You may not know it, but MMO games have a pretty interesting history of how they came to be what they are. Throughout the late 80s and early 90s, the Ultima series was considered one of the defining single-player RPGs among western countries. These games attempted open world and non-linear styles of progression long before the subject was even being talked about. And in 1997, Ultima Online was one of the first MMOs ever created.
The game is played from an isometric perspective using 2-dimensional sprites. There were also no traditional classes for players to focus their characters on. Instead, the game was meant to emphasize progression in any way the player wanted, whether through combat, humble professions like blacksmithing or stealing. Little did the developers realize that this freedom of choice would lead to an event that no one saw coming.
Lord British was a player character created by Richard Garriott, the producer of Ultima Online. Using this character, Richard acted as Ultima’s King and would sometimes interact with other players. Lord British had considerable protection from an entourage of bodyguards and was even explicitly coded to be invulnerable to virtually any attack. During the game’s online beta test, Lord British gave an address to fellow players at his Castle Britannia. But while British was giving his address, a player character known as Rainz cast a spell scroll that set the Lord on fire, killing him instantly.
It turns out that shortly before this event, the server had crashed and needed to be restarted. Garriott forgot to reimplement his invulnerability flag, leaving him open to being killed. If that wasn’t shocking enough for the attendees, a fellow developer of the game known as Starr Long, with his in-game character Lord Blackthorn, summoned a horde of demons to kill the assassin. Not only did the assassin manage to escape, but the demons had killed nearly every player attending the address. Shortly afterward, Rainz’s account was banned from the beta test, the stated reason being for previously exploiting bugs rather than the assassination. This banning, plus the massacre of the other players, drew outrage from the game’s community of players.
This event was quickly called one of the most shocking and important events in MMORPG history, becoming top stories for many gaming media organizations at the time. Players were encouraged to engage in player versus player actions, including murdering and stealing from other players. The incident also inspired fans to find creative ways to kill Lord British in the other Ultima games. This spike in behavior not only angered other players who became unwitting victims, but the devs themselves never imagined their game would transform into a chaotic free for all. Eventually, a compromise was made to address the PvP and overburdened server load of just one continual world and split the game into 9 servers. Each server had a copy of the Ultima Online world and even expanded on the game’s lore to explain this decision.
While Ultima’s popularity has waned over time with an ever-dwindling number of active players, the game was a huge inspiration for many new MMOs in later years, including RuneScape's first entry series. And many current and future MMOs will continue the idea of “anything goes” in sandbox games, thanks to Ultima Online, and the extraordinary events surrounding Lord British, Lord Blackthorn and Rainz.