Assassination of Lord British

Published February 3, 2017 | By Clann Marrach Faol

I was recently reminiscing about Ultima Online and found myself going through Ultima Online-related videos on YouTube. It reminded me of an incident that occurred in-game during Beta Testing.

In August of 1997, Lord British and Lord Blackthorn made an in-game appearance during Ultima Online’s Beta Test, their appearance was part of server population stress test. A player by the name of Rainz cast a fire field spell on Lord British that, to everyone’s surprise, killed him.

Although Lord British’s character had been made invulnerable, the server had crashed shortly before the incident and reset which also reset Lord British’s invulnerability flag. Richard Garriott (who played Lord British) then forgot to turn his invulnerability flag on when he logged back in. After Lord British was killed, Lord Blackthorn (played by fellow Ultima Online developer Starr Long) summoned deamons, which proceeded to attack the innocent bystanders in attendance.

Here is a YouTube video of someone who was in attendance during the incident.