Ultima Online · PC · 1997 · Impact: Became one of online gaming's founding legends
During a 1997 beta stress test of Ultima Online, a player killed Richard Garriott's supposedly invulnerable avatar with a fire field spell. A server crash had reset the protection, and nobody had switched it back on.
Richard Garriott had appeared in his own games as Lord British, the ruler of Britannia, since the early Ultima titles, and in the single-player games he was nearly impossible to kill. Ultima Online, Origin Systems' massively multiplayer game, put that character into a world shared with thousands of players. On 9 August 1997, during a stress test of the beta servers, Garriott's Lord British was appearing before a gathering of players when a player character named Rainz cast a fire field spell and killed him. The death should not have been possible. As producer Starr Long later explained, Lord British, like other staff characters, had been made invulnerable to that kind of attack, but by design the protection did not persist across game sessions. The server had crashed shortly before the event, and Garriott had not reset his invulnerability when he logged back in. Origin banned Rainz from the beta, stating that the ban was for repeatedly exploiting rather than reporting bugs, not for the killing itself. Many beta testers protested regardless. Ultima Online launched on 24 September 1997 and went on to become the first MMORPG to reach 100,000 subscribers. The assassination, though, is what many players remember: the moment a game's creator discovered that, in a persistent online world, the players could do things the designers had never intended.
In a single-player game, a designer controls every outcome that matters. In an online world, a single overlooked flag in front of an audience of players becomes a public event. The death of Lord British was a bug in the narrow sense — a protection that should have been on was off — but it became a story about something larger: players treating a developer's world as genuinely theirs to act in.