I'll make this quick: Whatever you had planned for the weekend, you've got to carve four-and-a-half hours out for a last-minute swerve into the late '90s. Six months in the making, YouTube essayist Majuular is back with the (I believe) penultimate video in his multi-year Ultima series. "This one was a doozy," he wrote in the comments. It's Ultima Online.

"From its unlikely formation at the behest of Richard Garriott and Starr Long, to its tempering at the hands of Raph Koster and his team of Multi-User Dungeon enthusiasts, to its changing identity in the face of competition, to its incalculable influence, this is the story of Ultima Online," the description reads. If you get the Ultima Online bug after watching the documentary, good news: it's still very much playable on both official servers and fan ones. Majuular highlighted the server he played on, In Mani Ylem, which aims to recapture the late '90s experience.

You can find the entire video series in a playlist here, and I can't recommend watching them highly enough. In late 2025 we published a feature story about Majuular's quest to chronicle the making of Richard Garriott's genre-defining series, and how that mission unexpectedly catapulted him to YouTube success with more than 200,000 followers. It's a good read—and won't take you quite as long as watching all the videos.

The Majuular Ultima Retrospective embodies the fastidious, affectionate critique that is gaming YouTube at its best. Many are multi-hour features that trace Ultima's burgeoning influence on both western and Japanese roleplaying games, discuss the human stories and context around its creation, and actually involve the dirty work of playing the games while analyzing Ultima's lore on its own terms.

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