Origin Systems, in addition to being a world-renowned developer of top-tier games across a multitude of genres, was also an incubator of talent for the computer gaming industry. Many of the men and women acknowledged as industry legends in their own right today began their careers at, or in affiliation with, Origin. In like manner, former Origin staff have founded, co-founded, and/or bolstered many other well-known (and, in some cases, infamous) game development companies.

“Exploring the reality in which we live,” Richard Garriott once said, “…those same feelings, that same reward of discovery is just as true in the virtual world as it is in the real world.” And nowhere is that sense of discovery, that sense of reward, greater than in the worlds of Ultima, the worlds that Origin Systems built. What other series of games that has been out of (single-player) publication for over a quarter-century can claim to hold such a powerful influence over the modern gaming industry and the men and women that work in it? I respectfully submit that the answer is: “none”.

True, there continues to be new content, in the form of periodic Publishes, added to Ultima Online. Age of Shadows was the last full expansion for that game produced by Origin Systems, though other expansions have been released since. And Ultima Online has survived changing hands more than once! Electronic Arts Redwood Shores (EARS, the EA headquarters) went on to produce three more expansion for the game before handing off control of it to Mythic just prior to the publication of the Stygian Abyss expansion. Mythic, in turn, handed off Ultima Online to Broadsword, a new (and independent) company formed by a handful of ex-Mythic developers when that studio was about to be closed by EA.

The Stygian Abyss expansion pack was an interesting development in the history of Ultima Online, because it represented an attempt to walk the game back toward the canon of the classic, single-player series to a certain extent. The expansion added the Abyss as a major new dungeon, and EA’s artists went to great lengths to ensure that the first level of the Abyss hearkened back to the first level of Ultima Underworld.

Mythic and (now) Broadsword, for their part, took cues from that design choice and have been incrementally moving Ultima Online, by way of in-game events and small enhancements released over the course of several publishes, into closer alignment with the single-player Ultima lore. Ultima Online will never be a canonical Ultima in the sense that it fits in with the storyline of the nine numbered Ultima games, but more and more the people keeping it alive are finding ways to reference the single-player series and bring in storylines and characters that hearken back to the stories told by the Ultima games. At the same time, they are trying to push the game forward and keep it relevant in an MMORPG market that has changed — wildly, markedly changed — since the game was first launched.

That tension — between looking back and staying playable — is, in its way, very Origin. The company that taught so many to chase discovery in Britannia, Pagan, and the Stygian Abyss also taught an industry how to staff up, spin out, and keep iterating long after any one studio’s doors had closed. You can still hear that inheritance in the people who left, the companies they built, and the games that borrowed Ultima’s vocabulary of virtue, sandbox, and living worlds without always saying the name out loud.

So if Ultima Online is still here — still publishing, still evolving, still finding room for an old dungeon’s first level or a familiar face from the single-player games — that is not nostalgia alone. It is the same reward of discovery Richard Garriott pointed to, carried forward by hands that never quite put the work down. A quarter-century out of single-player print is a long time for a series to matter. Origin’s worlds, somehow, still do.

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 first of five articles in total, which I’ll slowly be adding to the Codex to give them a permanent home.