I reported, some months back, on Alex St. John’s chronicle of his experience at a Britannia Manor Halloween party, but missed taking note of the story that led into that recounting. That story, as Infinitron Dragon pointed out to me, concerned Mr. St. John’s days as a technology evangelist for DirectX at Microsoft, and the role that Origin Systems played in helping Microsoft grow out that particular API.

And yes, there’s an Ultima angle to the tale.

I was given the job of “Game Evangelist” and got saddled with the enormous chore of trying to ensure that thousands of DOS games would be made compatible with the Windows 95 CMD shell. It was this very early initiative to work with leading DOS game developers on rudimentary support for their games that began the DirectX saga.

Of course the very first game company on my list was Origin located in Austin Texas and recently acquired by Electronic Arts. I found a technical contact there named Zack Simpson who was responsible for their libraries and a lot of their technology strategy. I had some Microsoft “Games Evangelist” business cards printed up and hopped a flight down to Texas…The[y] assembled about 30 people who were working on various Origin projects including Wing Commander III, Crusader and other games to listen to the Microsoft guy speak. I demonstrated WinG for them, extolled the virtues of creating games for Windows 95 and informed them that if they were receptive to working with Microsoft on making Windows games, I would be their point of contact. They listened politely which was a better reception than I got at many game companies. (Doing Darth Vader impressions while I spoke was a more common reception) Afterwards Zack, Ken Demarest (creator of the famous Multima prototype) and a few other engineers working on the game libraries to talk about Windows game development.

Boy did I get an earful. They all hated Windows, and hated Microsoft, the universal theme was the Windows was a giant, bloated resource sucking monstrosity that obstructed access to the hardware and media capabilities their games needed and consumed precious RAM and CPU cycles for no useful return.

So, it wasn’t exactly an auspicious start. But St. John was able to convince Richard Garriott to send three engineers to Microsoft’s headquarters for a month, ostensibly in an attempt to port Origin’s games to Windows. The experience wound up being a highly educational one…for Microsoft:

…[Garriott] agreed to send three of his best engineers to Microsoft for a month to attempt to port Origin games to Windows. It was the enormous success and impact of this mission that fundamentally shaped and defined the DirectX platform. The three engineers where Zack Simpson for Ultima, Frank Savage for Wing Commander and a third engineer who’s name eludes me which is unfortunate because he was the one who showed me a multiplayer demo while at Microsoft.

…

Although the DirectX API’s are well known today, they weren’t the only solution to Windows gaming problems. There were many changes that had to be made to Windows to support games that did not merit participation in the DirectX family of API’s. With guidance from Zack and other respected members of the game community that he introduced us to we made many changes to Windows 95 and NT to better support games including;

1. The KillGDI API added to WinG to disable the Windows GUI so games could talk directly to the video card without a fat Microsoft driver in the way.
2. API’s were added to Windows 95 and Windows NT to allow games to prevent virtual memory used by games from being paged out by the OS
3. Changes were made to the CD-ROM drivers to prevent caching that slowed game load times
4. Autoplay was added to Windows 95 to enable games to install and boot directly from a CD
5. The UDP protocol layer was exposed in the WinSockets API to support real-time multiplayer gaming
6. A hack that would become DirectInput was created (by Craig Eisler, now responsible for XBOX ONE Online Services) to enable digital joystick and gamepad support

In short, Zack Simpson and Richard Garriotts’ role in pioneering MMOG games went well beyond creating Ultima Online. In a sense Ultima Online, although it was not launched until 1997 was the very first independent DirectX game created.

Oh, and that multiplayer game that St. John mentioned above? It might just have been an early Multima demo:

I would have sworn that their engineer was doing some kind of multiplayer port. I recalled Zack and the other engineer showing me what I recall them claiming was a demo called Multima running on Windows using the Crusader engine. Years later I asked Zack what his recollection was and he said that they might have shown me Ken Demarest’s multima demo. In retrospect, had I known that I was participating in a historic moment I might have paid closer attention to what was going on.

In any event, I’m certain that they showed me a multiplayer Ultima like game running on Windows.

St. John also recalls discussing the “multiplayer Ultima” concept with a somewhat unconvinced Richard Garriott:

Two parts of the conversation stuck in my memory. I recall that he expressed doubt about how a multiplayer Ultima game would keep a party of players together. He was concerned that they would all run off in different directions and not stay on the same screen together. I recall expressing that such behavior might not be a bad thing, why not let them? People would form parties naturally when the game circumstances suited them. He had doubts about how story lines and scenarios would be kept synchronized in such situations. To me he seemed skeptical of the idea but receptive. I did not know at the time that Ken Demerest had already written the now legendary multima demo. I left the evening with the impression that Garriott was still early in his receptiveness to the whole multiplayer gaming idea.

If memory serves, I think it was ultimately Starr Long who sat Garriott down and sold him on the concept of an online Ultima. That said, I can’t recall where exactly I heard that, so take it with an appropriate quantity of salt grains.