Back in the late 1990s, the Internet was exploding with growth exponentially, but it was also limited by your ability to just get connected, have decent latency and speed, and just have a decent interactive client for whatever you were doing. Ultima Online became that standard for online, multi-player gaming or MMPORG. It was big, it was international, and anyone who knew anything about gaming was playing it.

image credit: Pratyeka, Wikipedia

Best of all, you could connect with what is now considered a horse-drawn buggy traveling backwards, a 44.6k baud modem (yes that screechy thing old people used to get online for their AOL email check). 

Ultima Online Sparked Gaming Businesses

A couple of key aspects about Ultima Online dramatically changed interactive game. First, everyone had a unique character profile and account that only they could manage (aside from game admins), but everyone could see and identify. This was essential because it gave players a digital "street address" how to be found in the game. That naturally triggered teaming, group interaction, and communities.

image credit: MacroPlanet, Reddit

Second, UO went beyond just basic equipment mechanics; they added the element of real property. In legal terms, everything you can pick up, carry, move, or consume is normal property. Real property is another name for real estate: homes, buildings, castles! Woah.

image credit: Jake Tucker, Rock Paper Shotgun

Because the game allowed players to build everything from a hut to a mega-mansion-castle, they then had the ability to have a safe house, store their goods and rest in game versus having to run to town and sell everything immediately after a day's adventure. This mattered a lot in the PvP servers where other players, "Red Killers," could murder and steal everything a player had. Ergo the famous ghost, ooOO oo oo oOOOO ooOooOOOOO...

What was not expected by the above, because it wasn't designed in the UO game system, was the industry and capitalism of players. UO defined the term "grinding," where a player has to do a lot of something to develop necessary account skill and ideally game advantages. Those advantages turned into dragons, wealth and, ultimately, the ability to buy real property in game. A funny thing happened though entirely driven by economics; supply was less than demand. By the time I started, there where so many players in UO, there was more accounts than people had space to build a hut, much less a house. So, while getting deed was easy, finding the actual game space to construct a place was near impossible. After months and months of searching the game and not getting killed (or getting killed), many players needed another way to get home ownership dream. They needed a way to buy in to the market.

eBay to the Rescue, Sort Of

Soon enough, starting with entire account sales and then everything else, UO property went on sale. eBay made this possible because it provided one of the few online markets that people could buy from others with some weird sense of safety. eBay's seller score was a key factor in determining whether an online sale was safe or not, and eBay did the rest making it possible to pay online. Then, with a sale made in real US dollars, it was just a matter of the players connecting in the game online and the property being transferred, which UO's client made possible.

Again, being one of those later arrivals, I couldn't find a place and really wanted a castle. So, taking tremendous risk in 1997 or so, I paid $300 for a castle on eBay. Fortunately, everything went smooth and I was soon enough a digital McMansion owner in the game. woot! Those days are long gone now; eBay heavily restricted selling of digital in-game assets years later.

Of course, nothing was every completely safe, even in good deals. Read here about how players figured out how to hack the UO game to burn down others' houses. Oh dear.

image credit: Tim Cotton, Cotten.io

Getting Tired, Time to Offload

After a year or so, however, I was bored with UO, and World of Warcraft was already pumping hard with a far better game and almost all the same dynamics of multi-player roleplaying, adventure, teams, group interaction and markets. So, it was time to downscale and migrate. Fortunately, my castle was still a hot commodity. So, back it went on eBay, and I think I sold it for $350 or $400. After pocking my moderate profit and principal I was divested. More importantly though, I realized how easy it was to start farming and make an income off of gaming, which seems like preschool now with all the Twitch, social media and influencer empires out their now on games like COD, Genshin and more. It's insane how much things have changed in just 20 years or so.

Interestingly, UO is still going. There are shards still supported well beyond the original Electronic Arts platform that started the UO worlds in the first place. And the game probably plays far better now with broadband access than was ever possible with baud modems. I can't imagine now what red killers and gank gangs at the UO gates are like in the current version with that kind of speed at their disposal.