I was 12-13 at the time (late 90s/early 2000s), I can't remember the emulator anymore, very likely it was POL, and the concept behind the shard was to be as close as possible to the official servers before UO:Renaissance so we worked quite a lot to make it look and feel as T2A. I learnt a lot, later when RunUO came out and became a bit stable (circa 2003) I helped to migrate what we had done within POL to C# code for RunUO, had to learn a lot more to keep up.

The other people working on this shard were all in university studying CS, or already had jobs as programmers, I was the kid who could write some scripts, I believe having this experience was pivotal for me to later become a professional. My first job in a real tech company even came from a recommendation one of these guys made when an internship position opened.

In a way I probably only have my career because of UO and private shards.

If it was an MMO, or online, there's private server communities for it endlessly.

I forget the name of the game, maybe it was City of Heroes? It was shutdown for years, and then boop, someone popped up a Private Server years later.

Heck, and I've mentioned it before, the Shockwave Online games of old have some niche communities rebuilding the servers, building Shockwave runtimes and decompilers, and they overlap between games since they find themselves trying to solve similar problems. ;)

Mine too! My second one was changing the map (remove static items, add new islands and buildings, etc), and my third one was changing verdata.mul to add new animations and item graphics.

Playing Ultima Online on an unofficial POL server literally got me into IT. I was studying to be an accountant before that.