I close my eyes.
It’s 1999.
The internet is still this wild, uncharted frontier, and online gaming? That’s for the lucky few with the right setup. I stumble home from Pizza Hut after a Friday night stuffed with personal pan pizzas and Pepsi, the neon sign in the arcade still buzzing in my head. I plop down at my brand-new computer; a beast with a 266MHz CPU that feels like the future. I plug in the phone line, and the dial-up screech erupts: that glorious, agonizing symphony of beeps, hisses, and static. ICQ chimes in the background, but I ignore it for the moment. Britannia await.
The UO client loads. The wooden chest creaks open on screen, that haunting lute melody swells, and suddenly I’m in. Britannia unfolds before me, pixelated and alive. I don’t get it all yet; the skills, the macros, the endless grind. But I know this: friends wait near Minoc, and enemies lurk in the shadows and caves. I’m a miner, fresh from the mountains east of Minoc, my backpack bulging with raw ore. It’s heavy, clinking with every step. I sprint north past Mt. Kendall, heart pounding. One wrong turn, one PK spotting me, and it’s all gone. Poof. Back to square one.
I spot my buddy’s house, that cozy single wooden house. There he is, his character in full bone armor like some death knight from the stories we swap at school. We chat in the overhead text: “Dude, biology test sucked.” “Latin was worse. Weekend’s ours now let’s pwn Britannia.”
He’s got my back. We dash the last stretch to my place, a humble shack tucked in the woods just north of town. Footsteps behind us? PKs on the prowl, red names glowing like demons. We dive through the door, slam it shut, chests heaving. Safe. For now.
Inside, we unload the ore into the forge. Sparks fly as I smelt, the hammer clanging like thunder. We plan the night: hit the dungeons, hunt liches in Destard, maybe steal a rare from Vesper if we’re bold. Laughter echoes in the chat box. No voice, no Discord; just pure, unfiltered text and imagination. Hours melt away. Dawn creeps in my window, but in-game, the moons rise over the mountains.
I open my eyes. It’s 2026 now. Those memories hit like a fresh respawn sharp, vivid, irreplaceable. I still have the old discs somewhere in a box. But that house near Minoc? Decayed and no long exists. My old friend? We haven’t talked in over 20 years. Napa Valley’s a ghost shard: empty streets, silent guards, the wind howling through abandoned taverns. Player run villages sit in a ghostly silence.
I will forever remember Ultima Online as it once was. A world where every login felt like magic. A time to call our own.
_brandon