>>59954Thanks. Yeah I began playing UO right before the Renaissance expansion and spent many years doing pretty much nothing else with my life but playing that game. It's hard to describe how amazing it was to be able to play games with other people using the internet. The concept was mind blowing. It basically ruined every other MMO for me and as a result I lost everything that came afterwards, WOW specifically. Good times, I even convinced a couple of kids in my school to try it and they also became very active players. I have 2 kind of funny UO stories, I'll write it down just in case you're interested.
It was 2001 and I had just convinced two of my classmates to try UO after playing by myself for a month or so. They soon became hooked themselves and one of them (let's call him Cosmo) got so addicted his mother forbade him to play games altogether. Cosmo turned out to be quite the cunning, scheming kid and would take none of it, which is weird because at school he was an extremely reserved, yes-man individual and never showed any social prowess whatsoever.
Cosmo's plan to continue to play UO with us during weekdays was rather convoluted. There was no way he could bypass his tiger mom at a home with a single computer (a common thing for middle class back in those days, one computer per household) so he found an Internet café a few stations away from his house and convinced the owner there to install UO in a couple of computers. He did this by promising the guy he would bring a couple of friends with him to play there everyday. The couple of friends he was talking about of course was myself and the other kid, let's call him George. Keep in mind we were like 12 at the time and Cosmo was this scrawny Chinese kid I never saw talking to anyone else but me or George. That was a pattern during my school days where I always happened to befriend the Asian kids. Turned out they were usually the ones that shared with me a good grasp on mathematics and a hatred for retarded ball games and P.E in general. In fact the reason we even began to talk to each other was because of some math olympiad crap they advertised in our school at one point. George's parents were from India and his mom is part of the second story but I digress.
Anyway, soon we were going after school to the internet place every other day to play Ultima Online, and we continued to do so for years. To go along with Cosmo's plan we learned to use the public transportation system, something none of us had done without adults at the time, find ways to lie for more pocket money and even come up with more lies about school projects and other bullshit just so we could spend more time playing games. And that's the story of how Cosmo, the guy who never talked to anyone and never cared for anything but factoring quadratic equations found his inner strength to go around downtown to strike a business deal with some stranger and how he used the collective wallets of his friends and propped them up and himself with a new arsenal of lying, scheming and bullshitting just so he could continue to play Ultima Online away from his mom. Now, to be honest, Cosmo already knew the online cafe owner before, we learned later his parents used the place to send emails to relatives back in HK, Taiwan or whatever it was before they purchased a PC. Still, pretty impressive.
The second story happens many years later. We were already teenagers and almost done with highschool at the time. Cosmo, George and I continued to play games in that same Internet cafe and there were also more people playing with us who first got interested in UO after watching us playing. One of these guys was George's cousin, let's call him Jerry. He was older than us, around his early to mid 20s. His dad had a business selling AC units to office buildings or something and he actually made a good amount of money by being a sales agent for the company. It was probably not that much money but from our jobless teenager perspectives it was a lot.
He often would pay for our hours on the internet place just so he could have people to play with and at the peak of his gaming days he was pretty much banking 100% of our bills there. He also introduced eating junk food to the mix, something we always avoided because we had no extra money for it. He had the money though and he really indulged in it. Jerry's lifestyle was the first glimpse we had of a manchild, though we were not aware that was the term for it. I myself only realized that's what he was years later. The internet was very far from being what it is today and to know what a manchild was you had to happen to see one in the wild and even if you did, you were not sure what it was. It's like birdwatching. You can just open YT nowadays and see 4k HD videos of any bird under the sun now but back in the early 2000s you had to go out and hope to catch a glimpse of one in the woods. Again, from our still rather innocent perspective, Jerry's life was perfect. He would show up at around 4pm, order pizza and play games, sometimes all the way to closing hours.
It was quite a sight to behold so see this overweight adult in a business suit playing a video game. The idea of adults playing video games is quite hegemonic nowadays but it certainly wasn't so back then. Granted, the list of adults I knew was rather limited to my parents, Cosmo's and George's parents, a neighbor and our teachers. But none of them even knew what a video game is. And here's Jerry eating greasy pizza and playing a game that even for the time was outdated both in gameplay and graphics.
This thing with Jerry lasted for about a year and it ended with a bang. In fact his demise kind of ended everything. We recently heard he began to skip work to play UO and other games and George told us he was about to lose his job. We kept asking for more info about it but he kept being evasive. Then, one fine Wednesday afternoon, we were all together playing whatever it was and two middle aged Indian succubi went inside the internet cafe. Immediately they drew our attention. It was bizarre enough succubi coming inside that place and even more bizarre the fact they were middle aged motherly figures. As soon as they enter the establishment, George just melts in his chair, trying to hide himself behind the monitor in the most ridiculous, cartoony scene imaginable. Jerry on the other hand has this dumb look on his face and he stares at the succubi for a good 10 seconds and goes "Mom? Mom?! Mom!!!"
She has this furious look on her face and without saying a word, makes a hand gesture, signaling him to come as if she's dealing with a lap dog. Like a brainless zombie, Jerry gets off the chair and follows the succubi towards the exit, the computer still running the game, he never even closed the window or anything. His bowls of chips left untouched. Complete defeat, not even a fight. They caught him in the act and he knew he was fucking busted. Before the two succubi get out of the cafe place, one of them shouts "I see you there, George!"
And that was the end of Jerry. I never saw him again. We stopped going to the cyber cafe soon afterwards, if not that very week. UO was pretty much dead at that point in the sense many other games had superseded in every aspect and people still playing it was pretty much doing it out of nostalgia. Internet Cafes themselves were quickly dying off due to very affordable computers and broadband internet becoming wildly available. In fact I think the one we went to closed down not 6 months after the Jerry incident. Not long afterwards highschool was over and I lost contact with George and Cosmo as well. End of an era.