Editor’s note: This is a slightly updated version of an article I posted on Examiner.com when, many years ago, I was an RPG and Gaming writer for the site. This was the fourth of five articles in total, which I’ll slowly be adding to the Codex to give them a permanent home.

It would be remiss to not to mention Raph Koster in this series about Origin Systems and its wider impact on the gaming industry. In fact, it’s appropriate that the man receives a section of his own.

After crafting LegendMUD in 2004, Koster was hired by Origin Systems to work on the design of persistent worlds. He soon fell into the role of lead designer for Ultima Online, and was instrumental in both developing and implementing many of the in-game systems that make UO a unique, sandbox-style gaming experience.

After overseeing the design of The Second Age, the first expansion pack for Ultima Online, he left Origin Systems and was subsequently hired by Sony Online Entertainment to serve as the creative director for Star Wars Galaxies. This game, which ran from 2003 to 2011, proved to be Koster’s last published MMORPG. Beyond his work as a game developer, though, Koster is a genuine polymath. He is a published author, and his book A Theory of Fun is widely regarded as a keen primer on the game design process. He writes poetry, and for a while was in the habit of posting a poem to his website almost every Sunday. For a brief time he also taught, although that career was cut short in no small part due to what he later termed “academic politics.” He dabbles in art and graphic design, and has even recorded a CD, After the Flood (that’s the Spotify link; you can also find it on Apple Music).

After leaving Sony in 2006, Raph Koster co-founded Metaplace (initially Areae) in a spare bedroom, raising Silicon Valley money to build a cloud-based platform meant to make virtual worlds “work the way the web does.” Users could create and share their own spaces on Metaplace.com; the portal even took an audience award at TechCrunch40. The flagship world never found enough traction to stay open, and by 2009 the company had shut that experiment down and pivoted hard into Facebook-based social games — Island Life, My Vineyard, and Legendary Treasure among them — before Playdom acquired the studio in 2010 for its technology and talent.

Koster stayed on through Playdom’s absorption into Disney Interactive, serving as Vice President of Creative Design. The Metaplace engine became the backend infrastructure for Club Penguin and a variety of other Playdom titles; he also creatively directed Deep Realms, and other projects that never shipped. In April of 2013 he left Disney to go independent again, describing the social gaming years as a crash course in metrics, mass-market audiences, and Disney’s creative culture — and as preparation for whatever came next.

The half-dozen years that followed were mainly consumed by consulting and advising, rather than any notable studio credits. Koster’s various clients and partners included Facebook, Google, Activision, Unity, Wooga, and others; he shipped the bar-trivia title Jackpot Trivia for NTN Buzztime and, with Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, helped design the mobile AR games Truck Stars AR and Nightenfell. He also kept publishing: a tenth-anniversary edition of A Theory of Fun for Game Design, the poetry collection Sunday Poems, and the essay volume Postmortems are all worthy reads. In 2012 the Game Developers Conference Online Awards named him an Online Game Legend — recognition that the industry still measured online design against the standards he had helped set at Origin and Sony.

In 2018 he founded Playable Worlds to chase the next generation of immersive online gaming, raising tens of millions in venture capital along the way. The studio’s first announced project, Stars Reach (revealed in 2024), is the game he has described as a spiritual successor to Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies: a massively multiplayer sandbox built around deep cloud-based simulation. A 2025 Kickstarter campaign to finance Stars Reach ranked among that year’s most successful, and as of this writing the project remains in active development and public testing.