What was the technology stack driving the original Ultima Online servers?

Ultima Online had begun as a small band of junior developers within Origin back in like 1995. The original concept was to build a massively multiplayer game using a variant of the Ultima 6 engine. That was a pretty far throw back considering that Ultima 7 and 8 had shipped with much more advanced features and Ultima 9—fully 3D and "modern"—was on its way. The group of programmers who worked on Ultima Online for the first few years were brilliant, talented, and driven, and they produced a lot of great work. The game would, of course, never have happened without them. But, they were absolutely green programmers, fresh out of high school in some cases, and... well, let's just say that the Ultima Online engine began to sag under the weight of its massiveness by the end of 1996.

One example just to illustrate the idea. In most game engines even at that time there was a conceptual difference between The Camera and The Player. Though the camera would often be attached to the player, you could normally move the camera someplace else—to show an in-game cutscene in which the player wasn't involved, say. But in the Ultima Online engine this distinction was lost. The camera was the player: where the player was, that's what you were looking at. It meant that when we wanted to show a cutscene, or a clairvoyance effect or suchlike, we had to use a hack: make the player invisible and non-colliding, teleport the player to the scene, move it around like a camera, then teleport it back to its original position and reset its usual state.

This sort of thing was commonplace. Imagine this times 100,000.

So here we have several young, gifted, powerful programmers making history—as they know, though hardly anyone else did—building a brilliant but difficult concept into a working implementation, often naively, sometimes shoddily, but effectively, productively.

Late in 1996 Electronic Arts (who owned Origin) woke up one day and realized that they had a massive potential hit on their hands. A game they could sell not just once, but once per player per month. Game subscriptions were a whole new concept, and boy what a tasty one.

After waking, the next thing EA did was to demand that the game ship by summer 1997. That gave Origin about six months to ship a huge, complex, wildly innovative concept that was barely out of the prototyping phase. This was, to say the least, an ambitious goal.

So they threw bodies at it. The Ultima IX team had been working on "the sequel of sequels" for quite a few years. The team was large but progress was slow. Although Richard Garriott would never let the game die, EA had no real enthusiasm for it (and indeed in the end it shipped, and was quite good fun, but buggy and didn't sell well).

EA put Ultima IX on hold and moved all the developers onto the UO team. That more or less quadrupled the size of the UO team overnight.

So now you have a small, brilliant, fast, naive cadre of programmers for whom UO has been their baby for a few years squished together with a large, perhaps less brilliant, slower, but wiser and more experienced pile of developers who are pissed about losing the project they've waited their whole to complete and find the idea of shipping any game, much less the world's first bona fide MMO, in six months positively laughable.

There was fear. There was anger. There were frenzies of productivity. There were frenzies of laziness. There was hope. There was dread. There was culture shock. There were absolutely awful tools. There were absolutely indecipherable codebases spanning Windows and Unix, with no documentation and the only people who understood it were too busy (or just didn't care) to answer questions. There was a game that could never live, could never run, could never be tested or debugged on a single system—a game that was intrinsically an MMO and needed a shard to run.

There were tiny bugs that took many, many, many weeks to find and fix.

This feels like the right time to quote Dickens: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Only it wasn't. It was just the worst of times. And despite all the joy that UO seems to have given other people, it was a loathsome development experience—I can't think of a worse or more accurate word than loathsome—and after it shipped in September (was it?) of 1997, just about on time, miraculously quickly, I never played it again.