The term “MMORPG” did not always exist in the games industry; something had to catalyze the word’s origin, and as legend tells it, that catalyst was the team behind Ultima Online. Renowned game designer Richard Garriott and his team at Origin Systems – the industry’s most successful PC games company of its era – contributed substantially to the modern world of role-playing games. Had Garriott not instituted his vision of fantasy role-playing games in the form of Akalabeth and Ultima, there’s no doubt that RPGs could have “grown up” vastly differently.

Fueled by a desire to bring digital life to tabletop D&D campaigns, a young Garriott set forth building D&D #1 on his school’s teletype machine. The challenge to create a functional RPG was first issued by Garriott’s father, who’d offered to split the cost of an Apple 2 computer in exchange for the prototype. This eventually gave way to the more sophisticated Akalabeth, sometimes referred to as “Ultima 0.”

The origin of the use of the term avatar as one’s online/in-game representation also merits mention:

Ultima also introduced terminology to the gaming world in the form of player “avatars,” or in-game representations of the player. Garriott felt that merely playing a “character” wouldn’t convey the appropriate connection with that character’s actions, and so he dug into his linguistic interests to find a Sanskrit alternative.

“Prior to Ultima IV, which was called Quest of the Avatar, your character in a game was called your ‘character.’ With Ultima IV, since it was a game about virtue, I wanted it to be you in the virtual world – so I used the Sanskrit word ‘avatar.’”

Other terminologies that are now common in the MMORPG space, but which were more or less coined during the creation of Ultima Online, also come up:

The root of server sharding is actually somewhat humorous. Publisher EA projected that Ultima Online would sell something to the tune of 30,000 units for the lifetime of the product, but Garriott’s Origin Systems thought this was wrong, itself projecting for closer to 100,000 units. In light of this, Origin architected a server system that would sustain the game’s world in the event of mass sales – a million copies in lifetime – and built Britannia to hold that many players.

And things did go exceedingly well for the title. The game’s beta, a $5 privilege offered by Origin, saw 50,000 sign-ups within a few days of launch. EA and Origin grew worried that not everyone would fit in the game’s world, and where most developers would be ecstatic, Garriott – although excited – was concerned.

“To me, this was disappointing! I want people to be together! I didn’t want this fiction where the two worlds were unrelated to each other, so I invented the term ‘shards.’”

There’s more to read than what has been excerpted here; click on through to Gamers Nexus for the rest. And if you have time, take in the video above!