Ultima Online

Ultima Online is a fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game set in the world of Britannia, developed and published by Origin Systems and released for Microsoft Windows on September 24, 1997.⁶¹³ Built within Richard Garriott’s Ultima universe, it was the first graphical multiplayer online game to support thousands of simultaneous players in a single persistent world.⁶ It is widely credited with forging the commercial template that later MMORPGs? followed — large player capacity, a monthly subscription fee, a persistent world, and a fantasy role-playing setting.⁶¹³

Origin Systems, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts?, designed the game as a “realistic” virtual sandbox in which players could explore, fight evil, or learn a trade in one of Britannia’s cities, pursuing whatever path they chose.⁶ The publisher describes it as a world where a character can craft weapons, armor, and equipment, build a house and furnish it, explore dungeons, sail a heavy warship armed with cannons, and choose to be either a defender who protects others or a villain who preys on them.¹⁴ The fiction holds that when the Stranger shattered Mondain’s Gem of Immortality, each fragment held a perfect copy of Sosaria, so the many Britannias inhabited by players are facets of a shattered gem.¹³ During early development the project was known internally as “Multima”.⁶

Development and launch

Expectations within the company were initially modest, with the most optimistic estimates projecting around 30,000 boxed sales and 5,000 subscribers.¹³ An open alpha test in April and May 1996 drew unexpected interest, prompting Electronic Arts to shift personnel from the Ultima IX: Ascension project onto the online game to finish it in 1997.¹³ An open beta in July 1997 became so crowded that access had to be restricted.¹³

The game shipped on September 24, 1997, with Origin announcing a flat monthly fee of US$9.95.⁸¹³ According to a GameSpot report, the beta period was ended with an in-fiction event in which Lord British succumbed to a poisonous brew “Tuesday night at approximately 9pm Texas time,” bringing the beta world to a close before the live realm returned.⁸ The retail version sold for a suggested price of $64.95 — quoted by GameSpot at a $65 MSRP — and included one month of free play, a cloth map of Britannia, a collectible pewter lapel pin, game software, and AT&T WorldNet Internet service with a copy of Netscape Navigator.⁸¹³ A Charter Edition, priced at $89 and sold only through EA Direct Sales, added 90 days of free play, a Charter Membership Certificate, and a print of original art created for the game by Tim and Greg Hildebrandt.⁸ Boxed copies of the Charter Edition were due to reach early subscribers on the Thursday after launch, with shipments to retailers in the United States, Japan, and Europe leaving production facilities that Friday.⁸ A notably detailed manual was not included in the first edition’s package.¹³

The launch was troubled by bugs, client exploits, lag, and rampant “player killing” — players attacking one another rather than monsters — which caught the development team off guard.⁶ Beta testers had also raised concerns about over-zealous guards, economy loopholes, sparse monster and animal allocation, and discrepancies between the game’s FAQ and the actual game.⁸ Origin became so consumed with fixing these problems that new content, NPC interaction, and quests were neglected, and the game initially drew less than stellar reviews.⁶ Despite this, it became a financial success, gaining more than 100,000 subscribers — each paying $10 a month — in its first few months.⁶ Shortly after the first expansion, most of the original design team left the project to work on other games.⁶

Expansions and later releases

The first expansion, The Second Age, was released October 29, 1998, and was initially offered to subscribers by mail for $6.99.⁶ It introduced the “Lost Lands” landmass with the new towns of Delucia and Papua, two new intelligent monster races — the Ophidians and Terathans — and an in-game chat system modeled on IRC; it was the first Ultima release to ship with a paper map of Britannia rather than a cloth one.⁶ Many players, reluctant to leave their towns because of pervasive player killing, never found or used the new lands, and the in-game chat system went largely unused.⁶

Age of Shadows added the dark, dry new region of Malas and introduced the game’s first true character professions, the Paladin and the Necromancer.⁴ The Paladin was a sword-wielding, armor-wearing class with ten new abilities, including holy spells such as “Cleanse by Fire” and “Enemy of One,” whose powers weakened as karma grew negative and which carried a “tithing cost” met by donating money at a shrine.⁴ The Necromancer commanded sixteen new spells, most inflicting poison or other maladies, with only one dedicated to reanimating the dead and the more notable being summoning and transformation spells that granted the powers of fearsome beasts.⁴ The expansion was sold at retail through outlets such as CNET-listed merchants.⁹ Later expansions extended through Stygian Abyss.¹⁸

A UO client for Linux was produced by two Origin programmers, who left the company in late 1998 to found WombatGames.¹¹ The unsupported glibc binary for x86 systems required a 16-bit or 15-bit XServer running under XFree86, worked with The Second Age, and was distributed through Origin’s FTP server using an installation script to copy data from the game CD.¹¹

Operation and legacy

Operation of the game later passed to Mythic Entertainment, which marketed it alongside Dark Age of Camelot, and subsequently to Broadsword Online Games, which has run it as one of the longest-running commercial MMORPGs.¹²¹⁴ In 2018 the operators introduced Endless Journey, a free-to-play tier giving access to the core features without a paid subscription and to expansions through Stygian Abyss; eligible accounts include new accounts and previously paid accounts closed for at least 120 days.¹⁸ Characters can train toward a total of 720 skill points under a classless, skill-based system, with stat restrictions matching those of a veteran account.¹⁸ The game has continued to receive regular content updates, with seasonal events and “Publish” releases — Publish 123 deployed worldwide in May 2026 — issued as recently as 2026.¹⁶ A new shard, Ultima Online: New Legacy, was announced for launch in September 2024.¹⁷

Fans have reverse-engineered the game to produce server emulators — “freeshards” — that replicate Origin’s servers and allow customization of most aspects of play while supporting large numbers of concurrent players on a single server.¹³ Among the most prominent is UO Outlands, online since 2018, which runs its own world map, cities, and dungeons and operates with its own expansions, events, and skill additions.¹³¹⁹ Ultima Online grew out of Garriott’s single-player Ultima role-playing series, set in the same world of Britannia, which Garriott and Origin Systems had pioneered as open-world fantasy role-playing.⁶¹³²³

Designer Raph Koster, reflecting on the game’s 20th anniversary, noted that many online worlds preceded Ultima Online, including numerous text-based MUDs, when the project was formally launched in 1995, a period in which most players connected by modem at 14.4k or 28.8k speeds and online discussion happened largely on Usenet and closed services such as Prodigy, America Online, and CompuServe.²² The game is nonetheless regarded as having essentially given birth to the modern MMORPG, establishing conventions that EverQuest and its successors carried forward.¹³⁶