Address: 5651 Derby Ct, Apartment 223, Alexandria, VA 22311
Bedrooms: 2
Term: –
Duration: May 28, 1997 to ~1998?
Rent: –
Security Deposit: –
Occupants: 3

My brother had offered to help me out of the situation I was in, catching chickens every night while living in Moorefield, WV. He said there were more opportunities in the area and that he had a cable modem there. With Ultima Online on the cusp of coming out to the public, and my nights spent on mIRC, programming, and researching, it seemed like a great opportunity.

I recall resigning from my job in Moorefield on my birthday. The memories are hazy, but I believe I drove to Virginia from there. I borrowed my mom’s Chevy Astro van and met my brother in the area. Looking back, I believe I met him near Fairlakes Shopping Center, as I lived across from there for a few years about two decades afterwards, and the corner looked familiar. I remember a flat, metal cut-out painted with kids playing in the corner. I remember driving on the highway with lots of green metal flaps sticking up along the divider, about a foot apart, but I didn’t know what they were for.

This was before GPS and cell phones were prevalent, so we were trying to meet at a place we could both reach by following written directions, and then I would follow his vehicle the rest of the way. I rarely drove into cities other than Pittsburgh to visit friends, but occasionally I did so when I knew the area. Other than that, I was often driving in rural areas.

I’m not quite sure why I brought my mother’s van. I had a 1980 Dodge Colt, but it was always stalling – even when traveling downhill. It may be that Dad had been fussing with it, and I needed a guarantee that I could make it to Virginia without a problem. When I arrived, it was a nice, fancy place – or so it seemed to me. The walls were all white and modern. They had nice carpet everywhere and air conditioning. My brother and his wife also had a dishwasher and a kitchen you could walk into from both sides. To give you an idea of where I was coming from, I was sleeping on a futon in Moorefield, and there was barely any room left in the bedroom to put a dresser and still open the door.

I spent the night and woke up to discover that the van had been towed. That was the first and last time I ever had a vehicle towed for parking. Apparently, I needed some kind of paper showing I had permission to park there. I believe it was around $400, which may have affected my rent for June in Moorefield and set me back with moving as well.

One of the nice things about the place was the bicycle path at the end of the parking lot. Sometimes I would ride my bicycle all the way into DC and bike along the mall. I was also able to bike over to Landmark Mall, where I worked at both Burger King and Ruby Tuesday on either side of the mall.

I remember watching commercials for Amazon.com before it was a “thing”. Some guys would be measuring a warehouse with a pole and wheels on the end, trying to find a place big enough to store all the books. Other memories were playing Final Fantasy VII and beating the game around this time. I’ve played just about every version of Final Fantasy, and I was happy to play the next one when they moved to 3D on the PlayStation. With the 3D animations, it felt more immersed in the environment. My brother also had an N64, and I believe he had Mario Kart 64, Super Mario 64, and maybe Star Fox 64. Super Mario 64 was pretty fun, and I would often go back and play levels over and over, trying to find stars.

I already knew quite a bit of programming on my own, but my brother had a rule that I couldn’t ask him any programming questions, so I continued learning on my own. I set up a server with Internet Information Server and a Microsoft SQL Server (6.0? 6.5?) database, and worked with what is now known as Classic ASP. I had a thick SAM’s book that taught me about databases.

I learned that the power of a cable modem was that you could tell which websites were over dial-up or slow ISDN connections. If you could watch an image download one line at a time, or see it come into focus slowly, the website was certainly on a slow connection. Being tech-savvy, we were at the forefront of cable internet. There weren’t many other people on the same line. We could actually see everyone’s computer on the ISP’s network, so we had to set up our network to protect ourselves from being discovered by other customers. Part of it was simply changing our workgroup.

My brother and I would play Ultima Online together for hours. Eventually, he built his own Ultima Online Emulator, and I would often write scripts to control the interfaces and set up different things in the world. It was an interesting feat, as he was able to emulate the world with just one server using a binary tree to look up and store everything. The official service ran on five different servers. We had a small group of people who would log in and play the game with us. I believe my character’s name on the emulator was Quizno or something similar, but a sub shop later became popular with the same or a similar name.

The Ultima Online Gold Duping Hack

Ultima Online was often full of bugs, glitches, and hacks. It was so bad that someone made up a song about the patch to fix the bug, which came from a patch of a patch, etc., etc. Before that, I’ve never heard of someone making a song about a game before, let alone a parody.

On the five servers in the official world, a duping hack became fairly popular for quickly making gold. It required knowledge of the server boundaries, the ability to teleport with runes, the ability to make a ton of cheap products, and the ability to acquire or build boxes.

Ultima Online was interesting in how it tried to create an economy based on supply and demand. The game had a skill system for crafting, where you were stuck creating the same things all day in order to get to higher levels, and it was hard to offload all of the stuff you made. If you kept selling the same thing, eventually the NPC vendors would lower the price or stop buying them. Many people were selling the same products to vendors, so there was a bit of competition over who could sell the quickest.

One way around this was to put a bunch of skull caps inside a box that looked fairly unique and valuable when tallying them up. You could end up with a box that is so heavy that your character becomes too encumbered to move. The way around this was to have a run marked to teleport you within close distance to the NPC vendors. Vendors like to walk around a bit, so sometimes you would have to wait for them to walk towards you, while hoping that no one picks your pockets. This is why you started to see people spamming phrases like “Vendor Sell the Bank to the Guards!”

That phrase has a few trigger words – “Vendor Sell” would bring up the sell dialog if they are close enough. “Bank” will open the bank dialog if you are close to the bank to transfer items from your inventory to the bank vault, and “Guards!” will make guards instantly appear if someone is looking at what you have in your backpack or has just stolen something.

Now, let’s get to the duping hack!

The servers are not perfectly in synch – we are talking about the late 90’s here. Many people began to understand where the server boundaries were when they crossed one, and things began to lag. This lag effect usually appears as if you were walking just fine, and suddenly you are placed 20 steps back from where you were. Not only do you get placed back to where you were, but everyone around you, including animals, monsters, and NPCs.

This magic of letting the client software handle things without an instant response from the server is part of what enabled it to support dial-up connections with less frequent, smaller data packets.

The trick would be to teleport to another server and have a chest of yours, or a pack mule, ready to receive the pile of gold that you just got for selling your wares, and then teleport back where you came from. If everything played out right, you still had a pile of gold in your backpack, and the chest or pack mule had a pile of gold as well.

You could do it again and again, but keep in mind that gold weighs a lot. Also, you can only stack 65,535 gold pieces in a pile. A few programmers will instantly recognize that as the maximum value of an unsigned 16-bit integer.

I only tried it a few times, but I was able to get enough to buy a little house and eventually get a mage tower. Once this duping hack/bug became widely known, boats, houses, towers, and castles started appearing everywhere. The problem was finding a spot to build a house.

Most buildings at the time were permanent, and this was before you could purchase and set up your own vendor NPC or build custom houses. Part of the rules about maintenance and upkeep requirements for homes came out of the issue where many people purchased buildings and soon became uninterested in the game. The upkeep taxes enabled the abandoned houses to be cleared.

A game came out around this time as well, called Unreal. It was fully 3D, fast, and had many different effects. It was cutting-edge for its time. Better than Quake, it was story-driven and had indoor and outdoor environments. The textures were amazing, and the lighting was too. The effects, sound, particles, sprites, animations, the amount of details packed into every environment… just everything. They even had mirroring, which, from my experience in 3D graphics programs, was very difficult to do just a couple of years earlier. Back then, upgrading a graphics card was like night and day for how the game looked and felt. It was like you were playing a completely remastered game. It also helped speed up the game, as some of the work the CPU was doing to compensate for missing features could be handled by the upgraded card. This would become a recurring theme over the years, where I would have to keep upgrading my hardware to play the latest games for speed, graphics memory, and features. Of course, in 2026, it looks like a simple game – but in the late 90’s, it truly was… Unreal.

My brother eventually bought a condo, and I moved in with him and his wife. It was a bit difficult to get, and he had to go through hoops to qualify for purchasing it. We ran into a problem where the condo kept getting delayed, so we ended up staying at an extended-stay hotel for a while, right behind an IHOP. I’d never heard of extended stay hotels before, and it was interesting to see a hotel room with a kitchen. Although it was paid for (by the developer?), it felt a bit miserable being there with no room to breathe.