True black dye first appeared in Ultima Online in spring 1998. A few hackers got the dye tubs to glitch: the shade index was broken, which eventually resulted in a very dark color. So dark that it literally corroded all the shadows and highlights on the clothes. Clothes dyed in this tub looked like absolute nothing, a hole in the world
Absolutely black clothes interested other players as well. They started copying the paint from the glitchy tubs (which the game mechanics allowed) and dyeing their own clothes. Many of them thought that it was a developer's passhack.
The developers reacted only after a couple hundred copies of the paint in the tubs. The glitchy tubs were removed (one of the reasons: they pissed off the designers). But the true black clothes remained: the developers had mercy on the players and did not destroy them. Since there were no true black bathtubs left, these clothes became very expensive.
Since black clothing became extremely popular, the developers decided to make Black Dye Tubs one of the gifts during the Holiday 1998 season.
Later, due to high demand, the tub was introduced as a first year Veteran reward.
Chronology
"In spring of 98, there were various UO server emulators popping up. It was the beginning of player run servers and there were about 5 different programs for running your own server. One of these was called FUSE(Fallo's Ultima Server Emulator).
It was necessary to modify your uo login file in order to log into the player run servers. Fallo released a program called FUSERUN. This program loaded before UO and did the modifications to switch to player run servers and back to EA servers.
In a version of this program that Fallo released in April of 98, he included code that allowed you to change your textcolor, textfont, textfontsize... and a few easter eggs. All you had to do was type "%textcolor 999999" (hex values) and your text color would change. You could test out a lot of crazy numbers and it was the first time we saw neon colors in the game as people ran around with neon text.
One of the easter eggs Fallo included, was %dyecolor, which allowed you to change the dyetub color to any hex value. This included pitch black. You could create a new character, buy 9 tubs and a dye with your starting 100 gold - then turn them all black and sell for 500k each (500k was a lot of gold in 1998).
Well, Fallo released this program on Thursday, and by Sunday UO had patched it. The amount of black that had entered the game was out of control though, and there was very little they could really do about it. Thus, they released it later as a reward.
That's the way true black came to the world of UO."
Marqee Dragon
Raph Koster post
Title: How UO rares were born Author: Raph Koster (lead designer Ultima Online) Location: raphkoster.com Publication date: Nov 24, 2010
