Ultima (2012)

As a kid I was thrilled to meet Lord British at the Apple Fest in Boston (1985, I think?). I told him all about how I loved his game and he said that since I liked it so much why didn't I present at his kiosk?

Later I realized that I was telling him I loved his game which was unreleased and already being copied illegally.

I was pretty obsessed with learning enough Apple IIe assembly to reproduce the tile graphics of ultima but never got close. These days... there's a community dedicated to reverse engineering the source code for Ultima and fixing bugs: https://xu4.sourceforge.net/ and even a team that made a modern Apple IIe Ultima-like (https://www.6502workshop.com/p/nox-archaist.html)

Another thing I realized, playing Nox archaist, is that much of the modern game mechanics already existed at that time: it was key to pay tons of attention to arming your fighters and using the right spells by your cleric and magician. I never knew I was supposed to optimize my builds when I was a kid, so my teams always ended up wimpy and dying. I learned how to hex-edit my player's disk sectors to give them 99 HP, which made the end game much easier.

Ultima VII: Part 2 is one of the best games ever made imo. I still remember waiting for the UPS truck to deliver it to my rural childhood home. One of the great things about these games is that they were packaged with real maps, ankhs, sometimes coins and other artifacts. Really pulled me in as a youth. I wore an ankh as a necklace for several years and still consider Garriott a personal hero.

>I do wonder that no one thought of it in even the relatively brief history of videogames prior to Ultima; it does seem a fairly obvious approach, after all. On the other hand, I can’t point to a specific example that would give me grounds to really challenge the claim. ... Ultima‘s tile-graphics engine was not so much the work of Garriott as of a friend of his who was the only other person to have a significant role in the game’s design and implementation: Ken W. Arnold (not the Ken Arnold who created Rogue).

I'll comment briefly on this as someone who spent a couple of years trying to build an Ultima-esque tile graphics game on the Apple II. Ken had a clever insight that eluded me completely: "Don't try to draw the tiles one at a time, dummy."

Ken's code was fast enough to be useful in an interactive fullscreen game because it drew an entire row of 280 pixels at once, then went back over the same row of map data, reusing the indexes for the next 14 lines in that row of tiles. There was less indirection and practically no overhead compared to drawing individual 2-byte-by-14-row block shapes.

Conversely, anyone trying to draw one tile at a time would have ended up with a low update rate, or would have been forced to draw the map in a small window. Either way, a worse gameplay experience would have resulted, especially if you were (as I was) comparing your work to Ultima.

It's difficult to overstate just how influential D&D was in video games, I don't think there's anything else remotely at that scale. Ultima and Wizardry would inspire the creation of the first JRPGs, and on it went. Maybe it's partly because D&D was becoming popular among nerds just as personal computers were becoming semi-affordable.

And it's not even just RPGs, literally any game with the concept of experience points and levels ultimately owes some small debt to Gary and Dave.

What I liked about U4 was the "morality" system required to advance the game. Sure it was kind of canned and could be gamed - in fact you had to grind out the last few virtues you need to elevate, but as a kid it felt meaningful compared to standard hack and slash. Don't know of any other game that tried to do something like that. Great thing about U4 was that it did and it doesn't really drag down gameplay. In later ultimas the system existed to some extent, but was watered down and kind of muddled.

Of course you could also say screw that, rip off the blind reagents vendor and make cheap fireballs to kill everyone in town and take their gold, but you then couldn't win the game or even get the best weapons - the mystics.

Even today the 8 virtues are probably still a halfway decent ethics system to follow IRL, though you'll never be able to whack your enemies with a mystic sword.

For those wanting to play in the universe https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com is still running and still getting regular updates.

We loved ultima 3 growing up. A bunch of us were playing it in middle school and we'd occasionally swap hints about how to advance. Before the internet thats all we had. Out of our group, at least one of us had a real copy of each game, making the spell books and instructions available... The cloth maps were fun, but I don't think we used them during game play. The games were a bit of grind, but we didn't care.

I do like the Ars Video on how they spent all this time on the "ultima online ecosystem" only to have it not work out..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE

Ultima 7:2 taught me more about DOS memory management than anything else. Had to handcraft a menu-driven autoexec.bat / config.sys monster to get that thing going. HIMEM.SYS ... oh the memories.

A single KB too much in a mouse driver and you were unable to start the game. Oh you want sound? Roland MT-32 or Soundblaster Pro? But how will you load all those drivers in those first 640K of RAM?

Shivers...

The surprising depth and insight into the ophidian belief system in Ultima VII part 2 still holds up to today

https://ultima.fandom.com/wiki/Ophidian_Virtues#:~:text=The%....

Forces of Order and Choas and concept of balance is just outstanding in how it is presented in the texts and gameplay.

Heh. I remember putting the underworld disk in the 1541 while on the surface. When you moved out of the sector the map would update with chests and monsters strewn about above ground. Putting the regular disk in again it would right itself eventually.

The c64 with Ultima III and IV brought my D&d dreams to the screen. Was a wonderful thing to pursue during summer vacation.

I loved U1-4 on the C64. If you like this sort of thing I created an ultima-inspired in browser game https://starlightdawn.online

It’s an interactive story and not a CRPG but there is a goal.

I've been enjoying playing a single-player/small-scale multiplayer mod of Ultima Online inspired by the early Ultima games called Ruins & Riches. If you have nostalgia for Ultima and/or Ultima Online I strongly recommend it. It doesn't have a dedicated webpage anymore, but there's some reddit posts describing it's current state, see e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/ultimaonline/comments/10axsri/ruins...

I highly recommend Michael Coorlim's video series on Ultima [1], which balances some playthrough with background on the game's design.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFCs_cDvTi4

14x16 tiles were used because 14 pixels wide is the native resolution of two bytes on the Apple II.

Enjoyed playing a friend's copy of Ultima 1 so much, I bought Ultima 2 for my Mac and played it through in black and white --- which was quite the contrast to the full-colour cloth map (which I really wish I still had).

I’ve played ultima a lot since i was 10 until I was like 15, emulating it with wine on linux I think has contributed to my ability to troubleshoot issues

The start implies there may be a prior article, is there?

Just wanted to chime in that that IMO the first 4 Ultimas looked way better on the Atari 8-bit than they did on Apple or any other systems.

I feel like the only person who enjoyed ultima VIII on release.

> Like so much in Garriott’s early games, simply because it sounded cool; certainly this title has no more bearing on the game’s plot, such as it is, than does the name Ultima.

I mean, the name doesn't even have a bearing on the game's genre, let alone its plot. I'd say Ultima was a space shooter if I'd only heard its name.