Update for next couple videos + Patreon stuff

Ultima Online wasn't anything I played growing up, but Ultima 9 was the first game I ever bought with my own money as a kid...

Really excited to see your retrospective on The Lost Age! It has one of my favorite Sakuraba tracks of all time, and it was probably the first time in my childhood where I really began to appreciate the music in video games outside of just mindlessly going "Cool boss music!"

I'm not sure how useful of an anecdote it'll be for an Ultima Online video but when I was a teenager I'd stay the night at my friend's house and after he'd go to bed I'd log into his UO account and just lumberjack for him all night. I didn't have access to the game on my own so I didnt really know what I was doing it for, but the idea of a persistent online game was so astonishing to me that I'd have done anything to have a chance to play for a bit, even if that meant just hacking away at trees until 6am, then running to town and using a VENDOR BUY SELL BANK macro to open a shop and sell all the wood. Good times.

Ultima Online. Ahhh yes. If you've heard the famous story from Richard Garriott about the Beta CDs, I actually was one who bought it (and I think I still have it). I was fascinated by the idea that I could play as a banker or a tailor or something and not have this "hero" role. I think even 25 years later that idea has some legs. It was an interesting evolution of gameplay though. Kind of not unlike the social media we have today. It starts off as innocent and just hanging out, having fun and then the trolls arrive. And then the trolls take over. And then the whole place is shit. Lol. If you want more of my takes, hit me up.

Regarding the early culture of Ultima Online, you might be rewarded to check out "ImaNewbie" dot com, a website archiving an early webcomic made from UO screenshots. While I did play UO as a kid, I honestly remember moreso the novelty of an online comic set in the game world, commenting on the nature of the player base & the struggles facing a player attempting to play the game "the intended way," as a RPer type dork, constantly being preyed upon by the new world order of "Gamers," amusing themselves with griefing etc. An interesting snapshot, & the archive itself is a cute throwback to late-90s web design. Might be relevant to the historical angle you're planning to take with it. Good luck! I really enjoyed the Pagan video btw, I think it honestly cured a few scars I incurred trying to play that piece of crap as a kid. Didn't occur to me it was just badly made lol, I sort of assumed it was just too hard for me & eventually gave up on it.

Ah, UO. I participated in the Ultima Online Beta Test. Mailed in a check and got a CD in the mail and everything. I remember a sense of ... hope? Ambition? Excitement? That this would be the online experience long promised. I read the promo materials and guide extensively. Even joined a guild with people I had never met. But all I ended up experiencing, even into the first year of the actual game, was rampant crime and zero friends. UO was something Britannia and not. The locations were there. But it was just a gaggle of strange people stealing the gold from newly created characters and murdering anyone with stuff worth taking. Or even not worth taking. I got some decent gear and was starting to enjoy exploring the world on my own when, on one occasion, logging off safely was not safe - it did not immediately despawn your character, you see, so you could be attacked in the five minutes or so between when you logged out and when your character despawned - and someone murdered my character and took all my things. Again back to zero. I gave up and let my parents cancel the subscription. In all that time I never actually found a single one of my supposed guild mates. I am glad others got to experience something wonderful from it, but it poisoned me to the entire notion of playing online with others. Edit: This reads like far too much of a downer, so let me dredge up something positive to counter-balance it. The period of hype leading up to it was full of good stories from people who had participated in the alpha and had a great time. I remember various web pages of the day on the Ultima Dragons web ring. Enoch's World, various Ultima fan pages, guild websites with midi versions of many different popular songs embedded, and so forth. Great fun. Lots of early internet innovations happening there. Almost every site is gone now, of course, but you might find fragments on the way back machine.

No doubt you would have already come across it, but the Ultima Online Retrospective from GDC in 2018 would no doubt be relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0 As far as stories of playing Ultima Online when it came out, I ended up having to change majors in college that semester. It wasn't the direct cause but certainly the catalyst - an easy escape from actual duties and schoolwork and a means for procrastination. It's hard to understate how revolutionary the concept of playing games with other people in other places had become in those years, and what massive step forward UO was specifically. Side story: In high school, I had made some of my strongest friendships from trying to get Doom to connect over modem lines. If you were lucky enough to have two phone lines, you could try to figure out the exact modem init string that your modem needed to use, while the other person did the same at the same time. You had these long strings of "Hayes" AT commands, and while some where standard ("ATDT" meant ATtention, then DIalTone, so ATDT followed by a number like ATDT8675309 would tell your modem to dial that number), but you then needed to get hardware compression right (Z followed by a number on some modems, a different character on others, some might also be Z but with a different number, etc.) and a couple other particular settings had to be combined just right. There was no internet to help you out (or at least the web wasn't a resource like it because a few years later), and unless the other person had successfully connected to someone else before they had no way of knowing which were the exact right commands for their modem also. So that second phone line would let you both discuss who was going to try what next, and then you'd wait while the computers did their thing. That left a whole lot of downtime between attempts, where you would start chatting with this complete stranger (whom you might have met via a local BBS, so at least you weren't paying long distance rates for the calls). The social aspect for that brief window was completely different, and this was only about 3 years before Ultima Online. (If you were lucky enough to be on a LAN it would have been a smoother experience, though most likely in the same room, like a computer lab). When Quake came out a year or two later, that's when you started getting large lobbies of people over the Internet proper, and tools were made to help you find and connect with strangers who you wouldn't ever necessarily communicate with, except at the end of a gun (or grappling hook! ...more games need grappling hooks, dammit!). Diablo reinforced this, where you would get matched with people over Battle.net, and might chat a little while in town. Enter UO. My first introduction to the Ultima series was 7. I was on consoles before that time. The phrase "Ah, 'tis better!" is burned into my brain from some random character(s) opening their windows over and over. That game was peak in a way the sequels never managed to connect for me. But UO captured all of that, plus that the majority of people you encountered were actual people. I remember all the typical stuff like camping outside a hole in a mountain waiting for a rabbit (or whatever) to spawn to kill it to complete some kind fetch quest, surrounded by a dozen or more people all trying to do the same thing. I remember being afraid of PKers (Player Killers) appearing and chasing you (this was possible on every single server at release, there was no concept of PvE versus PvP servers). I remember the frantic chase as a ghost trying to get back to your corpse before it was looted, with a growing pit in your stomach, knowing that it had almost certainly already happened. But mostly I just remember spending hours and hours lost in Britannia, only realizing morning had come when the ROTC crew would come jogging past the window as the sun rose. The biggest difference, and perhaps what was a hook for me personally, was that sense of *persistence*. The things you did and the items you got *stayed* (unless they were "stolen" of course). As much fun as Doom and Quake (especially CTF - capture the flag .. because gameplay objective + *grappling hooks*) every time the match ended, everything was exactly the way it was before. Nothing changed, so it didn't *matter*. But now you had this grand thing, that *did* matter (kinda-sorta-not-really-but-kinda), where anyone could just show up and play together (no stuggle like the modem days), and with the Internet itself being so new and novel, there was just never anything like it before.

exciting! and dont worry about extra content, i for one and mostly just here to support the regular video creation.

Should I actually play Golden Sun 1 before 2? Should I play them at all??

Ooh I will have to look at that Eve Online video! It's so counterintuitive on youtube. I see a 20m video? "Mmm this is probably just long enough to be monitizable and isn't really going to be that great, skip." But then "whoa this video is 5h long? I bet it's the best most gripping thing EVER (and it is)" Maybe I'm just lucky that it's mostly majuular, defunctland and jenny nicholson.

Positives: Majuular is working on Golden Sun 2 Negatives: I have to haul ass and play Golden Sun 2 Anyways thank you for the wonderful update and content as always dearest Maj

Cant wait until you replay GS2 and reach the racist stereotype village, Hell, I think there was two of them.

Echoing the curiousity about Ultima Online. I was around at the time but I was an EverQuest into Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds into Maple Story guy, and I feel like you always hear about the history of like FFXI and RuneScape in videos out there but you never hear about UO.

Thanks for the update, really looking forward to the Golden Sun follow up!

Thanks for the update you legend!

If you haven't already, i suggest checking out the official Prima guide for UO. It goes into some depth on the theory of the major game systems. It reads like a digest of the design docs

Thanks for the update. Glad you’re doing well and hope your recording studio comes out well.