And everyone is confusingly, unfamiliarly, disturbingly nice to newbies and strangers. The community is small enough that you recognize names. Avatars loiter in a lobby on a Saturday night, content to chat or idle or grind for the comforting familiarity. Logging into Phantasy Star Online and walking into one of these communities feels like walking back in time, to a moment perfectly preserved: playing a game on the internet is still achingly novel. And even then, Phantasy Star Online stands out. There's something different about communities like Ultima, built up around a totem of mutual love. Maybe they mean it wholeheartedly, but it often just feels like what you're supposed to say. It reminds me of a common sentiment I've seen time and again from game studios over the years: our fans are great and passionate and incredible and loyal. Larva's dedication to Ultima nine years later is a common theme with PSO players I've spoken to: for whatever reason, the game stuck with them. I have always been here with Ultima and I plan to be the last person in the server if some day it has to be taken down." "I guess from there we just keep climbing the mountain. "By the middle of 2009 we moved to a VPS server the internet of my work couldn't handle more than 30 users online," Larva wrote. Initially all the players were hispanic like him (Ultima's forums have sections dedicated to Spanish and Portuguese, a rarity in online communities), but as he tinkered with the server configuration to make it more inviting for more players, over time Ultima became the alternative to SCHTHack. Larva invited his friends to play and started advertising Ultima on forums and other sites, and it was slow going at first: he'd be lucky to have five players online at a given time. I decided to take my computer and give a try to the software and that's how Ultima started, in a local computer shop… using the internet of my job." I already had two machines that I could always have online in the shop, one was for the Ragnarok server of my friend, and the other one was the one I used for work. I didn't really play much online back then due to my economy but still loved to jump on my Dreamcast and play the classic way. ![]() The Sega US servers for the game closed just a couple of months before that. I was helping a friend to launch his Ragnarok Online server and while I was doing some research I found out about the software to run your own PSOBB server, I went totally crazy about that. "Back then in 2008 I was working in a little computer shop and had a lot of free time during job hours. "I have always loved PSO since the Dreamcast, that's where everything started," Larva wrote me over email. ![]() That's especially true of the people who run the servers keeping the Pioneer II in orbit. It's alive and well, and everyone has a story about how PSO fits into their lives. Phantasy Star Online didn't just refuse to die. Where many of today's derelict MMOs like The Matrix Online and Planetside struggle to sustain a single fan-emulated server, nine years after its third death Phantasy Star Online has at least four communities of active players, often with anywhere between 50 and 100 people idling in a lobby or grinding a 16-year-old grind. ![]() What's really remarkable is that I can do all of those things and have options. I can make a new HUnewearl, a lithe hunter with low HP but a penchant for knives and specialty skills, and find a party of players happy to walk a beginner through an opening mission they've done a thousand times before. In 2017 I can still step onto the deck of the Pioneer II and beam down to the surface of Ragol, clumsily fighting the keyboard controls of a game designed 17 years and half a world away from me.
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