With Ultima Online, one of the most important milestones for the MMORPG genre was released on September 24 and 30, 1997. The community remembers those days, sharing anecdotes and looking back with nostalgia at today.
What do I need to know about Ultima Online? In our extensive special on the history of MMORPGs, Ultima Online has rightly received a lot of space. The first online adventure for Richard Garriott’s iconic RPG series is considered one of the most important milestones of the genre. Here are just a few of the great achievements of the game:
- Richard Garriott coined the term “Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game”, or MMORPG, for Ultima Online.
- Ultima Online was the first truly successful MMORPG from the West (and completely shattered the hesitant expectations of publisher EA).
- In UO, there were the first mounts and the first player housing.
- Since participants had to pay for the beta, this was the first “early access” for an unfinished online game.
- For Ultima Online, the developers established standards for the entire industry with registration codes and game time cards.
However, much more important for the numerous players was certainly that Ultima Online (thanks to the previous parts of the Ultima series) could draw from a wealth of lore, races, classes, and more, and that there were immense freedoms in the sandbox world to live out and develop their alter ego.
Thanks to the enormous freedom, there were always memorable moments. Once, even “Lord British”, the character of chief developer Richard Garriott, fell victim to an assassination: How a player inadvertently committed regicide in Ultima Online.
A game for memorable moments
How does the community react to the anniversary? In the gaming section of Reddit, many players have been discussing the 28th anniversary of Ultima Online for a few days now – with 2,100 upvotes and over 360 comments. Many fans nostalgically recall the early days.
- Zoomlight writes on Reddit: “I miss having the time for games like Ultima Online. UO was my first MMO, and I loved it. I had a house and everything.”
- mephnick adds in the comments: “Yes. It was special because I could just sit around, chat with the guild, and didn’t feel guilty about investing that time. I used to spend whole days following new guild members disguised into low-level areas just for fun to counter-gank.”
- ericrox explains on Reddit: “I’m still searching for a better MMO. This set a standard that no other game has been able to reach so far.”
- Gallus_11B confidently states on Reddit: “People who haven’t experienced these original first-generation MMORPGs (like Legends of Kesmai, Ultima Online, or EverQuest) will never understand what they missed. It was just incredible.”
What Gallus_11B writes, I have already expressed in a similar way in the following article: Really sad: Those who try an MMORPG for the first time now will never feel the fascination of the veterans.
The good news is: Ultima Online is still online and playable. Thus, it belongs to a small group of important milestones that are still available today and have been able to have a lasting impact on the genre. Which games still belong to this group, you can find out here: 12 MMORPGs that paved the way for WoW and are still playable
