I just popped in to help everyone keep their Origin scorecards up to date. :] Although I was asked to make the move to Electronic Arts in Redwood Shores, I have declined that offer. Although there are some significant plusses to such a move, I feel staying in Austin is a better situation for me at this time. Still, I’ll be sticking around a few weeks to help make everyone else’s transition smoother.

Although I won’t be leaving the building just yet, I’d like to share some “before I go” thanks to a few people. I could easily have a super-huge “thank you” list, but I’ll try to be brief and just spotlight a few key people.

I’ll start by thanking Amy “Cynthe”/“Morgaine” Sage for hiring me in the first place. I never anticipated participation in the Ultima Online volunteer program, gaming guilds, player towns, and fansites would make sense for inclusion in my resume, and I’m glad that she felt I had the right combination of such things to become UO’s Community Coordinator.

Thank you to the OCR, Web, Scenario, Dev, QA, GMs, Event, and Japan teams, and to everyone else who worked with me while at Origin.

My thanks to every UO site operator & updater, both those still here and those who have moved on. Whether you were focused on sharing news, UO cartoons, tips for character development, insights on in-game decorations, player town anecdotes, or observations on UO’s seafaring opportunities, your devotion and enthusiasm to UO and Origin is almost beyond explanation. I was very proud to have known and worked with all of you.

And, of course, thanks to everyone else who participated in the greater UO experience. Whether you coordinated player lunches, managed a set of guilds, or simply helped a new player you saw struggling in combat with their first mongbat, you made the game worth playing. You evolved UO from a persistent game world into a culture, and that’s an evolution we can all be proud of.

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Keith "Sannio" Quinn
Community Relations
Ultima Online (www.uo.com)
Origin Systems