![]() I’ve told the story elsewhere of how they found Rick Delashmit, and from there they found my wife and I as designers, where we had cut our teeth in online world design on LegendMUD. When they went looking for people make the game, they ended up having to look outside the company, and the place to look turned out to be MUDs. Richard and Starr Long went to the executive greenlight board at Electronic Arts multiple times trying to get money to fund a prototype, and after being turned down each time, finally got a check for $150,000 or $250,000 (I have heard varying figures) directly from Larry Probst, the CEO. Cat, a long-time Origin veteran who had left the company, was interested enough in online gaming that he created a game called DragonSpires which was way ahead of its time, and the predecessor to Furcadia. There was an abortive deal with Sierra to create a “Multima.” Dr. Cat, and others tell it, the idea for an online, multiplayer version of the Ultima series had been around for quite some time. Ultima Online COULD have been DragonSpires, but Origin decided to build their ownĪs Richard Garriott, Dr. Sierra had launched The Realm in 1996 it had a side view, and each fight was actually an “instance” – when you engaged in combat with another entity, outsiders saw a cloud with fists and whatnot poking out, and you were sent to another screen to do battle. (I honestly don’t know whether this was a bug at the time or what – I never played it again). If you got hit, you were put into the turn sequence for everyone in the fight this resulted in a blob of dozens of players waiting a half hour to swing once or try to escape the fight. DSO was much larger, but had some sort of turn-based combat. Lineage, when I first tried it, consisted of one house, that you stepped out of onto a killing field and basically died immediately. I recommended Damion Schubert for it instead. After the tour, Mike talked to me about a possible job on Meridian 59, and I turned him down because Origin had already made an offer. If I was online, I often greeted newbies personally, and if they were people involved in creating MUDs, I would offer to tour them around the game, showing off the many things that it did that were different from the run of the mill. Sometime in 1995 or so, Mike Sellers logged into LegendMUD, and I toured him around. Meridian 59, like EverQuest after it, started out with a small game window with inventory and chat boxes around itĪnd of course, Meridian 59beat UO to market as well. The aforementioned Dark Sun Online and also Lineage were played in the UO offices during the development process as well, though they were both in pretty rough state. WorldsAway, a version of Habitat, was on CompuServe, as were Islands of Kesmai and Air Warrior. Simutronics had its text-based MUDs running, such as DragonRealms and Gemstone. You can read over the timeline to see just how many preceded Ultima Online – quite a lot, particularly if you count all the text-based worlds, as I do. These services varied in price from $30 a month to $30 a year, on top of ISP fees, but by and large didn’t offer much if any persistent world gaming (TEN had Dark Sun Online which came out in ’96). Around 1995 to 1996 TEN and MPath (aka MPlayer, and eventually GameSpy) showed up, and started bundling games with LAN play into a subscription that let you play them online via the Internet. Most online gameplay was LAN play, in fact services like DWANGO (launched in 1994) allowed LAN games to be played over the Internet using a dedicated dial-up service that served as a matchmaker. Quake had come out in 1996, and many of the art team played it on the company LAN in the afternoons. “That is forbidden in the demo” is still an occasional catchphrase in our house – our research sessions always ended there at the last doorway in the single-level demo. Its graphics were much better than what we were already committed to, but its multiplayer was very limited. I remember a bunch of us gathering around one computer to play the demo version. Max game resolution, if you had a powerful rig, was generally 800×600.ĭuring the development of UO, we carefully watched the development and release of Diablo and heaved a sigh of relief when we realized it was a graphical version of Rogue or NetHack, rather than a persistent world (today people toss around “roguelike” as a common term. The top games in 1997 included Final Fantasy VII, Goldeneye 64, Castlevania, Star Fox 64, Parappa the Rapper, The Curse of Monkey Island, Age of Empires, Mario Kart 64, Fallout, X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, Theme Hospital, and Total Annihilation. Gaming, of course, was alive and well, including online gaming. ![]() ![]() Prodigy streamed each screen down as an image, even the text ones.
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