Quick version, for anyone who wasn’t there or wants the refresher.
When Ultima Online launched in 1997, it became the world a lot of us think of when we think “online roleplay.” Not long after, players who wanted more than the official servers offered started doing something remarkable. They taught themselves to run their own.
First came the servers, the emulators, with names some of you will remember fondly: UOX, Sphere, POL, and later RunUO, which became the one everybody built on. Then came the tools, so people could make maps, place characters, write quests, and craft new content by hand. A whole creative community grew up around building custom worlds, and the best of them ran for years.
None of these people worked for the company that made the game. They were players who loved it enough to build it themselves, for each other. That spirit, small groups hand-making living worlds for the love of it, is the tradition Grimmloch stands in.
If you lived through that era, or you’re just curious how it all actually happened, I wrote the whole story out below. It’s a good read.
For anyone who wants the whole walk, here it is. This is the story of how a scattered community of players taught themselves to build and run online worlds, with no company behind them and no permission from anyone. If you were there, this is a trip back. If you weren’t, this is the tradition Grimmloch comes out of.
A quick honesty note before I start: most of this history was kept by the community itself, in fan-maintained timelines and old forum posts, so treat the exact dates as “close and well-remembered” rather than official record. The shape of the story is solid. The specific months are best-effort.
Ultima Online launched in 1997. Almost immediately, players wanted to run their own versions of it, which meant one enormous problem had to be solved first: figuring out how the game’s server actually worked, well enough to rebuild it.
The earliest real attempt was UOX, short for Ultima Offline eXperiment. It grew through UOX2 into UOX3, and UOX3 is still maintained to this day. When its source code was released, several other struggling projects folded into it, and the community’s momentum really began.
From there, a few distinct server families grew up side by side. Sphere came out of an earlier project called Grayworld around 1998 and became known for being approachable. POL, short for PenUltima Online, arrived the same year, built in C++ with its own scripting language. And the UOX3 line kept spinning off new versions of its own.
In September 2002, a developer known as Krrios revealed RunUO. It was the first of these servers written in C#, and it changed everything. It was cleaner, easier to work with, and easier to extend than what came before, and the community adopted it almost completely. RunUO was actively developed for nearly twelve years.
Almost every server that came after is a descendant or relative of it: SunUO, ServUO (which became the most popular in later years), ModernUO (a rebuild on modern .NET), and others. If you played on a custom UO shard in the last twenty years, there is a very good chance RunUO or one of its children was running underneath it.
Worth sitting with: between the first emulator and 2005, more than forty of these server projects were attempted. Only a handful survived. Building the server is the part that stopped most people cold.
The server runs the world, but you also need a client, the program on your own machine that draws the world and lets you play it. That is a whole separate piece of software.
Most shards took a shortcut here. They used the official game client that players already owned, paired with a helper program, an “assistant,” that let it connect to an unofficial server. The famous ones were Razor, UOAssist, and later UOSteam. These weren’t clients themselves, they were the bridge that made the official one work where it wasn’t supposed to.
The much bigger job was rebuilding the client from scratch. A few projects actually did it. ClassicUO is the best-known today, an open-source client that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and adds comforts the original never had, like a resizable window, zoom, and a built-in map. Others followed, including OrionUO, CrossUO, and even MobileUO, which brought UO to phones.
With a working server and client, the real creativity began. This is where shards stopped being copies of UO and became their own places, and it’s the layer that never truly finishes.
People made new art in Photoshop and hacked it into the game’s files, using viewers and editors like InsideUO and UO Fiddler. They built maps, first by painting them as images and rendering them with tools like Dragon, and later by editing them together, live, with a collaborative editor called CentrED, where several builders could shape the same land at once. They constructed custom buildings with UO Architect and dressed them with decoration tools.
And they populated it all. A system called XML Spawner let creators control what appeared where, script quests, and give NPCs behavior. On top of that, people wrote entirely new spells, weapons, monsters, and systems by hand.
None of these people worked for the company that made Ultima Online. They were players who loved it enough to build it themselves, and then loved it enough to keep building for years, for each other, for free.
That’s the tradition Grimmloch stands in. Small groups of dedicated people, hand-making persistent worlds because they want them to exist. The one difference, and it’s a big one, is that those builders had an existing game to rebuild. We’re building an original one from scratch. Same spirit, same three layers of work, but no map to follow.
That’s what the rest of this log is about: where we are on that climb, and how far there is still to go.