The launch of Ultima Online in 1997 saw Garriott and crew scrambling to implement the basic systems of one of the founding MMORPG titles, and twenty years ago, the rules and conventions of the genre as we know it today were still very much up in the air. Garriott had to make a lot of guesses about what exactly players might want to do in the game and spent a considerable amount of time building what he thought was the perfect “virtual ecology.” Of course, the game’s players had different ideas—users rarely tend to go where you want them to go, especially in games.