Ultima Online Retrospective
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Kirk "Runesabre" Black
Current Company: Family Time! Interactive
Current Project: Family Time! Adventures
Current Position: President / Owner
UO background: Aug 1998 to May 2001 as Lead Programmer and Producer
My first experience with UO was an IRC chat in July of 1997 with a guy named Designer Dragon [Raph Koster - Ed.] about this exciting new virtual world about to be released. I would later become one of the first developers hired directly from the player community. Thanks, Rich Vogel, for taking a chance! I helped grow the game from a stagnating 96,000 subscribers to a thriving 240,000 in markets such as Japan, China, Korea, Europe and Australia. Among the many things I did during my tenure, I'm most noted for treasure hunts, banning a lot of cheaters, un-nerfing tamed dragons, making animal taming actually useful, getting the servers to run longer with fewer crashes, making patch day pleasant instead of hellish, and Siege Perilous. Many players may simply know me as one of those holiday bells... the one named Runesabre. :)
One of the most memorable and touching experiences I had while working on UO was the time a wheelchair-bound player wrote to us to say that of all the things he liked about it, the best was that he could run again. For me, that sums up my passion for UO and for developing MMOs in general - the unique opportunity to have a positive, tangible impact on people's lives.
