Ultima Online is a drug. Pure and simple. Its just that it doesn't look like a drug to the uninitiated. I have been so pissed off at OSI, the company that manages Ultima Online, that I vowed to quit but I never quit. The closest I ever came to quitting was during a time at the end of the summer. I decided that if I quit, I knew the guy I would give everything I had to. This guy was really into the game and like the role-playing aspect and he was the best person to receive all of the virtual wealth that I had gathered in the game. His name in the game was Lord Thalos. I met him one night at the East Bank in Britain where I sold him an almost full spellbook for not too many GP's. He had been out of the game for a few months and had just returned and had already met a few people that were assholes. Not to mention the fact that his character was missing his spellbook. I decided it was easy enough to help him out since he seemed like the kind of guy I wanted to see play the game.
Well, as it got closer to the time when I would be making that decision of quitting the game or not Lord Thalos was opening up his player run tavern on the Ice Isle. I wanted to drop in and show some support for this type of player. Unfortunately, he ended up getting in a bad car accident that night and died the next day. I was devastated that this virtual friend had died and I didn't know how to handle it. Welcome to the 90's my friends. I was in a very weird place with having met and made a friend on line and then having that friend die. He lived in the Maryland area so attending the funeral wasn't an option for me at the time. If it wasn't so far I would have gone. There is a website that is dedicated to the tavern he was trying to open called the Eye & Dagger. They were going to put some real life pictures there of Thalos, actually Jim Cunningham. I check every so often but haven't seen any.
Well, here's
me at home number 1 in UO....