Ultima Underworld's Untold Influence on Early Metaverse Development - Including Second Life

Watching Philip Rosedale and Avi Bar-Zeev talk about early days in metaverse development, reader "Nadeja" points out another early milestone that's often under-appreciated — the launch of pioneering game Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss:

Another interesting thing is that in March 1992, just a few months before the publication of Snow Crash (June 1992), another influential work in the history of virtual worlds came out: Ultima Underworld. Although it wasn't set in a cyberpunk world and it was single player (as a RPG, you interacted with NPCs), the player's character was also called Avatar (apparently, Stephenson came to the idea independently, even though it was called "Avatar" in the Ultima series since Ultima IV, 1985), the gameplay was nonlinear and with emergent storytelling, it was an immersive sim: There was crafting, fixing the equipment, cooking and eating, you needed sleep too, and to carry different kind of lights, each illuminating the walls differently and eventually burning out.

Its first-person 3D engine was quite sophisticated for the time (and influenced Carmack's Wolfenstein 3D engine too, that was a lot simpler and flat, but also a lot faster): you could look up and down; when you walked, the camera would bob slightly to simulate the motion of the walking; you could jump, swim, and even fly, there were slopes and bridges, you could drop items inworld from your inventory (not too different than "rezzing" in SL), you could take notes on the map, and many other things…

It gave you the sense of being in a real environment, freely explorable anywhere and interactive, and with customizable avatars. By today standard maybe you won't call it a virtual world; but in 1992, when Snow Crash was published, Ultima Underworld was the closest thing to it. So this is the best Neal Stephenson or someone else could get from the most powerful PCs (and taking most of the hard-disk space) in 1992.

Great points! To which I can add a fun fact: Back in 2004, since I knew him through some of my early articles, I invited lead Ultima Underworld developer Doug Church to visit Linden Lab and judge an early Second Life game development contest.

Philip was excited to meet Doug, because as I wrote in the first book, Ultima Underworld strongly enforced Philip Rosedale's vision of creating a virtual world:

[T]hough it seems inevitable that Philip Rosedale would, through his interests and aptitudes, originate Second Life, it was his college girlfriend Yvette who first brought Snow Crash and its notion of a 3D Internet called the Metaverse to his attention. She bought the novel for his birthday in 1992, but as he tells it, what Yvette really did was link Stephenson’s book to a half-formed vision Rosedale already had, even before being aware of it:

“I remember the idea of this sort of digital genesis… floating in the darkness like an avatar, and you had like a tool belt, and the tool belt allowed you to make things… shapes, and surfaces and stuff… and they’d show up near you and you’d stretch them and shape them and everything.”

These changes would happen dynamically, he decided, and from the start, he saw what would become Second Life, for it was implicitly a shared space—other people would be avatars like you, and they would see what you were doing, and have the ability to modify or contribute to your work.

He would think about this vision often, in his own computer coding; his dream interface would be the human body. “How can I do this, how can I be in the machine?” he’d ask himself, while he coded. “Not to be in the machine and play Doom, but be in the machine and build things.”

The hyper-violent first-person shooter is often (incorrectly) credited with being the first fully 3D game, but the title actually belongs to Ultima Underworld (1992), a cerebral dungeon exploration adventure created a year before Doom by a Cambridge studio bristling with mad scientist graduates from nearby MIT.

In Underworld, you were placed in a vast cavern; you could look up and down, you could swim in streams, and fly through caverns. There were rudimentary lighting effects which furthered the illusion of distance and mystery, and the sense of being inside a living world. Rosedale estimates playing Ultima Underworld for a hundred hours—another affirmation of the ideas he was already germinating.

So while Underworld didn't inspire the Metaverse of Snow Crash, it did inspire the first metaverse platform to reach mainstream awareness. Wheels within wheels, we!