History
Ultima Online is the product of Richard Garriott's idea for a fantasy game involving several thousand people who can all play in a shared fantasy world. There were a number of prior games that allowed hundreds of people to play at the same time, including The Realm Online, Neverwinter Nights (the AOL version), and Meridian 59; however, Ultima Online was intended to be a significant improvement over the previous games, both graphically and in game mechanics. The initial team was composed of Garriott, Starr Long, Rick Delashmit and, a bit later Raph Koster, who became the lead designer for the project. Koster wrote a number of public "designer letters" and usually went by his nickname of Designer Dragon. Koster drew inspiration from a number of prior online games such as DartMUD.
The project started in 1995 and was shown to the public at E3 in 1996. The development cost was much greater than traditional computer games, it relied on people accessing servers with modems. Ultima Online initial features included persistent player housing, skill-based character progression (without levels or classes), a crafting and player-driven economy, and unrestricted player-versus-player combat.
Upon release, Ultima Online proved to be very popular, reaching 100,000 paying subscribers within six months of release, despite severe lag problems. Subscriptions continued to grow for several years, reaching a peak of some 250,000 paid accounts. Origin was able to make a great deal of money from the monthly fees required to play Ultima Online and many other companies took note and began development of their own massively multiplayer games. The most successful games after Ultima Online have been EverQuest (released in March 1999), Asheron's Call (released in November 1999), Dark Age of Camelot (released in October 2001), Final Fantasy XI (released in May 2002), World of Warcraft (released in November 2004).
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