Post by leunas on Jan 5, 2007 14:17:30 GMT -5
Thanks to Damion, I got to read a "way back when" post on UO by Dan Rubenfield. Mostly he concentrates on the amount of ganking and griefing that went on in UO, but it brought back some memories.
One of the stories he told is almost an exact retelling of the event that brought me back to Ultima Online, and more importantly prompted to me to leave my cushy Unix consulting gig to return to the game industry.
From his site:
Everyone talks fondly about it, but there’s never a happy story.
It’s always the shared moment of getting slaughtered in a dungeon, losing your stuff, hiding traps in your backpack and killing people who snooped and more.
But regardless of the tone, people still loved it. The 'farked' up moments, the slaughter of the innocents, the absolute depths that you could sink to.
When it first released, people would break into your house, steal all of your stuff, sapping you of thousands of hours of gameplay. Then, not content with having ruined your experience, they would leave you a book on the floor of your now empty house, with a note in it.
“You Suck”
When they broke into my house, they left all the furniture stacked in the back, with a book in the armoir. The book said "Thanks for all the cheese."
Now, I don't have the best memory, so I'll give you the romaniticised version of what happened next. I called Raph Koster on the phone (whom I had met when I was working in QA at Origin through an informal game design group called "Project Brainstorm" (memories anyone?)).
As the story goes, I told Raph, "Dude, you need to hire me so I can fix your game." A few months later and I was working my first large system in UO: House Security. Looking back an the resulting system, it seems like a fairly crude game design solution, requiring chat commands for a lot of functionality. But it sure did make houses more secure!
Thanks for the memories, Dan. Happy New year!
(As an aside, it seems like a UO day for me, as it keeps coming up. This morning I ran across the MMORPG.com Interview with UO Producer Aaron Cohen.)
www.sunsword.com/mt_archives/000328.html