I’ve been talking a lot about the Ultima VII games these last couple of weeks when pitching project E to the press. I happily abused them to explain where a lot of my inspiration was coming from, and what aspirations we have with our new game.

While talking about Ultima VII, it unfortunately dawned on me again that I’m really not that young anymore. Apparently half the journalists had never played any of the Ultima games, and several of them had never even heard about them.

I was a bit shocked by this, because to me that was like a fantasy book reviewer saying that he’d never heard about Tolkien. Of course, if you think about it, it does makes sense. Most of these guys were still trying to figure out if Optimus Prime really existed when it was first released, yet for some reason that hadn’t occurred to me.

That didn’t dissuade me from talking about it though. I consider Ultima VII: The black gate and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle to be among the best RPGs ever made, and in my mind there’s not been a single RPG since 1992 that surpassed them, including those now considered to be the industry benchmarks.

So why was I talking about Ultima VII so much?​