Ultima Online Memories
Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:47 amUltima Online Memories
To mark the 10th anniversary of EA's landmark title, we ask people who worked on it to share their recollections
November 23, 2007 - In the video game industry where hype is expected, it's still very safe to list Ultima Online as a landmark. Launched in 1997 by EA's Origin Systems division, it brought the celebrated single-player RPG property created by Richard "Lord British" Garriott into the massively multiplayer space, offering legions of fans the chance to adventure together in the land of Sosaria. Although it had been preceded by other server-based graphical titles that supported large numbers of concurrent users, it was the first major success. At its peak, the game's subscriber base was in the hundreds of thousands, and there's no doubt that during the past decade, well over a million people have played for at least a while. Notably, quite a sizeable portion came from overseas markets, not just in Europe, but also in various other regions around the entire globe.
Here at Vault Network, our roots go back to our first site, UO Vault, which opened during development. It became a focal point for the project's community, and its success served as the foundation for the addition of, among others, RPG Vault. So, we've actually been tracking Ultima Online for about 12 years. A great deal has happened during that time, far too much for us even to attempt a telling of its history. Still, we couldn't allow the tenth anniversary to pass without some form of tribute. The concept we came up with was to ask people who have worked on it to share some of their memories with us. This turned out to be a surprisingly substantial task, so we're especially thankful to the 13 individuals, both current team members and alumni, whose contributions comprise this special feature.
Jeff "Witch Doctor" Wilson
Current company: Funcom
Current project: Age of Conan - Hyborian Adventures
Current position: All-around coder, mostly server development
UO background: Programmer, Director of the library and tools group. I worked at Origin from Jan 1991 to June 1997 - I believe it was 1997. I was involved in the early development of all projects. For UO specifically, this was for about six months.
The main thing I remember is that Richard Garriott brought in some people who where from MOO/MUD community, and they became the core of the UO team. This, I believe, is on of the main reasons Ultima Online worked. Online games are about community, and they where the only people at that time with any real experience in building such communities. This is what Richard always excelled at, building the correct team for what he wanted to achieve.
Joshua M. "speedman" Kriegshauser
Current company: Sony Online Entertainment
Current project: EverQuest II
Current position: Associate Technical Director
UO background: November 2003 to June 2005. Programmer
UO was my first love as an MMO from both a player and developer standpoint. I loved hearing from players at meet-ups and on the forums, and fixing bugs that they pointed out. It was also fun to watch the way they responded to my dev name "speedman". It was not an easy game to work on as much of it was in proprietary script, and it was very easy to break things unintentionally, but I learned a lot from working on it. UO will always hold a special place in my heart.
Kirk "Runesabre" Black
Current Company: Family Time! Interactive
Current Project: Family Time! Adventures
Current Position: President / Owner
UO background: Aug 1998 to May 2001 as Lead Programmer and Producer
My first experience with UO was an IRC chat in July of 1997 with a guy named Designer Dragon [Raph Koster - Ed.] about this exciting new virtual world about to be released. I would later become one of the first developers hired directly from the player community. Thanks, Rich Vogel, for taking a chance! I helped grow the game from a stagnating 96,000 subscribers to a thriving 240,000 in markets such as Japan, China, Korea, Europe and Australia. Among the many things I did during my tenure, I'm most noted for treasure hunts, banning a lot of cheaters, un-nerfing tamed dragons, making animal taming actually useful, getting the servers to run longer with fewer crashes, making patch day pleasant instead of hellish, and Siege Perilous. Many players may simply know me as one of those holiday bells... the one named Runesabre.
One of the most memorable and touching experiences I had while working on UO was the time a wheelchair-bound player wrote to us to say that of all the things he liked about it, the best was that he could run again. For me, that sums up my passion for UO and for developing MMOs in general - the unique opportunity to have a positive, tangible impact on people's lives.
Andrew "Ando" Woodruff
Current company: Aeria Games
Current project: Twelve Sky
Current position: Producer
UO background: 2004-2007 as Assistant Producer and QA Lead
The coolest part of working on the UO team was when I became an Assistant Producer and got to work on the live team around the time of publishes 40 to 44, along with the work we did on live events. Our development team was so much fun to work with, and it really felt like we were accomplishing a lot. One of my favorite things was working directly with players to discuss features and issues for each publish in the Dev Corner on our forums. I also really liked hanging out with players on the test center late at night when I wasn't busy. Sometimes, I would even create mini-events for them.
I also really enjoyed working on the 9th Anniversary Collection. This was basically the first boxed product I shipped after becoming an Assistant Producer. It actually wasn't easy; it felt like we were working on a mini-expansion pack in a lot of ways. I had a lot of fun working with our team to develop the content that went into the box. I enjoyed working with the players during the public testing, and was very pleased to see our hard work was well received by the fans.
Kevin Saffel
Current company: Heatwave Interactive
Current project: Unannounced
Current position: Director of Engineering
UO background: 1999 to 2004. I was client programmer on UO: Renaissance and UO: Third Dawn. I was also a consultant on UO: Lord Blackthorn's Revenge, and a senior programmer on Ultima X: Odyssey.
I started playing UO in December of 1997. I remember as players (I was working at Acclaim at the time), Greyburn [former developer Ed Groover - Ed.] and I would play for hours on end, and when we weren't playing, we were talking about it. It was a blast dodging PKs, putting together hunting parties to get revenge, trying to kill demons (I couldn't even kill a bird initially, ha!) and saving up to afford a house.
I loved UO so much that I got a job working on it, and Greyburn also joined the team not long after. It truly is my all-time favorite MMO because it really makes you feel like you are in a living world. I STILL play from time to time.
Patrick "Leurocian" Malott
Current company: Electronic Arts
Current project: Ultima Online
UO background: 2004-2005, 2006 to present as a Game Designer, and now Lead Systems Designer
Once, when I was hanging out at the Sweet Dreams Inn at Britain Bank practicing my hiding or musicianship skill, a thief walked by and attempted to steal from my character. I remember when I actually gave him gold not to steal from me. It worked! He ended up stealing from someone else the next night, but alas, the guards came when a stranger called for them, and quickly ended the thief's life. Those were fun times though.
One of my fondest memories as a developer is when I created paragon creatures of Ilshenar back in publish 26. As a developer, I would invisibly watch players as they battled them. When the paragon Ancient Wyrm spawned, the players would type to their friends, "There it is!" "Wow, he hits hard!" "This is so fun!" That put a big smile on my face and reminded me why I became a game developer.
J.P. "Grimm" Harrod
Current company: Electronic Arts
Current project: Ultima Online
UO background: 2004 to present as Character Artist, Senior Artist, Art Lead, Lead Character Artist, Associate Art Director, and now, Associate CG Supervisor
I was hired on during the development of Samurai Empire, and one of the things that will stay with me most vividly about that time was how complicated the process was for getting art in the game. This was one of the first expansions, so we found ourselves having to reverse engineer a pipeline in order to get new assets in - and with no tools and no blueprint to follow.
The second thing was the development for Kingdom Reborn. As far as art goes, this was the renaissance for UO. We had an established pipeline and evolving tools, we had migrated to the latest versions of 3D Studio Max, and we finally had the opportunity to break the limitations of the 2D client that we had been confined to (nine year-old limitations, mind you). The challenge came in re-creating nine years of art assets in one year's time. This was the most aggressive production schedule I've ever worked on!
In that time, we designed and re-created hundreds of creatures, clothing items and weapons, rendered out tens of thousands of pieces of tile art, and over a quarter million frames of animations. I can easily say that during my time here on UO, I have worked with some of the best engineers, designers and artists I will ever work with in my career.
Jon "JIB" Rein
Current company: Electronic Arts
Current project: Ultima Online
UO background: May 2004 to present, Software Engineer
UO is a great sociological experiment in which we see so many aspects of real life reflected in the game environment. To demonstrate this on our Halloween shard, I took a kindly player who was healing others against the hordes of evil zombies. I then gave this person the god-like powers to kill any other player or creature anywhere, without consequence. Needless to say this individual soon waged a genocidal war on fellow players who failed to pay tribute. At first, it was amusing, but eventually, it got scary how quickly power will corrupt. No matter how many times this experiment was repeated, no one used it to help their fellow man against the evil tide of baddies.
Jason Spangler
Current company: Electronic Arts
Current project: Ultima Online
UO background: 1996 to present (with a little time away 1999-2000) as Programmer, Lead Programmer, Technical Director
Demon invasion at the end of the beta test. It was a fun Wombat script to write, and fun to see the players enjoy it.
When time stopped. The time value overflowed, causing time to essentially stop on the shard.
Player housing. Implementing player housing late in the evenings after the feature had been cut from the game in an attempt to get it back on the schedule, I had a ship sitting on land with a house sign and door, and Richard (who was not usually around) walks into my office, looks at my screen, and asks what I was working on. "Player ships." I said. They figured it out, but player housing eventually got back into the game after they saw the progress I had made during those late evenings.
Thaddeus Oba
Current company: Electronic Arts
Current project: Ultima Online
UO background: Senior QA Tester from 2004, currently Asst. Development Manager
One of the two things I remember is testing all the items for the 7th Anniversary Edition of UO. Now that I am on the development / project management side, I remember all of the late nights and how the entire team pulled together to get Kingdom Reborn out the door and into players' hands.
John "Wilki" Wilkinson
Current company: Electronic Arts
Current project: Ultima Online
UO background: 2004 to present. Community Coordinator, currently a Designer
My favorite memory of UO is the day I first stepped foot in Felucca. I had heard the stories of rampant PKing, and was expecting to be slaughtered and dry looted instantly. Instead, I ran into a very nice woman who invited me to hunt lizardmen with her, and then introduced me to her guild when we were done. I ended up playing with that small guild for many a night over the next few years, and found that I really enjoyed the thrill of a non-consensual environment.
As a developer, I remember when I was first given god client access on a test shard. Oh, the fun I had spawning crazy powerful monsters with funny names that just slaughtered players en masse. What made it so fun was when those same players came running back for more after dieing, over and over, shouting "Devs, kill us again! This is so cool!"
Another time on the test shard, I attached a script to a player that spawned a dragon at his location every 10 seconds. He ran around for a while, trying to get away until he realized that HE was spawning them. You could almost see the realization come over him, as he suddenly ran straight towards the most populated area on the shard, where he proceeded to run in circles around the crowd until they were surrounded by angry dragons. I was laughing for quite awhile over that incident.
Steven Wade
Current positions: CEO, MMOsmart; Vice President, New Game World; business development, Keywords International
UO background: Counselor, 1998-99
Ultima Online made me the man I am today. I suppose after a statement like that it may seem I, like many, have romantic beliefs of what Ultima was. I was first turned onto the game at 15, and by 17, I was still playing strong and making $1,000 a month on eBay. I became part of the counselor program in
1998. I lied about my age and faxed in my mother's driver's license. Morally, was it wrong? Who can say? I do know, coming from humble beginnings, I credit and thank UO for helping me go to college and forge my career in the gaming industry.
I believe the game had many great ideas, and still today, is adding new content to a world already rich with history. It's funny that it's now is thought of as old and out dated, but amazingly, it still has some of the best features I've ever seen in an MMO. If you think about it, things like dye tubs are simple, yet powerful tools.
Community though is what Ultima Online was greatest at. A player would amass real-world relationships from the lands of Sosaria. Kids (an adults) would sit around lunch tables and plan out character templates or where they would build in-game towns together. Various websites like UO Vault, tradespot.net and imanewbie.com sprung up to help foster this growing community. Ultima Online has influenced so many; it was more than a game - it was a beginning.
Mitch "Pareidolic" Gross
Current company: THQ / Kaos Studios
Current project: Frontlines: Fuel of War
Current position: Community Manager
UO background: I was a player during beta and for several years afterwards. For part of that time, I was a Counselor, a volunteer player helper.
I had played MUDs and other multiplayer games like Meridian 59, but Ultima Online was the first in which the concept of community really clicked for me. I joined a guild for the first time, The Lost Order of Akalabeth, and really enjoyed the adventures we had plus the camaraderie of being part of a great group of players. I enjoyed UO so much that, inspired by the example of my guildmates, I applied and was accepted as a Counselor, which allowed me to help other players learn about and enjoy the game the way I did.
I later took on similar roles in Asheron's Call and its sequel and, with my interest in community, ended up writing for and managing websites for Warcry and IGN Vault Network. Recently, I joined THQ's Kaos Studios in a full-time position supporting the upcoming game Frontlines: Fuel of War, and am having a great time working with the growing community interested in our game. A large part of how I came to be in the game industry can absolutely be traced back to the experiences I had in Ultima Online and the wonderful community that developed around it.
Vault Network has had the pleasure of helping to build many massively multiplayer games' communities over the past dozen years, but Ultima Online's will always occupy a special place because it was the very first. The longevity of EA's title is testament to the power of its community, and we hope both will be with us for a long time to come. For the moment, our thanks go out to the 13 industry members who helped us to mark its tenth anniversary in such a special manner.
-- Richard Aihoshi - 'Jonric'
To mark the 10th anniversary of EA's landmark title, we ask people who worked on it to share their recollections
November 23, 2007 - In the video game industry where hype is expected, it's still very safe to list Ultima Online as a landmark. Launched in 1997 by EA's Origin Systems division, it brought the celebrated single-player RPG property created by Richard "Lord British" Garriott into the massively multiplayer space, offering legions of fans the chance to adventure together in the land of Sosaria. Although it had been preceded by other server-based graphical titles that supported large numbers of concurrent users, it was the first major success. At its peak, the game's subscriber base was in the hundreds of thousands, and there's no doubt that during the past decade, well over a million people have played for at least a while. Notably, quite a sizeable portion came from overseas markets, not just in Europe, but also in various other regions around the entire globe.
Here at Vault Network, our roots go back to our first site, UO Vault, which opened during development. It became a focal point for the project's community, and its success served as the foundation for the addition of, among others, RPG Vault. So, we've actually been tracking Ultima Online for about 12 years. A great deal has happened during that time, far too much for us even to attempt a telling of its history. Still, we couldn't allow the tenth anniversary to pass without some form of tribute. The concept we came up with was to ask people who have worked on it to share some of their memories with us. This turned out to be a surprisingly substantial task, so we're especially thankful to the 13 individuals, both current team members and alumni, whose contributions comprise this special feature.
Jeff "Witch Doctor" Wilson
Current company: Funcom
Current project: Age of Conan - Hyborian Adventures
Current position: All-around coder, mostly server development
UO background: Programmer, Director of the library and tools group. I worked at Origin from Jan 1991 to June 1997 - I believe it was 1997. I was involved in the early development of all projects. For UO specifically, this was for about six months.
The main thing I remember is that Richard Garriott brought in some people who where from MOO/MUD community, and they became the core of the UO team. This, I believe, is on of the main reasons Ultima Online worked. Online games are about community, and they where the only people at that time with any real experience in building such communities. This is what Richard always excelled at, building the correct team for what he wanted to achieve.
Joshua M. "speedman" Kriegshauser
Current company: Sony Online Entertainment
Current project: EverQuest II
Current position: Associate Technical Director
UO background: November 2003 to June 2005. Programmer
UO was my first love as an MMO from both a player and developer standpoint. I loved hearing from players at meet-ups and on the forums, and fixing bugs that they pointed out. It was also fun to watch the way they responded to my dev name "speedman". It was not an easy game to work on as much of it was in proprietary script, and it was very easy to break things unintentionally, but I learned a lot from working on it. UO will always hold a special place in my heart.
Kirk "Runesabre" Black
Current Company: Family Time! Interactive
Current Project: Family Time! Adventures
Current Position: President / Owner
UO background: Aug 1998 to May 2001 as Lead Programmer and Producer
My first experience with UO was an IRC chat in July of 1997 with a guy named Designer Dragon [Raph Koster - Ed.] about this exciting new virtual world about to be released. I would later become one of the first developers hired directly from the player community. Thanks, Rich Vogel, for taking a chance! I helped grow the game from a stagnating 96,000 subscribers to a thriving 240,000 in markets such as Japan, China, Korea, Europe and Australia. Among the many things I did during my tenure, I'm most noted for treasure hunts, banning a lot of cheaters, un-nerfing tamed dragons, making animal taming actually useful, getting the servers to run longer with fewer crashes, making patch day pleasant instead of hellish, and Siege Perilous. Many players may simply know me as one of those holiday bells... the one named Runesabre.
One of the most memorable and touching experiences I had while working on UO was the time a wheelchair-bound player wrote to us to say that of all the things he liked about it, the best was that he could run again. For me, that sums up my passion for UO and for developing MMOs in general - the unique opportunity to have a positive, tangible impact on people's lives.
Andrew "Ando" Woodruff
Current company: Aeria Games
Current project: Twelve Sky
Current position: Producer
UO background: 2004-2007 as Assistant Producer and QA Lead
The coolest part of working on the UO team was when I became an Assistant Producer and got to work on the live team around the time of publishes 40 to 44, along with the work we did on live events. Our development team was so much fun to work with, and it really felt like we were accomplishing a lot. One of my favorite things was working directly with players to discuss features and issues for each publish in the Dev Corner on our forums. I also really liked hanging out with players on the test center late at night when I wasn't busy. Sometimes, I would even create mini-events for them.
I also really enjoyed working on the 9th Anniversary Collection. This was basically the first boxed product I shipped after becoming an Assistant Producer. It actually wasn't easy; it felt like we were working on a mini-expansion pack in a lot of ways. I had a lot of fun working with our team to develop the content that went into the box. I enjoyed working with the players during the public testing, and was very pleased to see our hard work was well received by the fans.
Kevin Saffel
Current company: Heatwave Interactive
Current project: Unannounced
Current position: Director of Engineering
UO background: 1999 to 2004. I was client programmer on UO: Renaissance and UO: Third Dawn. I was also a consultant on UO: Lord Blackthorn's Revenge, and a senior programmer on Ultima X: Odyssey.
I started playing UO in December of 1997. I remember as players (I was working at Acclaim at the time), Greyburn [former developer Ed Groover - Ed.] and I would play for hours on end, and when we weren't playing, we were talking about it. It was a blast dodging PKs, putting together hunting parties to get revenge, trying to kill demons (I couldn't even kill a bird initially, ha!) and saving up to afford a house.
I loved UO so much that I got a job working on it, and Greyburn also joined the team not long after. It truly is my all-time favorite MMO because it really makes you feel like you are in a living world. I STILL play from time to time.
Patrick "Leurocian" Malott
Current company: Electronic Arts
Current project: Ultima Online
UO background: 2004-2005, 2006 to present as a Game Designer, and now Lead Systems Designer
Once, when I was hanging out at the Sweet Dreams Inn at Britain Bank practicing my hiding or musicianship skill, a thief walked by and attempted to steal from my character. I remember when I actually gave him gold not to steal from me. It worked! He ended up stealing from someone else the next night, but alas, the guards came when a stranger called for them, and quickly ended the thief's life. Those were fun times though.
One of my fondest memories as a developer is when I created paragon creatures of Ilshenar back in publish 26. As a developer, I would invisibly watch players as they battled them. When the paragon Ancient Wyrm spawned, the players would type to their friends, "There it is!" "Wow, he hits hard!" "This is so fun!" That put a big smile on my face and reminded me why I became a game developer.
J.P. "Grimm" Harrod
Current company: Electronic Arts
Current project: Ultima Online
UO background: 2004 to present as Character Artist, Senior Artist, Art Lead, Lead Character Artist, Associate Art Director, and now, Associate CG Supervisor
I was hired on during the development of Samurai Empire, and one of the things that will stay with me most vividly about that time was how complicated the process was for getting art in the game. This was one of the first expansions, so we found ourselves having to reverse engineer a pipeline in order to get new assets in - and with no tools and no blueprint to follow.
The second thing was the development for Kingdom Reborn. As far as art goes, this was the renaissance for UO. We had an established pipeline and evolving tools, we had migrated to the latest versions of 3D Studio Max, and we finally had the opportunity to break the limitations of the 2D client that we had been confined to (nine year-old limitations, mind you). The challenge came in re-creating nine years of art assets in one year's time. This was the most aggressive production schedule I've ever worked on!
In that time, we designed and re-created hundreds of creatures, clothing items and weapons, rendered out tens of thousands of pieces of tile art, and over a quarter million frames of animations. I can easily say that during my time here on UO, I have worked with some of the best engineers, designers and artists I will ever work with in my career.
Jon "JIB" Rein
Current company: Electronic Arts
Current project: Ultima Online
UO background: May 2004 to present, Software Engineer
UO is a great sociological experiment in which we see so many aspects of real life reflected in the game environment. To demonstrate this on our Halloween shard, I took a kindly player who was healing others against the hordes of evil zombies. I then gave this person the god-like powers to kill any other player or creature anywhere, without consequence. Needless to say this individual soon waged a genocidal war on fellow players who failed to pay tribute. At first, it was amusing, but eventually, it got scary how quickly power will corrupt. No matter how many times this experiment was repeated, no one used it to help their fellow man against the evil tide of baddies.
Jason Spangler
Current company: Electronic Arts
Current project: Ultima Online
UO background: 1996 to present (with a little time away 1999-2000) as Programmer, Lead Programmer, Technical Director
Demon invasion at the end of the beta test. It was a fun Wombat script to write, and fun to see the players enjoy it.
When time stopped. The time value overflowed, causing time to essentially stop on the shard.
Player housing. Implementing player housing late in the evenings after the feature had been cut from the game in an attempt to get it back on the schedule, I had a ship sitting on land with a house sign and door, and Richard (who was not usually around) walks into my office, looks at my screen, and asks what I was working on. "Player ships." I said. They figured it out, but player housing eventually got back into the game after they saw the progress I had made during those late evenings.
Thaddeus Oba
Current company: Electronic Arts
Current project: Ultima Online
UO background: Senior QA Tester from 2004, currently Asst. Development Manager
One of the two things I remember is testing all the items for the 7th Anniversary Edition of UO. Now that I am on the development / project management side, I remember all of the late nights and how the entire team pulled together to get Kingdom Reborn out the door and into players' hands.
John "Wilki" Wilkinson
Current company: Electronic Arts
Current project: Ultima Online
UO background: 2004 to present. Community Coordinator, currently a Designer
My favorite memory of UO is the day I first stepped foot in Felucca. I had heard the stories of rampant PKing, and was expecting to be slaughtered and dry looted instantly. Instead, I ran into a very nice woman who invited me to hunt lizardmen with her, and then introduced me to her guild when we were done. I ended up playing with that small guild for many a night over the next few years, and found that I really enjoyed the thrill of a non-consensual environment.
As a developer, I remember when I was first given god client access on a test shard. Oh, the fun I had spawning crazy powerful monsters with funny names that just slaughtered players en masse. What made it so fun was when those same players came running back for more after dieing, over and over, shouting "Devs, kill us again! This is so cool!"
Another time on the test shard, I attached a script to a player that spawned a dragon at his location every 10 seconds. He ran around for a while, trying to get away until he realized that HE was spawning them. You could almost see the realization come over him, as he suddenly ran straight towards the most populated area on the shard, where he proceeded to run in circles around the crowd until they were surrounded by angry dragons. I was laughing for quite awhile over that incident.
Steven Wade
Current positions: CEO, MMOsmart; Vice President, New Game World; business development, Keywords International
UO background: Counselor, 1998-99
Ultima Online made me the man I am today. I suppose after a statement like that it may seem I, like many, have romantic beliefs of what Ultima was. I was first turned onto the game at 15, and by 17, I was still playing strong and making $1,000 a month on eBay. I became part of the counselor program in
1998. I lied about my age and faxed in my mother's driver's license. Morally, was it wrong? Who can say? I do know, coming from humble beginnings, I credit and thank UO for helping me go to college and forge my career in the gaming industry.
I believe the game had many great ideas, and still today, is adding new content to a world already rich with history. It's funny that it's now is thought of as old and out dated, but amazingly, it still has some of the best features I've ever seen in an MMO. If you think about it, things like dye tubs are simple, yet powerful tools.
Community though is what Ultima Online was greatest at. A player would amass real-world relationships from the lands of Sosaria. Kids (an adults) would sit around lunch tables and plan out character templates or where they would build in-game towns together. Various websites like UO Vault, tradespot.net and imanewbie.com sprung up to help foster this growing community. Ultima Online has influenced so many; it was more than a game - it was a beginning.
Mitch "Pareidolic" Gross
Current company: THQ / Kaos Studios
Current project: Frontlines: Fuel of War
Current position: Community Manager
UO background: I was a player during beta and for several years afterwards. For part of that time, I was a Counselor, a volunteer player helper.
I had played MUDs and other multiplayer games like Meridian 59, but Ultima Online was the first in which the concept of community really clicked for me. I joined a guild for the first time, The Lost Order of Akalabeth, and really enjoyed the adventures we had plus the camaraderie of being part of a great group of players. I enjoyed UO so much that, inspired by the example of my guildmates, I applied and was accepted as a Counselor, which allowed me to help other players learn about and enjoy the game the way I did.
I later took on similar roles in Asheron's Call and its sequel and, with my interest in community, ended up writing for and managing websites for Warcry and IGN Vault Network. Recently, I joined THQ's Kaos Studios in a full-time position supporting the upcoming game Frontlines: Fuel of War, and am having a great time working with the growing community interested in our game. A large part of how I came to be in the game industry can absolutely be traced back to the experiences I had in Ultima Online and the wonderful community that developed around it.
Vault Network has had the pleasure of helping to build many massively multiplayer games' communities over the past dozen years, but Ultima Online's will always occupy a special place because it was the very first. The longevity of EA's title is testament to the power of its community, and we hope both will be with us for a long time to come. For the moment, our thanks go out to the 13 industry members who helped us to mark its tenth anniversary in such a special manner.
-- Richard Aihoshi - 'Jonric'