ABSTRACT
Around the time that Meridian 59 was in its inception phase, Starr Long was working with Richard Garriott on Ultima IX. But around the end of 1994, his attention was pulled toward a new idea inspired by the emergence of the World Wide Web and experiences that he and other members of the team had with DikuMUD. “We looked at every online game we could find-INN, Air Warrior. We realized that we had to get in right now… this is the next thing,” says Long. Garriott agreed, and told them to make a prototype. Two weeks later, they had a game called MUltima, which could support up to 50 players. There wasn’t much action, only a sort of scavenger game based on Ultima V graphics. But the seed was there.
