So good, it seems that trying to be honest about things doesn’t work well.

Instead, let’s talk about funny UO anecdotes.

This is one from a year or so ago that I recovered from an old blog backup. Feel free to add your own.

I worked on UO for around 4+ years for my career (started right after pre-alpha through ship, then came back for a stint for Rennaissance), and to this day I’m amazed by the memories and shared history it inspires.

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 fucked 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”

You’d get killed, lose your stuff, and they’d make fun of your ghost.

They’d put a moongate in front of you and teleport you to a desert island and make you do tricks, or put you on top of the bank in Britain. Then people would wander by and make fun of you even more for being stuck.

Hell, the celebrities of the world weren’t role models or champions. You had people like Hobbes, not known for their public help, but for the sheer quantity of their enemies and slaughter of the innocents.

Those players who you saw for a split second, right before “Corp Por” which completely fucked you up.

And then you were there with 20 other ghosts, another hash mark in someones kill list.

That’s something you simply can’t deliberately create.

But it went beyond simple violence…

A friend of mine(Jeff Freeman) who I worked with for many years had a term he used called “Time to Cock”.

It’s the amount of time it takes players to use a feature to make a giant cock in the world.

In UO, one of the first thing I saw players doing was writing FUCK in giant letters using Fish.

Hell, I remember when we had a bug with sewing kits where if you tried to use it on a non-sewable object, it deleted the target, not the kit. We logged into the beta and saw most of the dynamic objects in the world missing.

And a solitary player comes running by, screaming, closely followed by another player.

and then he must’ve caught him, and POP… The running player was gone… Deleted by the jackass with the sewing kit.

I’ll be honest. I never got into the game. After having the absolute power of a god client on TC or a local server, you can’t really get back down to speed of normal play.

But regardless, UO was a truly amazing thing. We got to do things that normal developers wouldn’t touch nowadays. We got to be on the bleeding edge of development and online world creation.

It was a bad ass experience, and I love the fact that it’s the source of so many of these killer stories.

originally posted January 2007