Replay: The History of Video Games (51 page)

Long pitched the idea for an online
Ultima
to Origin’s founder Richard Garriott, who saw the potential. Garriott asked Electronic Arts, who had bought Origin in 1992, to bankroll the project. “We went through this period of time where we tried to convince everybody that this would work, but since there was never previously a successful online game, people’s sales projections were basically zero,” said Garriott. “It took us a long time before we managed to convince Electronic Arts to give us some money to do a prototype and that was $250,000. We were already in an era where games cost many millions, so it was useless or almost useless.”

Long and Garriott built a prototype using the isometric-view graphics of 1992’s
Ultima VII: The Black Gate
. The team set out from day one to turn the world of
Ultima
that Garriott had been designing since the late 1970s into a living, breathing world. “The idea of simulation as the foundation for the game was always there,” said Long.

In keeping with the simulation approach, the team decided that player freedom was crucial to the game and set out to remove anything that prevented players from playing as they pleased. They created numerous professions and jobs for players to do in their virtual world, from warrior and wizard to baker and glassmaker. They designed the trappings of a virtual economic system and built towns with shops and bars for people to gather in. They even built population dynamics into their digital realm. “We wanted to create this virtual ecosystem where the grass on the ground was a resource that the rabbits would consume and the wolves ate the rabbits, so if there weren’t any rabbits the wolves died off,” said Long.

Despite the miniscule budget, Origin had a working version of their game world ready by 1996 and decided to hold a pre-launch beta test with a select few
Ultima
fans in order to give themselves time to fix any unseen problems. “We put up a single web page that said ‘hey we’re the
Ultima
development team and we’re doing
Ultima Online
and we’d love you to help us test it’,” said Garriott. To make sure those who signed up would actually play the game, they asked fans to pay $2 for the CD they needed to run the game.

Since the most popular online game at the time had attracted, at most, 30,000 players, they expected hardly anyone to sign up. They were in for a surprise. “Within two or three days, 50,000 people had signed up to pay,” said Garriott. “That was the day the future changed. That was the day that this game no one knew or cared about became the most important game currently being developed at Electronic Arts or Origin. Immediately not only were the coffers opened up, but so was management oversight, much to our chagrin.”

Since the release of
Neverwinter Nights
, the business model for online games had changed radically. The internet’s explosive growth had sent bandwidth costs plummeting, slashing the overheads involved in running online games. On top of that a game called
Meridian 59
had provided an alternative business model for online role-playing games that eschewed the expensive hourly charges of old in favour of a set monthly subscription that allowed players to spend as long as they wanted playing.

The brainchild of Archetype Interactive, a game studio formed by two pairs of brothers spread across the US,
Meridian 59
sought to reinvent
MUD
using the kind of 3D graphics seen in
Doom
. A test run of the game in early 1996 had already caused a minor stir, attracting the interest of around 10,000 players and prompting Trip Hawkins’ The 3DO Company, which was reinventing itself as a game publisher after the failure of its 3DO console, to buy Archetype before the game had even officially launched.

“It was essentially a visual
DikuMUD
,” said Rich Vogel, senior producer of
Meridian 59
. “It was the first game that was actually internet accessed. It wasn’t accessed by a propriety network like AOL, CompuServe or GEnie. It was the first one where if you had a web browser you could login and register. That game was such a trailblazer, we were excited to have as many people as we had on it because it was the first time anybody had done this and because the internet in 1996 was just kind of getting there then.”

But while its 3D visuals were a first for an online role-playing game, it was
Meridian 59
’s payment system that was truly revolutionary. “It seemed like a reasonable idea at the time because role-playing game fans wanted to play a huge number of hours per month and with a flat monthly fee it was only pennies per hour,” said Hawkins. “Ironically, the users complained that its $9.95 a month subscription was too high.”

Ultima Online
would, Origin decided, adopt the same subscription-based business model. And since
Meridian 59
attracted around 25,000 players at its peak – just half of the number of people who wanted to take part in the test of
Ultima Online
– Electronic Arts were convinced they had a major commercial success in the making.

With
Ultima Online
set to become the biggest and most complex online game ever launched, Origin appointed a community manager to help manage the player relations in the hope of avoiding the headaches of player management that Lucasfilm had experienced with
Habitat
. The idea of a full-time community manager stemmed from oneof Long’s finds during his early exploration of online gaming:
Air Warrior
. First released in 1987 on the GEnie network,
Air Warrior
evolved out of a multiplayer text-only flight simulation developed by University of Virginia physics students Kelton Flinn and John Taylor back in 1977. The game recreated the air battles of the Second World War and charged players $10 to $12 an hour for a dose of dog-fighting fun. Despite the price tag,
Air Warrior
gained a loyal following among flight simulation enthusiasts thanks to its realistic physics and social interaction.

By the time Long investigated the game, its 30,000-odd players had become a thriving community that would hold long debates on player etiquette and chivalry – berating cowardly players who would quit the game when they were about to get killed. “
Air Warrior
is a flight simulator, but in every other definition it was a massively multiplayer online game,” said Long. “Everybody was in the same space simultaneously playing together in real-time, communicating live. It was in
Air Warrio
r that we started to realise that this was really a community and that it wasn’t just a bunch of people playing together.
Ultima Online
was the first game that had an official community manager as a full-time job. Before that people had facilitated communities but they were also a game designer or a programmer.
Ultima Online
was first to say this is a full-time job.
Air Warrior
’s probably the biggest contributor to that realisation for us, so it had a big influence.”

But even with their dedicated community manager,
Ultima Online
was soon riddled with the kind of social problems and surprises that Lucasfilm encountered when it made
Habitat
. And the first victim was Origin’s carefully built virtual ecosystem. “Once we introduced the players into the equation they did what happens in the real world and wiped out everything,” said Long. “They killed all the rabbits because they were easy to kill, so all the wolves died off and then there was nothing to kill. Frighteningly like the real world, but not very fun for the new player coming in who had nothing to hunt, so we had to scale back a lot on our original ambitions for creating ecosystems.”

The biggest problem, however, was the general lawlessness of the online version of Britannia. “We left it open for players to attack each other,” said Garriott. “We thought that’s just part of reality. People are going to have grievances that they are going to want to fight over. I didn’t have a problem with people fighting each other, but we didn’t at all anticipate the PK’ing – the player killing.”

Within weeks of the test launch, opportunistic players were rampaging through the game world slaughtering those weaker than themselves and looting whatever items their virtual victims were carrying. Thieves lurked outside the game’s towns to rob new players as they took their first steps into Origin’s virtual world. Criminal gangs would gather at the entrance to minand wait for players who had spent hours breaking virtual rocks for gold to emerge, before pouncing on them and stealing their treasure. Angered players formed vigilante gangs that prowled the world looking for criminals to meat out mob justice. Others resorted to stripping their characters of items and clothes and wandering the world in their underpants hoping the obvious lack of possessions would keep them safe. “The problem we had was that we didn’t have enough tuning time before we released it and one of the things that needed tuning was player-versus-player combat,” said Vogel, who became
Ultima Online
’s producer after working on
Meridian 59
. “We never realised how bad it would get. I took about three months to notice.”

The extent of the lawlessness varied depending on the server that players were logged into.
[8]
“It’s interesting how they developed differently,” said Vogel. “We had servers near the North East US, which were very bad servers, and then we had servers in the Midwest, which were calm and nice. The Pacific coast and
the one in the North East were our worst. The way they grew up was like the broken window syndrome, because if you get a bunch of bad people in one area you’re screwed. Everything from extorting people for their money, holding them captive and teleporting them to islands to steal their money. It was just amazing. People were scared to leave the cities.”

The players of
Ultima Online
soon started developing their own slang to describe the situation, which soon spread out onto the web, seeping into the language of other online games and eventually into everyday conversation. “Almost all the terminology in use today came out of
Ultima Online
– griefing, nerfing, killer dudes, raids – all this kind of stuff really developed out of
Ultima Online
,” said Vogel.

Even direct intervention from the game’s creators did little to stop the problems. Garriott once encountered a thief robbing a new player while wandering around the game as Lord British. He caught the thief and told him not to do it again and returned the items to the victim. The thief promised not to do it again and promptly broke his word. Garriott intervened a second time only for the thief to strike a third time. “I said ok that’s it, I’ve warned you twice, you did it three times in a row so I’m about to ban you from the game forever,” said Garriott. “The thief then drops character and goes ‘Ok Richard Garriott, if that’s who you really are, I’ll have you know that I’m only playing the role as you defined it in the game. I’m playing a thief and I’m using the thieving skill that you put in the game and if you are a thief and the king of the land comes and tells you not to steal of course you’re going to tell him you won’t, before going somewhere else and getting back to thieving because that’s what you do.”

Garriott was dumbfounded. This was his world: the murders, the violence, the chaos. It was all his and his team’s doing and his game was no longer under his full control. “I went ‘wow, that guy’s right’,” said Garriott. “So I said ‘ok, you make a very good point’ and teleported him all the way to the other side of the world where he couldn’t mess with this woman. I went off to rethink the rules and think about the fact that people are just gaming the system you provide. You can’t really blame the player killers, you can’t blame the people stealing stuff from each other, you can only blame the vision and rules and structure that you put into play. So we began to take much more care in the development of our inter-personal systems.”

Fearing the lawlessness would cause many of
Ultima Online
’s 250,000 players to cancel their subscriptions, Origin became embroiled in a desperate battle with the player killers, criminals, thieves, griefers and vigilantes who doubled as their customers. “There’s many people who say the danger is part of what made the game very, very exciting, but for many it was very challenging or a big turn off, especially when they felt like it was being abused,” said Long. “When the strong kill the weak over and over there’s nothing to be gained from that – it just humiliates the weaker character and becomes not very fun for the weaker player.”

Over the course of 1998, Origin began a crackdown on the griefers. It turned cities into safety zones where players could not attack each other, introduced reputation scores for players so troublemakers could be spotted and avoided, and created virtual jails to lock up problem players for periods of time as punishment.