Stratics and UO Birthdays

Yesterday, Bonnie “Mesanna” Armstrong, the Producer of Ultima Online posted an article on the UO Herald mentioning UO’s upcoming 15th birthday in September, as well as Stratics 15th Birthday, which is coming up in October.

I’ll wish Stratics a happy birthday in October, not here in August 🙂 but I will say congratulations, Stratics has had a pretty amazing history and its a testament to the community that grew up around Stratics (literally, some of you were kids when Stratics started!)

I want to take you on a trip down memory lane for a moment. I remember using the very early version, 1990s version, as a go-to database (Stratics = Strategy + Statistics). You can find early versions of Stratics at Archive.org. Here is an example of the front page from October of 2000. I used to point new players to the Guide to Conversational Britannian. Evil roleplaying used to be a lot bigger than it was, and there was the Sanctum of the Damned. A lot of people have forgotten that at one point, Stratics was a cornerstone of the UO shard emulation scene, hosting a couple of different shard emulators and their communities (this was under different ownership and leadership mind you). Here is a look at the Stratics staff from October of 1999. For you Treasure Hunters, here is an early version of the Treasure Hunters of Britannia.

By August of 2000, Stratics was up to its 56th House of Commons online chat. You read that right. 56th of those sessions, and let me tell you, some of them could get wild and wooly.

If you really want to take a trip back in time, check out Stratics Armor Page from May of 1999. Boys and girls, that was pre-AOS. You didn’t mouse over armor and have a dozen properties pop up. One of the things mentioned in the Producer’s Letter from a few days ago, is that they want to give meaning to all armor types agaon. Many of us wish it would go back to the days when different types of armor, and not the properties, really mattered.

I should stop there, otherwise this post will go on. Poke around some of those links, it’s a very nostalgic trip for those who follow Stratics. Stratics has had an amazing journey to get to its 15th birthday, and it says a lot that many other sites that were much larger in the early years have faded away as their staff lost interest in UO or were hired into the MMORPG industry (that’s a topic for another article).