Raph Koster links to a pair of articles published at MMORPG.com — the first one is here, and the second here — and offers some comments and corrections based on his recollections of Ultima Online’s development process.

For example:

Technically, we didn’t have the engine at the point the article states; the client was basically rewritten in 1995-96. Rick Delashmit had been there for a few months when my wife and I joined the project on Sept 1st 1995; other key early folks such as Scott “Grimli” Phillips and Edmond Meinfelder also joined in August to September of 95. That’s also around when Ken Demarest left, and Jim Greer — best known today for founding Kongregate.

I think I have told this story before, but the whole “dragons eating deer” example came from the design samples that my wife and I sent in as part of our job applications. We showed up on the first day and were taken aback when we were told that was how the game was going to work… So at least that much of the notion of “what the game was going to be” was set in 1995…

That crazy resource system stuff, particularly some of the AI, did in fact work in the alpha test. It led to rabbits that had levelled up and were capable of taking out wolves — or advanced players. We found this intensely amusing, and quoted Monty Python at each other whenever it came up.

It’s an interesting concept. I mean, if players can level up by defeating monsters, animals and/or other players in battle, why can’t monsters and animals do the same thing by defeating each other and/or players?

And here’s a historical clarification:

The alpha was not an MMO in the “really massive” sense of the word. It supported the same sort of concurrency as Meridian 59 did — 250 or so. In between the alpha and the beta, the server was rewritten to allow for 2500-3000 concurrent players per shard. In order to do this, a whole bunch of new technology had to be invented for creating seamless borders between adjacent maps. These borders would prove to be a source of bugs for years (most dupe bugs made use of race conditions when moving across server lines).

Anyhow, Dragons and Dragonettes, do read both MMORPG.com article as well as Koster’s summary of and corrections thereto. If you played UO at all, it should be an informative stroll down memory lane.