perfect.
Then they open the gates and welcome people into this city. One million people show up and start using the facilities. What is the probability that the power grid will stay online? Zero. What is the probability that the sewers won’t back up? Zero. What is the probability that people will think the taxation rates are fair or that the economy will stay in balance? Right, zero. And what is the probability that when someone discovers their toilet doesn’t flush, the lights don’t work, and the garbage isn’t being collected that they aren’t going to be upset and try to find someone to complain to? One big fat zero. And when they get frustrated because they are trapped in a city that isn’t working, and there is no one to tell them it’s all being fixed, they get disruptive.
That’s what happened when we invited people into our city for the first time. It actually happened twice: first, when we invited our beta testers into the city then again later when we went online for real. Neither time were we adequately prepared for the number of people who wanted to play the game or the widely varying ways in which it would stress unimagined aspects of the controlling systems of the game.
We had no expectations because we had no history to look at. The biggest complaint was that with so many people online at the same time, our servers were not sufficient to sustain their game play. We knew it and we were working on it, but apparently not quickly enough. There were other problems as well. Players might go down into the dungeons to unlock secret doors and discover treasures, only to find all the doors open, and the treasure chests ransacked. There were also limits to the number of people who could congregate in any one place. The more people there were, the more slowly the game would respond. It was inevitable that from time to time the servers would overload and the whole game would just come to a crashing halt. There were also countless times when the game’s response to player activity would be inadequate or downright wrong.
The system was broken in so many ways that you would think players would eventually get tired of all the problems and pack up and go home, but that’s not what happened. People clearly saw the potential; they desperately wanted it to work, so instead of walking away they registered their unhappiness in really clever ways, culminating in an act of civil disobedience that was impossible to ignore.
This was a remarkable social event and confirmed the viability of the game. These people knew each other only through their avatars, yet they were able to communicate successfully and stage a massive demonstration. It was pretty funny too.
Several thousand players simultaneously went to Lord British’s castle and stormed the gates, which were locked. We had to help the protesters by opening them. Once we opened the gates, they flooded the building with bodies. People were packed in from wall to wall, from ceiling to floor. They knew that we had provided alcoholic beverages for the game; if you had one drink you would go hic, hic, hic; if you had two drinks you would respond hiccup, hiccup, hiccup; and if you had three or more drinks your character would get sick, double over, and vomit on the floor.
That was a small aspect of the game we had enjoyed developing: should you vomit after three drinks or four?
While the only limit on how much a character could drink was that it affected the character’s performance, we did have a profanity filter that blocked characters from using certain words, figuring moms weren’t going to like their kids hearing the colorful variety of language that some players were inevitably going to want to use. If someone tried to type in one of the more colorful words, the game automatically replaced it with symbols. So naturally players began figuring out ways to circumvent the filter, replacing the s in certain words with a dollar sign, for example. Hundreds of players crammed into the castle, took off their clothes, and started drinking and cursing. We quickly had a screaming naked mob vomiting all over the floor.
We got the point. People took endless screen shots, the press covered it, and, naturally, our servers crashed. The people playing took the entire system offline, very effectively making their point. Our problem was that not only were we more successful than EA had projected, we were wildly more successful than even we had imagined. Instead of thirty thousand units, we were going to sell several hundred thousand units, maybe more, maybe a million. We had designed servers that would allow thousands of people to be connected simultaneously, but we were completely unprepared for the game’s success. At peak times rarely were more than 10 percent of subscribers logged on, so we believed we had sufficient servers to keep our world operating. But suddenly we had millions of subscribers, which meant that 10 percent was more than the total we had anticipated. Our servers couldn’t handle it. This is commonly referred to as “the m-squared problem.” Every player had to have access to every word said by every other player, a complex issue that required an enormous number of servers.
For a lot of technical reasons, we couldn’t just make the world bigger. The only solution was to create a second set of servers and divide players between these worlds. One player logged on to copy A, while someone else was on copy B of the world or copy C or D. Nothing about these worlds was connected in any shape or form. I was very unhappy that we had to do this. My vision of a metaverse was not going to come to fruition, exactly. To me, this was a defeat. I knew that events in one world were not going to match events in another world, and the worlds would evolve independently and end up being very different. One world might have all the happy players, while another world would be where the dissidents lived. To me, this violated the basic concept of creating a fictional reality. I didn’t want anyone thinking they weren’t in the real world, but rather that they had been shunted off to a copy of the real world. In order to create a singular reality, I needed to find a fiction that tied everything back together.
For inspiration I went all the way back to Ultima I, which was the story of the evil Mondain the Immortal Wizard, who became immortal by possessing the gem of immortality. In order to kill him, the gem of immortality first had to be destroyed. So I wrote a story of how when the gem of immortality was broken, it took a snapshot of the world as it was at that moment and created shards of the gem. The reality of the world was reflected within each shard and those shards were scattered through the universe, to finally be found in Ultima Online. Every shard was an exact duplication of the world as it was when Mondain was finally killed, and in theory, if all those shards were collected and brought back to Lord British, he could reunify the world. So even though players might be in a disparate world, a shard of reality, it was possible that someday the world would be unified.
I never expected the word shard to become a common term in the online gaming world and even be applied to database server architecture. Banks, for example, use it to describe their networking capabilities. I was talking with someone from another company one day and he explained, “We’ve broken up our world into five shards and . . .” I stopped him and asked why he’d used that word and he explained that it was just the term used to describe a copy of the world.
“It’s not,” I told him, “that’s not it at all. The word shard comes from Mondain the evil wizard’s gem that was destroyed, and these shards had to be unified to bring the worlds back together.”
“Oh,” he said, “okay.”
Eventually we were able to get twenty copies of our world running at the same time. But our challenges were only just beginning.
The Long Good-bye
It took us about a year to work out the problems that surfaced during the beta testing of Ultima Online. We were inventing solutions on the run, just trying to keep the world functioning. Several times during the beta phase we made sweeping changes as we came to understand the needs and quirks of our world. We tweaked how easy it was to get gold, and to advance in levels. Each time we made a change, we informed our beta testers that we had to reset the servers and erase all the player data, meaning their avatar had to start over. But we really didn’t want to have to do that after the game went live. So the transition from the beta phase to live would be the last time the servers would ever be wiped. Everything about the world up to that moment would be erased, and when the servers came online the next day, the game would begin for real and everyone’s avatars would theoretically live forever. From that moment on, whatever role people played, whatever fortune a player accumulated or property they owned, it would remain with them just as it would in real life.
We informed all of our testers of when we were going to wipe the servers clean for the last time. It was a major event, although even we had no idea that it would become one of the seminal events in the history of gaming. In fact, there isn’t a list of the most important moments in game development that doesn’t include it in the top ten, and usually in the top two or three. It was the night my avatar, Lord British, was assassinated.
This was the end of the world for the beta testers. Their homes, their businesses, their possessions would all be gone. At precisely midnight the servers would go down, they would stay down a few hours, and then the new and permanent world would begin. It was a monumental event for all of us, and our players wanted to be there to celebrate the end of the beginning. In addition to the players, every member of our staff was also online. All the senior management, the customer service department, and the designers were spread throughout our building, most of us in our offices, playing the game with the thousands and thousands of testers around the globe. I was with project director Starr Long, who was playing his character, Blackthorn.
To mark the occasion we had announced that Lord British and Blackthorn would go from town to town giving speeches thanking everyone and saying good-bye. We had to travel because if all the players tried to get into the same city at the same time, the game would bog down. Star and I teleported from city to city with many of our employees. It was kind of a king’s entourage. We broadcast it on our global “network” so whichever town we were in, all the players could see it, as if we had a global megaphone. In every city there were hundreds of characters lined up, often very formally, to hear the creators make these final pronouncements. Sometimes people responded in very funny ways: When Star and I arrived in the town of Moon Glow, for example, we found the players lined up facing away from us. And then in unison all of the characters took off their pants and bowed. We were mooned in Moon Glow.
In fact, in each place Lord British went to make a farewell speech, people were finding fun and clever ways to celebrate this occasion. And then, just before midnight, just before the end of the world, we reached the city of Trinsic. Trinsic is protected by a high wall, and in the center of the city there is a large, open square. Much of the population of the city had gathered there to hear our final words in the final minutes of the final beta test days of Ultima Online.
At this point it’s important to note that my avatar, Lord British, was immortal. Being immortal was absolutely essential because, as we had learned in the solo-player Ultimas, just about everyone’s favorite activity was trying to kill the non-player characters, especially Lord British. Having to constantly fight for my life, escape assassination attempts, and avoid traps might be fun for other players, but not for me. By making Lord British immortal I could focus on building the world. And besides that, being immortal is cool. Who wouldn’t want to be immortal if they had the option? Every time we did a wipe of the entire game, I had to make a new version of me, and when I did I re-created my special character, who looked like me and wore a recognizable outfit. I also set all my attributes—my strength, my intelligence, and everything else—at the peak of what the game could hold. Basically, I couldn’t be harmed, and if I hit anybody with even my little finger they would be killed instantly. I even had a special flag called immortality that I could trigger, so that even under the worst conditions there was no way I could die.
It’s good to be Lord British.
To maintain the peace we gave that same immortality flag to the guards in cities so that no one could overwhelm the police. In the waning moments of the beta version, both Lord British and Blackthorn appeared on the wall overlooking Trinsic’s town square. As we began our speech, an avatar cast a fire-field spell up onto the parapet, setting the area directly around us on fire. Of course this was something we had seen many times before. During the early days of beta testing there had been countless attempts to assassinate Lord British and every one had failed—because he is immortal!
And so I treated this puny fireball as just another effort to be ignored. Ah, those mortal fools, believing they could kill the mighty Lord British. I took a couple of steps back to avoid the fire, but that meant I could not continue my speech; I could neither see nor be seen. Being immortal I had nothing to fear from this feeble attempt, so I decided to step through the fire. I enjoyed the thought of showing them my power by stepping out of the flames. So I took one step forward into the fire—and fell over.
Dead.
I was stunned. Oh. My. God. I couldn’t believe it. Dead? Lord British?
As we later discovered, during the last server reboot several months earlier, I had been in such a hurry to create the character that I had forgotten to set my immortal flag. I hadn’t noticed it because I hadn’t been challenged; I had lived for months without any problems until we were minutes away from shutting down the servers. Suddenly, I was dead.
There was nothing I could do. When you fall over dead in UO, you can’t speak, so I couldn’t ask for help. And I couldn’t resurrect myself. There were only minutes left in the game and my character lay dead in a storm of fire.
I was dumbfounded. It took a few seconds before anyone else actually realized what had happened. Then my staff set to work. While with today’s technology it is pretty easy to do a quick query on the database to find out who performed what function, as Ultima Online was pioneering the development of this type of game, it took us days of going through our records to figure out exactly what had happened.
But at that moment that was not the staff’s primary concern. They knew they had only five minutes before there would be an automatic shutdown of the entire service. This wasn’t enough time to restore order to the proceedings. They weren’t sure I would come back to life before then, and couldn’t figure out which of the evildoers in this courtyard had killed Lord British. So there really was only one thing to do: kill them all.
It’s amazing how quickly the cloak of civilization can disappear. The word spread verbally throughout the office: Let us unleash hell! My staff summoned demons and devils and dragons and all of the nightmarish creatures of the game and they cast spells and created dark clouds and lightning that struck and killed people. The gamemasters have special powers, and once they realized I had been killed, they were able to almost instantly resurrect Lord British. And I gleefully joined in the revelry; kill me, will you! Be gone, mortals! It was a slaughter of the thousands of players in the courtyard.
It definitely was not the noble ending we had intended.
And while some players enjoyed the spontaneity of this event, others were saddened or hurt by it. When most characters die they turn into a ghost and are transported to a distant place on the map. Then they have to go find their body. So the cost of being killed is a temporary existence as a ghost. In the last three minutes of these characters’ existence, they suddenly found themselves alone, deep in the woods, unable to speak or interact with anyone else. But the net result of this mass killing in retaliation for the assassination of Lord British was that not only were all of these innocent people slaughtered, they were also cast out of the presence of the creators at the final moment. As the final seconds trickled down, they desperately tried to get back but most often failed. The fact that all of us, the creators and the players, were able to turn the last few moments of the beta test into this completely unplanned and even unimagined chaos was proof that we had built something unique, a platform that would allow players to do pretty much whatever they pleased, and it was about to take on a life—and many deaths—of its own.
We eventually proved that the person who killed me in those final hours was a player known in the game as Rainz. He lives in infamy to this day. And I still have yet to get my revenge!