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Ultima and Wizardry arrived in the same year, each translating pen-and-paper role-playing into code in a different way, and together they fixed the conventions of the computer role-playing game.
Before these two, computer versions of tabletop adventuring were mostly campus curiosities. Afterward there was a commercial genre with recognizable parts: characters who improve, dungeons to map, equipment to manage and a world larger than one screen. Nearly every later role-playing game descends from one lineage or the other.
Origin Systems opened Ultima Online on September 24, 1997. Tens of thousands of subscribers shared a fantasy world with housing, crafting, a player-driven economy and few restrictions on attacking one another.
Persistent online worlds became a commercial industry rather than a research topic. The subscription business proved sustainable at a scale large publishers could not ignore, and the social problems the game exposed set the design agenda for the entire genre that followed it.
