2004 was, in many respects, not a great year for Ultima fans. Origin Systems was closed by EA, and its assets consolidated to Redwood Shores, early in the year. The controversial Samurai Empire expansion pack for Ultima Online was introduced later in the year, earning the scorn of many long-time fans of the series for its wild departure from the Ultima mythos. And it was in the midst of all this that Ultima Aiera was born.

Ultima Aiera

August 9th, 2004. That was the day I first posted something to the original Ultima: Aiera, way back in the day when I still bothered including a colon in the site’s name. The first site was, if memory serves, hosted on the webspace given to me as a student of the Computer & Electrical Engineering faculty at the University of Alberta.

Of course, students didn’t get access to web-facing databases. PHP was enabled, however, which meant that I could make use of CuteNews a fairly simplistic PHP-driven content-posting system that stored its data in flat text files. After cobbling together a basic site layout with some help from Dino the Dark Dragon, I set about the task of mirroring the content of Ultima: The Reconstruction, Voyager Dragon’s repository and directory of Ultima fan projects and their released files. These were precious things, I reasoned…it would be good to have another place at which they were safely stored. That, and Voyager was finding it difficult to keep his site updated even then. Surely, between the two of us, news could be kept current.

The Original Ultima Aiera layout

Well…it wasn’t all roses, and it didn’t quite work out as planned.

Ultima Aiera was, for a time, moved to a subdomain of Time Immortal, one of my earlier websites, and fell into a kind of stagnation there. I had graduated university and moved into the working world, which of course made for less time to follow all the many Ultima fan projects that were out there. I had a girlfriend, who — let us be honest — took up still yet more of what little free time I had left. And I was involved in other blogging efforts, and other projects. If I posted to Ultima Aiera more than a couple times in a month, I considered that a good month; I was fine with one post a month, if there was news to report. And there wasn’t always news to report.

Ultima Aiera moved to its next home — and its own domain — in early 2007; the first post to the new site (a project entry, in fact) was made on March 4, 2007. The site itself was formally launched on March 5, 2007. Even then, I didn’t put a terrible amount of effort into the site, and continued to focus on other blogging efforts and other projects. Between the summer and fall of 2007, I did almost nothing with the site, and even into 2008 didn’t really do much to keep it going. News continued to be posted to the site at irregular and infrequent intervals, though I mostly managed to keep the project files up to date. (Voyager Dragon tried to revitalize The Reconstruction at around the same time, but moved on to other projects shortly thereafter.)

The move to a standalone domain was accompanied by a migration to the WordPress blogging platform, which at the time was indeed still more a blogging platform than anything else. (It has since grown into a very competent, easy-to-use CMS, albeit one which still puts primary emphasis on its blogging roots.) WordPress also brought comments — and the resultant community discussions, which became a mainstay and key feature of the site — to Aiera.

At some point in late 2008 or early 2009, I decided to quit my other blogging efforts and just focus on all things Ultima. And in months where there wasn’t a huge wealth of Ultima fan project news to report, I started looking for other bits of content to provide (e.g. news about former Origin personalities). In some respects, I was duplicating the work of Dino’s Ultima Page, but the relationship between the two sites was more symbiotic than anything else. Dino would report on news that I covered, and I’d report on things he covered (since he often caught projet-related news before I did). (Dino did ultimately note that Aiera and the Codex of Ultima Wisdom had largely superceded his site’s role when he effectively shut down his page in late 2011. In some respects, I feel bad about that.)

Aiera really began to take off in 2010, which was an interesting year in many respects. That was the year that Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum and Ben “Bandit LOAF” Lesnick of the Wing Commander CIC reached out and made contact with me. Ben began treating Aiera as the equivalent to the CIC for the Ultima community, which certainly helped drive more readers to the site (and which in turn fueled even more lively discussions in the comment threads), while Joe began supplying all sorts of delightful content from his extensive archives of Orign Systems material. BioWare Mythic first reached out to me in August of that year, putting out the first feelers (and the first hints) to capture community opinion for what was then a secret project. That project has since come to light, of course, with the announcement of Ultima Forever. (And the Ultima fan community have readily made their thoughts known in turn.)

The most recent Ultima Aiera layout

Ultima Aiera’s readership and role grew by leaps and bounds from that point, and became a major hub of activity within the Ultima fandom. It continued to serve up news and downloads from Ultima fan projects, and it became a means by which Mythic’s Ultima development team could keep their finger on the pulse of the community. The site saw its millionth visitor in 2011, a major milestone for any website…especially one about an RPG series that hadn’t seen a new title published in twelve years.

And then something very interesting happened.

UO Journal

Technically, UO Journal began in 1999 or 2000, and was founded by a Durham Stargazer.

The original UO Journal layout

At some point, ownership of the domain name passed to Deckard (whom many of you have seen around the site here), and he launched the site in its current incarnation in late 2010. UO Journal provided some commentary and information that maybe wasn’t being covered by the main UO fansites. Parts of it were moved to UO.UltimaCodex.com, and some of the news being posted there will soon be consolidated to the main site.

The current UO Journal layout

There are still some plans for UOJournal.com with other people taking over, but they are on hold for now, as those people have left or are considering leaving Ultima Online after the 15th Anniversary.

Ultima Codex

Set up by Deckard, UltimaCodex.com was briefly active in 2006 and 2007, and then fell into disuse. Originally, it was going to be part of a pair of sites/portals, UltimaCodex.com focusing on Ultima in general (both as a news site and an archive site), and the other (UOCodex.com) focused on providing Ultima Online news and information. Like many fansites, both were simply victims of real-life interests taking precedence over a hobby for the people who were in charge, almost as soon as they started, as well as dealings with a large corporation, and trying to bring several different personalities together from other UO fansites. On the UO side of things, there was a frustration at being shut out by some of the community relations people from Electronic Arts in favor of other sites, even though there was a lot of off-the-record communication going on. Being told something off-the-record that you can’t mention publicly, and then seeing that same information being announced on more mainstream UO fansites was frustrating to the point of causing people to quit.

The original Ultima Codex layout

The early emphasis was going to be on the UO side, as this was after Ultima X had been canceled and UO was clearly the only Ultima property being updated. This was an interesting point in the Ultima Online fan community: UO subscriptions were dropping due to other MMORPGs, and yet Kingdom Reborn was around the corner. Older famous (and infamous) UO fansites that had been around since the late 1990s and early 2000s had started shutting down or ceasing to exist entirely. (This in turn was accelerated by the fact that many within the UO fansite community found themselves being hired into the videogame industry.)

UOCodex.com was going to fill in some gaps, provide a history of UO itself that was in danger of being lost, and provide an alternative to the mainstream UO fansites, and it seemed natural to set up an Ultima-focused side as well. UOCodex.com was originally going to bring together several UO-related blogs and bloggers hosted on blogging services (GeoCities, Blogger, etc.) as well. It was ultimately a victim of bad timing — some personalities clashed, some people got burned out on UO, and other typical problems reared their heads. If it had been formed a year earlier, it might have turned out very differently.

The UO Codex layout

Deckard confesses only a few regrets in regard to the fate of the site — namely that the UOCodex.com domain name lapsed rather than be given to JC the Builder at UOGuide.com, and that the forums that were on UltimaCodex.com and UOCodex.com were never archived by the participants or by The Wayback Machine. These forums were actually active in 2006 and 2007, with hundreds, maybe thousands of posts, mainly discussing what people wanted to do and just discussing the games and guilds. They were removed from their respective sites because of security issues with the forum software and spammers, and they never had more than maybe 40 or so participants — they were not listed on the front pages of the sites and were somewhat of an invitation-only affair. Deckard’s regret, then, is that there were some past and present (in 2006 terms) UO developers participating at the time, and those contributions have most likely been lost.

Thankfully UOGuide eventually filled the role that UOCodex.com was going to fill as far as providing a guide/content that could be edited by the community. And when UltimaAiera.com started, it unknowingly filled in the role that UltimaCodex.com was going to fill.

Which brings us to…

It was Deckard, then, who offered me the Ultima Codex domain name. He and I had been talking for a while at that point, and I can’t remember the exact context in which the offer was made…but I accepted it almost immediately. I mean, c’mon…Ultima Codex? You can’t ask for a better name for an Ultima-themed website…except, perhaps, ulti.ma (which I could have as a domain name, if I could afford the $300+ USD/year registration fee that Moroccan TLDs typically go for).

Initially, I wanted to move the Codex of Ultima Wisdom to the new domain, but the more I talked about it with various people, the more I wanted to do something more with it. It has always bugged me that the Ultima fandom and the Ultima Online fandom have been so disparate and separated from each other in the past, and the possibility had emerged to fuse the two communities — or, at least, one influential website from each community — into a single portal.

So we went for it. The Ultima Codex was launched in early 2012 to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Ultima Underworld, and for a brief time Aiera was maintained there as a separate subdomain; the main domain here was set up as an aggregation portal for various Ultima Codex sub-sites. This was a rocky start, and didn’t actually serve the goal of providing a unified portal for Ultima– and Ultima Online-related content. Thus, after a few months, it was decided to consolidate all Ultima news and most Ultima Online news here, at the main domain.

And that’s where we are today.

And yes, the first post at the Ultima Codex happened in March, rather than in August. And yes, the site arguably only dates back half a year, not eight years. But ultimately, everything that’s happening here today — and everything that will happen here in the days, weeks, and months hereafter — has its origins in the tiny little website I started back in August of 2004. Which is why we’ve decided to adopt August 9th as the effective anniversary date for the site: where we are today began back then, on that date.

Also: Don’t forget that our friends at the Wing Commander CIC will be celebrating their fourteenth anniversary tomorrow! Be sure to drop by #WingNut and offer your congratulations to the team that keeps that site humming!