World of Warcraft at Ten Ton Hammer

No one could confirm that a second spell was shot from the grassy knoll.

For their part, Origin insisted that that last part might have been “said in the heat of the moment by a very tired and overworked Origin employee.” Instead, they’d been tailing Rainz for “deliberately going against requests” they’d made of him as a tester. From the official statement: “ This is the stuff of legend, kudos to him for not only attempting it but actually succeeding. He has now made quite a name for himself. The assassination merely provided us an opportunity to get his account information. We had actually been looking for him in order to ban him before this.” [source]

More than a decade later, we couldn’t track down Rainz for a follow-up, but Sean “Dragons” Stalzer, leader of the longest continuously running guild in existence, The Syndicate, was witness to the events. He confirms Rainz’s account: “ At the time it was initially assumed by many that a demon had been summoned that killed him. It was so incredibly laggy with dozens of people on very old code and very slow machines that it was incredibly hard to read the words much less see things happening. The overall series of events.. firewall.. LB dying.. demons.. people dying.. does look pretty accurate.“

As for the reaction at Origin and why Lord British was vulnerable to attack in the first place, Koster had this to say: “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.” [source]

Stalzer viewed the event in a more negative light for Ultima Online: “The aftermath, for those who were following it, did negatively affect perceptions. I don’t think those perceptions were long lasting. I have long since forgotten about it and still play UO many years later. But at the time I think it was a bit of a black eye.”

Anshe Chung Says Hello to w-hat’s “Little Friend”

Second Life - December 2006

A moment later, and this screenshot would have become profoundly not safe for work.

Ailin Graef’s avatar, Anshe Chung, has been featured in Business Week, Fortune, and on numerous CNN segments as the first “virtual millionaire”, amassing an estimated $2 million in the space of 30 months as a virtual real estate broker in Second Life. [source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anshe_Chung ] At the height of the SL media frenzy, news organizations like CNN and CNet maintained news bureaus inside the Second Life world, and Chung appeared on an interview in one such venue.

Unfortunately for her and CNet, so did elements of w-hat, a Something Awful splinter group known for its share of Second Life hijinx (reference the skywriting incident of a few months before). According to an unnamed source that was a part of w-hat at the time, a “particle emitter” - an item which spawns flying textures - could be worn on a character. Security settings for land in Second Life could be set to “no scripts / no build”, which was almost assuredly the case inside the CNet Studio. But avatars trump land settings, and a specially customized particle emitter - the so-called “dong gun” - was smuggled in with one of the live studio audience members.

The rest played out just as you might imagine... or probably wouldn't want to imagine. The interview had barely begun when a parade of floppy elephantine male genitalia entered stage left. After a few horrified moments, the host, Daniel Terdiman, admitted that he couldn’t regain control of the room and Chung beat a hasty retreat, teleporting away. You can find a set of completely not safe for work images and a video, as well as a somewhat... shall we say, stylized retelling of the events, in this Something Awful article.