Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
I owe my career to this game.I was totally obsessed with UO from the moment I logged in for the first time and created my character, a crafter who was primarily a miner/blacksmith.That’s the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a player-killer out to strip the dungeon crawlers of all their loot and gear; or, spending your days baking bread or running your own player shopping mall, your only limitation was your effort and imagination. The idea that you could stake out your own small part of this vibrant world, right down to building a house in the limited land space available; or making your name as an accomplished crafter who people sought out for their superior crafted equipment, it was so fascinating to me.After a few years I found out about a project called the Ultima Offline eXperiment, they were working on a server emulator that would let you run your own worlds, with your own rules! (Their scripting engine was JavaScript, running on the server... 19 years ago) As a teenager with no prior software experience, this was incredible to me. I scoured the internet for anything I could find to learn C++ and JavaScript and started screwing around with the emulator. It was slow going at first, given the somewhat limited resources available on the internet at the time, but I stuck with it and from that point on I knew exactly what I wanted to spend my life doing. After that I moved to would become the de-facto emulator for nearly 2 decades, RunUO. Through that community I found contract work on projects that were unrelated to UO, and from that experience transitioned to a full-time career in software about 10 years ago.This game was hugely important to me and who I became because of it, and it makes me so happy that stories about UO pop up every few years as a reminder of that.