[axus]

A game development pair working on a kind of similar MMO for the last 10 years. "Haven and Hearth" has all the house building, player killing, crafting, and trading. No pre-made safe zones, though, and it resets every year or two.

I think all of these small, independent efforts fall under the radar without the advertising of more expensive games. I don't know if UO was well-advertised at the time, but it was certainly the only option at launch!

[nerdix]

UO was well advertised before launch. One of my most prized possessions as a kid was a summer of 1996 (want to say June) issue of PC Games magazine that had an in depth preview of UO. It came out about a year before the game actually launched. I probably read that article about 100 times. I was never going to get my parents to pay the monthly subscription fee so that magazine and my imagination was the closest I got to UO until I was in college and could afford it myself (that was during Age of Shadows and EverQuest had already supplanted it as the most popular MMORPG)

In the late 90s, Ultima was still one of the biggest (if not the biggest) PC/Western RPG franchises. UO launched before Ultima 9 kind of killed the franchise. I'd be surprised to find anyone who was really into PC gaming during that era that hadn't heard of Ultima Online.