Cran Gallara, on the Ultima Dragons Facebook group, pointed out something rather impressive and incredible yesterday:

As far as I can tell, the Ultima Dragons formed our Internet Chapter almost exactly 20 years ago. (Give or take a couple of weeks.) Happy Birthday, UDIC! Welcome to our third decade!

The first Ultima Dragons club was founded on Prodigy, an online service provider of significant prominence in the 1990s. Prodigy’s rates became excessive, however, and so the Ultima Dragons Internet Chapter was founded with the creation of the alt.games.ultima.dragons newsgroup.

(If you’re wondering how the Dragons got their name, the UDIC FAQ tells the rather amusing tale: “When the club was first formed on Prodigy, there was already a group dedicated to Ultima called the Evil Avatars — and rival that, the new club was called ‘Players of Ultima for Fun’, or PUFF. This resulted in inevitable references to Puff the Magic Dragon, and the club was soon renamed the Ultima Dragons.”)

Some Dragons still hang out in the official RCGUD newsgroup; it’s not as active as it once was, but neither is it completely devoid of activity. The Facebook group boasts over 830 members, and has become a significant hub of conversation over the last couple of years. And, of course, there’s always the Weyrmount, if MOOs are your thing.

At their core, the Dragons are just a group of people who love Ultima, and they take a pretty relaxed approach to membership: the sole requirement is to have played any single Ultima game. I honestly doubt that the official UDIC website has changed significantly since it was first launched; certainly it looks basically the same as it did when I joined the group in the late 1990s.

There hasn’t been a single-player Ultima game published in the last fifteen years. Ultima Online is still going after seventeen years, and Ultima Forever was — for a brief time — an interesting attempt to bring the Ultima namesake and concept to a younger generation of gamers. There was also Lord of Ultima, which was at least a technically sound game, albeit not one that really bore any relation to Ultima apart from the use of the name. And yet, the Dragons persist, as they have ever done. It’s a testament to the unique nature of the group, I think, that it has been able to continue to exist for over a decade after the series whose fans founded — and still comprise — it came to an end.

And in turn, the longevity of the Ultima Dragons is a testament to the staying power and historical significance of the Ultima games themselves. What other game series can boast that its fan groups have remained strong — and active! — over a decade after the last entry in the series was published?