Using the Past to Jump to the Future

A Q&A with Areae President and Founder, Raph Koster

March 14, 2007

Raph Koster is “the man.” While some people claim to be “the man,” this guy has actually walked the walk and coded the code. While not the original founder of the MMO, Koster comes darn close and often rubs shoulders with men like Richard Bartle, the pseudo-father of MMOs. If you don’t believe me, I’ll just rattle off a few of the games he’s worked on:

• LegendMUD - emeritus implementor
• Ultima Online – Lead Designer
• Ultima Online: Second Age – Lead Designer
• Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided – Creative Director
• Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade – Chief Creative Officer and Editor

If those games don’t impress you, Koster has also been listed in the top 100 developers in Next Generation magazine. The man’s been on the cutting edge of online world design for nearly a decade, and he’s not done yet.

In another headline making move, Koster left SOE in March 2006 to pursue an independent project of his own making. This project was revealed to be Areae,inc. a company that Koster believes will cause a “disruption” in the MMO marketplace. While still amazingly busy with his new project, Koster took a moment to answer a few questions from Ten Ton Hammer that discuss Raph’s past and just where his future is taking him.

Micajah: I think it can be officially noted that you’re a legend in the industry, Raph. You’ve certainly come a long way since your days as Ptah in LegendMUD. How does it feel to be a man singularly responsible for making industry-buzzing headlines? Did you ever fathom that your career would reach this point?

Koster: That would be a definite “no.” I still don’t tend to think of myself that way. I’ve often commented that I am a lot better known for things I have said than for things I have done. I also don’t think that I am “singularly responsible” for anything. It’s always been teams, and there’s a long-standing history of both giving me credit for stuff I didn’t do – and also giving me blame for stuff I didn’t do!

While we do tend to think of there being core folks on teams, the fact is that games like these take the work of dozens of people – even the MUDs. I didn’t come up with the idea for LegendMUD – Sherry Menton did that. I didn’t code it, Rick Delashmit did that. I worked on it, and made a lot of content, and contributed a lot to the design for several years, but at this point, so have many many other people.

Likewise, I keep seeing stuff like EQII listed on my bios in the press, and I go, “no, the credit for that goes to a whole host of people – I probably contributed less than the typical QA guy!” I did do some actual work on the first Untold Legends, but beyond that, my role was really much more distant and advisory.

So bottom-line, I think that life is often unfair as to how it give credit. I think I was mostly lucky to be in certain places at the right time – and I also try to remember that’s probably true of everyone.

Micajah: Ultima Online, for many of us MMO gamers, was really where it all began. Looking back, what was it like working on those first few games that really helped revolutionize the way online games were played?

Koster: UO felt like a garage project from the beginning. It’s funny, because at the time, there were comments from some of the other folks in the industry that part of the reason why UO was a big deal was that it was blowing up the standard budgets to a huge degree and making it harder to compete – much like the commentary that surrounds WoW today.

But we were crammed three to an office, put on a floor where they were doing construction… we kept the servers under the thermostat, so the AC ran all the time and it got so cold we typed code while wearing gloves. For a long time, we were the weird kids in the attic, basically. Most of the team was brand new to the industry – there were a couple of programmers hired straight out of high school.

Then after the beta signups hit 50,000, we were suddenly a big deal and tons of experienced folks were put on the team. It was a tense time because the vision of the new arrivals didn’t always match what that original core team was intending to make. They were mostly single-player guys, and many of them had never played online games.

Then we shipped – and the live team shrank down to next to nothing! The team that shipped split up into those that quit and those who moved to UO2. I was the only original team member left on UO after three months – we had to do Second Age with a team of six, I think it was – and everyone else was new. And then I stuck with it for almost two more years.

Micajah: Do you still talk with Richard "Lord British" Garriott? What were the offices like after he got PKed at his own event?

Koster: Richard’s pretty busy, and while I usually see him to catch up briefly at trade shows and the like, that only happens once or twice a year.

I wasn’t even online at the event when the infamous “Rainz murders Lord British” incident happened. I knew that Richard and Starr were doing an in-game appearance, but I was busy getting something else done – probably debugging scripts or something. I recall that Scott Phillips came into my office all wide-eyed and laughing, like a mix of dismay and amusement, and told me what had happened… the whole thing happened because the little checkbox that said “invulnerable” had just never gotten set on the LB character. But of course, Richard assumed that it had…

I think I was a little taken aback by how much press the incident got afterwards – it was, in retrospect, one of those times when the expectations of single-player games collided with the expectations of multiplayer gaming. Lots of people probably realized for the first time what sort of experience an online world might be when they saw that someone had killed Lord British.

I remember Richard took it in stride. After all, he delighted in telling stories about how LB could be killed in all the standalone Ultima games. Once he’d been beaned by a falling plaque or sign at the offices, and of course, that got put into one of the standalone Ultimas as a way you could kill LB in the game. So he was used to being offed virtually, I think.

Micajah: Since UO, you’ve worked on SWG and Everquest 2. How different were those two projects then UO? You were obviously in a different employment situation, but did they feel as “big” as your initial games?

Koster: I was pretty far removed from EQ2, but in both cases, it was a very different feeling. Honestly, what I am doing now [with Areae] feels more like what I think of as the “classic” UO development period: small skunkworks team, where every single day you get a demo of something new and cool. In UO, stuff like “let’s do 3d terrain!” would come up one day and would be in by the end of the week. In fact, that one almost got cut because it was thought the art would be too challenging, so I came in and made the textures for the “embankments.” Those textures are what’s still in there today (well, at least until Kingdom Reborn comes out).

Housing went down similarly, actually. It was basically “let’s try this!” and seeing if it would stick, in a small team environment. In a big team, you have so many moving parts that the exercise of sitting with someone and brainstorming and then making things just happen just is harder to come by. Leading design for SWG was about three hour design sessions, rigidly formatted design documents, lots of scheduling meetings with MS Project and a video projector so everyone could see dependencies… whereas in UO I was able to personally code up stuff like guilds, the house menu, pets, the ship control system (tillermen stories!) and so on, in SWG I don’t think there’s any actual code of mine in the whole game. Everything happened at one remove – if not three or four removes.

As Chief Creative Officer, it was even more of a remove.

Be sure to check Ten Ton Hammer for any new information concerning Raph Koster's upcoming MMO!