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Raph Koster, one of the designers who worked on Ultima Online in its early days, has an interesting article up on his website concerning “rares” in the game, and how they came about.

Rares, for those not in the know, are basically (according to Raph) “items that were incredibly uncommon. Often they were near unique. They couldn’t be found via loot — they were only spawned once, really, when the server came up. As a result, they were immediately collectible. Most of them had no use whatsoever — they were simply uniquely colored objects, like a red vase that a crafter couldn’t replicate, or an object that was outright not craftable at all.”

Because of their rarity and uniqueness, rares quickly became items of great value, purely on the value of being collectible; almost overnight, an entire economy sprung up around them, which eventually saw people trading thousands of real-life dollars (and/or millions of gold coins in the game world) in order to purchase rares of interest to them.

Here’s the funny part, though: rares were the result of a bug.

Raph’s explanation is pretty lengthy, so I would direct interested readers to simply check out what he’s written; I’m not going to try and really condense it here, beyond remarking that the objects that became rares were intended, initially and in most cases, as a means of plugging small holes in how the Ultima Online engine rendered the world, or of correcting for misplaced/incorrectly assigned items and tiles.

His concluding insight, however, is pretty cool:

After banging our heads against this sort of thing for a few weeks, we embraced it instead. Players felt clever. They had invented a minigame out of our bugs, and it was a minigame people were willing to pay thousands of dollars a month to play. People started making museums of rares.

Our wisdom was not in inventing an awesome cool collectible feature. It was in surrendering control to the awesome power of emergent behavior.

Now there’s a worthy consideration for would-be and currently active developers, especially those who have crafted multiplayer online games inspired by — or set in — the Ultima universe.