ULTIMATE AMBITION
How Ultima Online changed the world
■ “We wanted to make an alternate reality,” says Raph about his ambitions for Ultima Online. “We were all sci-fi readers, we had all read Snow Crash, and we knew that we were building the next generation of what a MUD could be. We leaned really heavily into all kinds of things that were really unusual. We insisted that in our game, you had to be able to sit down. We put in a pet system, we let you own a house, we let you dye your clothing and customise your avatar to a degree that had not been seen before in games. We let you form guilds. We put in crafting. Ultima had allowed you to bake bread as a one-off here and there: Ultima Online was built on a substrate of a whole player-driven economy.” On its release in 1997, Ultima Online got a mixed critical reception, partly as a result of offering perhaps too much freedom. “It had a horrendous problem with player killing, because we were pretty permissive about that,” says Raph. The introduction of safe zones eventually calmed down the murder sprees, but the creativity of players meant the game offered much more than casual killing, like playerrun sporting events and touring theatre groups. “This resulted in think pieces in Wired magazine and The New Yorker almost immediately,” says Raph, “because it was like the birth of a new online society.” Virtual goods from Ultima Online even ended up being sold on a new site called ebay. “The first time we saw a castle sell for $9,000 in 1997, we were just astonished,” says Raph. There were plenty of other headline-grabbing events, too. The time that Origin’s Richard Garriott was murdered by another player while playing as Lord British made international news. In short, Ultima Online was a very big deal. “Online games had been around in the form of MUDS since the Seventies, but this was a moment when the rest of the world had to sit up and realise, ‘Wait a minute, science fiction is coming true over here,’” says Raph. “It was an inflection point, it felt like we were leaving a dent on the universe.”
were enormous tensions with the Ultima IX people, just enormous, because they came from making linear single-player games. It was often very uncomfortable.
We showed at E3 again in the spring of 1997, and at that point most of the game was there. We shipped in September, so it was just about two years from the day I joined.
To think that you could ship something so ambitious in two years is phenomenal, really. Yeah, it was done incredibly quickly, which did mean 80-hour weeks, working through weekends. My first kid was born during the crunch of Ultima Online, and we just had them in the office. Kristen nursed in the office, and we’d tuck the baby carrier under the desk. I would sleep on a futon under my desk. It was everything you hear about horrendous crunch stories.
And Ultima Online launched extraordinarily buggy: it needed more time, absolutely. But an executive actually came around and visited each of us, and said, “There’s going to be a vote on whether to launch this tomorrow. It would be a career-limiting move to vote against launching the game.”
Did you receive many complaints after Ultima
Online launched?
We were deluged with complaints – but it became the fastest- selling game in EA history. It was seismic, but it was exhausting. We were tremendously overworked, and one month after the game had come out, I was the only team member left standing on the project.
What happened to everyone else?
Everyone else either moved over to what became an abortive attempt to create an Ultima Online 2, or quit the company altogether.
It’s interesting that people plunged into a sequel, because nowadays we think of MMOS as essentially endless.
EA did not understand that. Many of us were saying this is a very bad idea. EA was saying, “No, we need to make a sequel,” and a big part of that was probably to jump on the 3D graphics wave: Ultima Online was the last gasp of incredibly highend 2D engines. Frankly, you couldn’t have made Ultima Online in 3D at the time, the performance wasn’t quite there yet to have all of the freedoms.
What did you do next?
I started getting asked, “Hey, could you take the UO platform and build a new game on top of that code?” I developed a few pitches: the one I really wanted to do was MULE Online,
but through this hilarious sequence of political events, EA didn’t have all the rights to MULE.
So it became something called Star
Settlers, then EA said it should be in the
Wing Commander universe. And I’m like,
“Wing Commander doesn’t have planetary settlements,” and they’re like, “But Privateer does,” and so it became Privateer Online. Then they said, “Wait, UO is a 2D engine, and Privateer is a 3D spaceflight game,” so then the UO engine reuse turned into a brand-new engine.
The one I really wanted to do was MULE Online, but through this hilarious sequence of political events, EA didn’t have all the rights to MULE
Raph Koster
What happened next? We went from a quick-turnaround project to a new, monster 3D game that was in a different IP that wasn’t even part of our studio. Chris Roberts’ group were furious that we were getting to do this, because they had been wanting to do a Wing Commander Online. So then some of them got put onto the team, and that caused fresh culture conflict. We actually got a prototype going, and we showed the whole thing to the company – and were promptly cancelled by EA in favour of Earth & Beyond. So Privateer Online was a year of work, and it just went poof.
The core of the Privateer Online team quit and were offered a deal by Sony Online, who were the makers of Everquest. And then Sony Online said, “Actually, we want to hand you Star Wars,” which we did not expect.
How did you feel then?
Terrified. It was public knowledge that the project existed, and it had supposedly been going for a year, maybe longer. They asked us, “Hey, can you come in and do an evaluation of where the project sits?” And we had done that and said, “It’s not where you think it is, it is behind.” And we present the report, and they’re like, “OK, take it over.” And we’re like, “Take it over? There’s a whole team, it’s gonna be a mess, they’re gonna hate us.” So we debated all the flight back. It was all like, “It’s Star Wars.” “Yeah, but it’s gonna be mad crunch.” “But it’s Star Wars.” “Yeah, but it’s going to be politically a nightmare.” “But it’s Star Wars.”
It was a mess. The entire programming team in San Diego quit. I felt really bad for the guy who had been running the project. And then we were on a crazy tight timeline. We had to basically redesign everything, because the other mandate we were given was, “The design is too much like Everquest, make it more like Ultima Online.”
It was a death march, it was diving right back into horrendous crunch. We built Galaxies in two years and nine months.
Were you crunching that whole time?
Not the whole time, but probably for at least a year and a half of it.
Wow, that’s awful.
Yes. Between Ultima Online and Galaxies, I probably put on 100 pounds from eating junk food all the time. I’ve never managed to lose it all back. Crunch is enormously destructive. An awful lot of colleagues from that time period who were my age are dead. Heart attacks, cancers, suicides. Lots of cases of drug addiction.
So you launched Star Wars Galaxies after this momentous crunch period – what was the reception like?
We shipped it, in my opinion, a year early. It was far from ready. I had asked for an
additional year: they were willing to let me slip from May 4 to the end of June, that was all the time they were willing to give.
We had built a community of about a quarter of a million people in forums, and we found all of the top community members and flew them to the office. We basically fell on our swords and said, “Hey, the game’s not ready, but it’s going to ship anyway, and we could use your help, because we’re gonna keep working on it to deliver what we promised. But we hope you trust us, because we built this good relationship with you. Please help us.” And they did, they went out there and helped us with the community.
The game didn’t even work on the first day, like you couldn’t log in at all. It was very, very broken. But we did deliver things, particularly in the first six months. Player-run cities with player-run governments, a pretty plausible galactic civil war, and a whole bunch of new innovations that made things feel more like a living world.
And somehow around that time you managed to write a book…
I did! After I was promoted, I was chief creative officer at Sony Online, and I spent a lot of time doing milestone reviews, and running R&D projects, and doing pitches for Hollywood tie-ins that were never happening. And I was also really, really tired and burned out, and had a ridiculous amount of vacation time accrued. So I asked for permission to write a book based on a talk that I had given called The Theory Of Fun. It’s basically a pop-science book about what exactly is fun, and why does it matter? What are games for?
It ended up being hugely influential, didn’t it? Yeah, which is sort of weird for a book that is half cartoons. But yes, it’s usually named in the top three recommended books to read if you want to get into game development. And it still sells as well today as it ever has. I wouldn’t be surprised if the book lasts so much longer than any of the games I’ve made.
What happened next in your career after the book?
After I left Sony Online, I did a start up called Metaplace, which was an attempt to build the metaverse. In a lot of ways it was more robust than Roblox is now: it had way less flashy graphics, but it interacted completely with the internet. You could run virtual storefronts in it, you could run classrooms in it, you could hook it up to learning systems. At peak, there were 70,000 user-built worlds, ranging from simple RPGS to platformers to combat games to social spaces.
But it never really caught on to the degree that I hoped. Disney acquired it, and it ended up being the back end for Club Penguin and a couple of dozen other games at Disney, mostly Facebook games and social games.
What happened after the social games?
I ended up doing six years of whatever I wanted: I did consulting, and I wrote music, and I put out a couple more books. I also worked with Google for a long time on what will happen when social gameplay is done using AR glasses. The other thing I did was a bunch of retro game emulation work on Retropie for the Raspberry Pi. I helped out on the Atari emulator, I did some work on the various Commodore platforms, and I took over the Microvision emulator and made it nice and user friendly. But eventually, I got the itch to go back and make an MMO again, and that’s what I’m doing now.
Can you tell us anything about it?
Since late 2018, I’ve been working at Playable Worlds, which is a new studio I cofounded in order to get back to that idea of building worlds that can be alternate realities. All those years ago when we said that online worlds could be more than just hack and slash? Time has proven us right, and the world is ready for that now. Now we can do all of the things that we were too naive to realise were impossible when we did Ultima Online.