Ultima The Ultima Series Discussion Thread

[Eggs is eggs]

I read somewhere that Ultima VII seems non-linear but is in fact linear, while Serpent Isle seems linear but is in fact non-linear.

 

[LESS T_T]

Long Lord British interview about his life and career: https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/10/...rly-four-decades-making-video-games/view-all/

Inspirations from Tolkien:

GamesBeat: As far as inspiration goes, it seems like your main inspiration was J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Garriott: That’s definitely a foundation. In my best imagination of myself, I think of myself as a Tolkien-style game designer. What I mean when I say that — as soon as I started reading Tolkien, I personally came to the belief that his understanding of the world in which his characters were living was not just deep but astoundingly deep. The layers upon layers of reality crafting he had done for the world before he even unleashed his characters into the world — I was constantly impressed with that.

After reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, I went back and read all his unfinished work. I read English translations of Kalevala, the Finnish oral histories that inspired a lot of his unfinished tales and the pieces built on top of that. So, I feel the same way. By researching deeply the worlds that we’re crafting, it creates meaning and context and depth within the stories we eventually layer on top of that.

GamesBeat: In your book, Tolkien provided you with a very inspirational quotation, about how he felt as if he created languages for his world and then the stories came from that process. This is something you’ve done in your games as well.

Garriott: If you look at the cloth maps that the Ultimas are well known to have included as one of these anchor pieces you’d get in the box — I presume most of you have read The Hobbit. You may have had a moment like I did, when you saw the map with the strange writing on it, and then, you move on, and only after a chapter or two of the book, you realize that that writing isn’t just a scribble. It’s real words that are in fact quite easy to read because it’s made in this runic language that’s an easy letter for letter cipher into English. To me, that was a great revelation, to realize that this wasn’t just made up. It had a sense of truth to it.

I went back to the same source Tolkien did, the druidic runes, to create a slight variation of my own for Ultima. But I kept that — to where I have research projects going on to this day about symbolic languages, phonetic languages, and other structures that try to improve how to present languages in a game context. For example, runic is great if you speak English, but it’s terrible if you speak Japanese. You first have to convert it from runic into English characters to get an English word, then translate that word into whatever your domestic language is. Something that’s easy for an American becomes doubly difficult for anyone else. Solving that problem — making universal languages that both create a sense of mystery and depth in the game world but don’t increase the difficulty for anyone to understand — has been one of my pet projects.

How Ultima V almost crashed Origin:

GamesBeat: Your book had some details that we didn’t always know. You almost went out of business before publishing Ultima V.

Garriott: We talked about highs and lows. There are very important lessons that come out of the lows. The first machine I was particularly enamored with was the Apple II, and so, most of the early Ultimas were developed on the Apple II. When other platforms came out, I would make my own judgment as to whether I thought they’d eventually supersede or do less well than Apple’s.

When the IBM PC first came out, the original version of the IBM PC in America had a bit of a faster processor, a bit more memory, but it had this chiclet-style keyboard that I thought wasn’t very good to interact with. I thought the DOS operating system was confusing. I just felt that Apple had a strong enough lead that it would ultimately win the day. I kept Ultima V, as well as most of our other projects that Origin was developing, focused on Apple first and then porting to a variety of other platforms.

About halfway through the development of Ultima V and three or four other projects, it became obvious that the Apple market had crashed. The PC clone market had rapidly become dominant. We had no employees that were working on the IBM PC. We were going to release a bunch of games that had no market, and we knew that would put us out of business.

We had to become a PC-first company. We had to hire a whole bunch of new employees, delay the release of all our games, and did a simple calculus. We expected this revenue to come in at the end of a particular year, and that was now pushed out six months or more. We weren’t going to survive that long. We looked into a bank loan, which wouldn’t take us to the point we needed. I had just built my first home in Austin, Texas, but I hadn’t paid for it yet. I had a construction loan. To bridge to the ship date of Ultima V, I had to put my house up as collateral. My brother and I went millions in debt with personal loans.

If we hadn’t shipped Ultima V on time and it was not successful, not only would we have been out of business, but all the value I had ever created up to that point in time in the industry would be gone, and I’d have a huge amount of debt. Ultima V, by the way, is the only game I think I ever shipped on time — because of that pressure.

Game journalism:

Above: Ultima V. Image Credit: Origin

On Ultima VIII and Tablua Rasa:

GamesBeat: What do you see in the rear view mirror about the Tabula Rasa project?

Garriott: I mentioned that my three favorite releases were Ultima IV, Ultima VII, and Ultima Online. The games that, despite resistance, me and the team stayed the course with our beliefs and got them out as we planned. The two rockiest releases I’ve had were Ultima VIII and Tabula Rasa. In both of those cases, they had a very similar problem, largely described as a strong difference of opinion between me or the team and the publisher.

That’s not unusual. I’ve had those differences before. But in both those cases, we did what the publisher wanted us to do. In the case of Ultima VIII, Ultima VII had been the first product we did as part of EA, but it was mostly finished before we became part of EA.

EA’s dominant business is selling sports games that they do on a yearly cadence. Every year, they release a football game at the beginning of the football season. Every year, it’s a bit better than last year, but they always make that ship date for football season. Their advice to us was, “You have to ship on time. It’s more important to ship when we expect you to ship than it is to have all the bells and whistles you think need to be there.” They believed they had data to prove it. And they now owned me so I listened. I cut the game to try to fit their schedule, the schedule we’d agreed to. That was a tragic mistake. It means the game shipped unfinished. It was buggy and unrefined.

With Tabula Rasa, it was a similar issue, but instead of being at the end, it was at the beginning. We were going to create a game that would hopefully sell well in both Korea and the U.S. For two years, we kept shipping game designs and art styles to Korea, and for two years, we got feedback saying, “No, this isn’t right for Korea.” Here we are burning time and lots of money not really starting at all because we could never understand what they wanted from us or provide them something they were happy with.

In the end, we just said, “We can’t make a game for you. We’ll make the game we think we should make for the audience we know….” But those two years of false starts set the project behind in time and in budget at level where the pressure to ship began, frankly, before we even got started. It was a very difficult game to finish — again, because of that unclean start to the vision.

In the end, for both Ultima VIII and Tabula Rasa, I’m actually very happy with those games, once they were polished and patched and rectified. But by then, it’s too late for the marketing window. I’m not entirely sure what the lessons to pass on from that are. But having a good, clean, strong vision from the start, and standing by it until you finish, I think is crucial. I always found that if you allow yourself to wander or you allow your publisher to make you wander, it’s a recipe for disaster.

 

[Viata]

So he has a book and I didn't know about it.

 

[Infinitron]

Interesting that he says Ultima V is the one game that shipped on time given that it seems to have had a pretty long development cycle for a 1980s game. Ultima IV - 1985, Ultima V - 1988. Ultima VI took less time.

(I guess it might not have been in development for that entire period.)

 

[Morblot]

(I guess it might not have been in development for that entire period.)

The Digital Antiquarian has a good article on the development of Ultima V: http://www.filfre.net/2016/02/the-road-to-v/

tl;dr they wasted time on other stuff too

 

[Eggs is eggs]

I wonder what the concept of the aborted Ultima IV Part 2 was (and yes I know the parody version exists).

 

[Eggs is eggs]

He also describes perfectly one of the main problems that Shroud of the Avatar ended up having:

But having a good, clean, strong vision from the start, and standing by it until you finish, I think is crucial. I always found that if you allow yourself to wander or you allow your publisher to make you wander, it’s a recipe for disaster.

 

[pippin]

What's going on with Shroud of the Avatar, by the way? It's still on Early Access iirc.

 

[Eggs is eggs]

They're doing a free trial this month so you can try it for yourself...just keep expectations low.

 

[Jaesun]

One of the guys on the Exult team uploaded the extended video intro to Sepent Isle. They *might* actually be able to implement this intro into Exult.

The audio sound (voice overs and the thunder sound) and score would have to be re-synched and scored though.

 

[Junmarko]

I never even thought about how fucked up that really was back in the day...

What a great game.

 

[grimace]

https://www.youtube com/watch?v=MKTuo19gUG4

This hour-long Q&A with Richard “Lord British” Garriott dives into the process of story-telling in the Ultima games. Topics include the origins of the Guardian, various story angles considered, and how the design evolved over time. Richard reveals a number of nuggets of history while going into detail on a number of game design and story-telling aspects.

Highlights:

The Fellowship and parallels to Scientology mentioned at 28 minutes.

When does a religion/philosophy become self serving economically?

Unity, Trust, and Worthiness


The guardian looking like a muppet?


A book on heraldry and beer can be seen in the background on the bookshelf.


Not selling Ultiima 8 Pagan to Fundamentalist Christians so let's do magic deep.

The pentagram manifests the golden ratio. Proof of God's divine hand in the creation of the universe.


Life imitating art imitating life?
Art imitating life imitating art?

 

[Citizen]

Old Garriott looks like old Mick Fleetwood.

 

[Leitz]

Looks more like a tired ass faggot who hasn't made a good game in 20 years.

 

[Dzupakazul]

Kinda like Cleve.

Spoiler

 

[LESS T_T]

http://www.usgamer.net/articles/how...thinking-about-the-choices-they-make-in-games

How Richard Garriott Got Players to Start Thinking About the Choices They Make in Ultima IV
Today's in-game morality systems owe a huge debt to Ultima IV.


The following excerpt comes from Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution by David L. Craddock, available in hardcover from Schiffer Publishing. The book chronicles the making of over a dozen groundbreaking PC games, featuring interviews with their developers and details how they went on to influence the games of today. In this chapter, a controversial scene in Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar pits Richard "Lord British" Garriott and his family members against each other as they argue over whether to keep the scene intact, or cut it from the game.

Heroes and Villains

Switching off the monitor, Richard Garriott rolled up his sleeves and dug into the mounds of unopened letters on his desk. "What was interesting about Ultima III being our first product was that when people had something to say about the game, good or bad, they could write in to Origin at our home address, and we began to get fan mail. And hate mail. Both."

Tearing open envelopes and poring over the good, bad, and ugly of fan feedback was a new experience for him. Garriott had written his previous games in a vacuum, handing in code to publishers and waiting for royalty checks to roll in. Receiving letters, postcards, and packages from fans directly was exciting. To his amusement, he picked out a pattern existent in nearly every missive. "When anybody writes to you about your game, it's usually one paragraph of 'Hey, I really liked your game, really enjoyed it... but...' And then the rest of the letter, which could be anywhere from one paragraph to ten pages, is their personal diatribe of what was wrong in the game and what they would do to fix it."

Looking past fans' tendency to play armchair general, Garriott took many responses to heart. Every so often, religious zealots would write sternly worded letters complaining about the winged, horned demon that adorned the front of Ultima III's box, which they believed provoked the youth of America to run around killing goats and tendering bloody sacrifices to Satan. Garriott might have found the claims ridiculous and easy to dismiss if not for the methods that an alarmingly large percentage of his players seemed to employ. In painstaking detail, these players explained that when the going got tough, they got nefarious. When they needed gold, they admitted it was easier to bribe or steal than earn money killing monsters and looting crypts. To his horror, many players copped to killing off vendors so they could loot their shops with impunity.

As confessionals stacked up, Garriott realized he was responsible for the unscrupulous actions of his players. In video games, those who threw morals out the window got ahead much faster than those who played by the rules—just like in real life. "There was something fundamentally wrong about their actions, but I couldn't really blame the players because they were doing exactly what the game has instructed them to do, or what the game seems to have encouraged them to do—even if not explicitly, then implicitly, through the game's mechanics, they were encouraged them to behave that way."

Equally disturbing was the fact that players who cleaved a bloody path through Ultima games made his games look tame. In effect, players were treating his games like games. Their goal was not to free a land under the thumb of tyranny and oppression. They were out to win and cultivate greater power.

Like a domino effect, this realization sparked another that set his imagination aflame. If players felt no compunction at misbehaving, he would have to scare them straight.

The first item on his to-fix list was the player—or, rather, the character they controlled. Characters in video games were just vessels used to encapsulate attributes and items. Garriott decided to flip the script. "It was important to me that you weren't playing a character. You couldn't be playing Conan the Barbarian. It had to be you. You, personally. Even though you, when you manifested in this world, might have gone from a skinny little computer nerd to a big, buff, heroic warrior, and maybe even changed genders, it was important that it feel like your soul, your spirit, inside your character so that you feel responsible for the deeds and actions your character performs."

Garriott dubbed Ultima IV's player-character the avatar, a Sanskrit word defined as a deity's human incarnation—the flesh-and-blood form they took when it became necessary to descend from the heavens and walk among their human subjects. Still, telling players that they, not some made-up character, inhabited the game world was only the first step. To make them to think twice before clubbing peasants who stood between them and a cool new sword, he had to convince them that they owned the body they inhabited.

Instead of letting players choose their class and race, and assign points to attributes, a gypsy greets them and asks them a series of ethical questions. There are no right or wrong answers. Choices boil down to how individual players feel about eight virtues: honesty, valor, compassion, justice, spirituality, humility, sacrifice, and honor. Their answers determine the type of character they play. If a player's answers favor honor, the gypsy pronounces them a paladin; spiritual players devote themselves to the arcane arts; players who lean toward compassion assume the role of a bard; and so on.

With the class decided, players assume their avatar form—a human. This represents another major departure from the template followed in previous games: eliminating stock fantasy races like dwarves and elves reinforces the notion that players are playing themselves.

Setting foot in the world of Britannia in their avatar forms, players notice a distinct lack of spaceships and aliens. Previous Ultima titles—as well as Akalabeth—contained a medley of themes and elements that reflected Garriott's diverse interests. For Ultima IV, he cleared away conflicting motifs and grounded his morality parable in fantasy tropes and characters: knights, wizards, paladins, castles, swords, and magic. "I wasn't trying to craft intellectual property," Richard says in regards to his early games. "I was just trying to bring everything I thought was cool to bear. It was only after Ultima III that I sat down and said, 'I really need to expunge from my work the obvious references to everybody else's work, and invent my own world from scratch."

To complete Ultima IV, players have to jump through a series of virtuous hopes. First, they must achieve enlightenment in the eight core virtues. Worshipping at shrines bolsters certain virtues, but the game also monitors players' actions, docking or adding points in a virtue based on how they behave in everyday situations, such as paying blind merchants the correct amount for their wares to increase their honesty, and standing resolute in battle to foster courage. Fleeing from fights brands them a coward, and shortchanging vendors clues NPCs in to their reputation as a cheat.

Virtues also affect the player's odds of attracting companions. Warriors won't fight alongside cowards; bards shun heroes incapable of showing compassion for the less fortunate. Rather than penalize immoral actions such as theft, Garriott opted to have his NPCs forgive, but never forget. As an example, players can steal herbs from a certain vendor. She will not label them a thief, nor will she sick guards on them. But hours later, players need a password to enter a certain area, and the herb vendor knows it—but she'll only give it to them if they've been kind to her.

"I wanted people to fall into that trap," Garriott says. "I would overly reward theft, and even find ways to rationalize it, or make it hard to not steal; you see gold, and that's the only place you see it—whatever it might be, I encouraged people to cross that moral line. Through that delayed feedback, not only did you make them reflect on, 'Man, not only have I done this, I've been doing it a lot, and now I don't even know how I can make amends to this woman I've been stealing from all this time', but people don't even know if you're testing them or not. They have to start looking at every single moment of their behavior to decide what is the right thing to do, because they don't know if the game will be watching."

While chasing enlightenment, players must gather ancient artifacts from temples and dungeons. Once enlightened and in possession of the artifacts, players may descend into the Stygian Abyss, the toughest dungeon in the game. Their goal is to locate the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, which enables them to ascend to Avatar-hood. Between players and the Codex lie challenges rooted in the virtues they worked so hard to foster.

Challenges in the Stygian Abyss take the form of scenarios designed to make players overthink what they need to do. Most of the time, the solution is simple: kill monsters and proceed to the next room. But after dozens, even hundreds of hours spent weighing each and every action, players would be on guard. Garriott knew that, and sought a way to test them without testing them. "For the final dungeon of Ultima IV, I wanted you to at least believe you were being tested on all your virtues in this final run. But often, there was little physical testing I could do. So I'd sit back and think, What is the player's current mindset? What is the player's current circumstance, and how can I reflect that to encourage the player to make up a story in their head?"

In one scenario, players enter a room to find doppelgangers of each member of their party—a cleric, a fighter, a paladin, and so on. Seeing another fully formed party should give them pause. What were they to do? How should they proceed? Attacking seemed out of the question; the NPCs were virtuous heroes, just like them. Except they weren't. They were monsters in the guise of heroes. Attacking them would incur no penalty. "This is all occurring to them in real-time, so it forces them to make quick decisions," Garriott explains. "And in this case, it really doesn't matter: they're all monsters. But the fact that players didn't know that means that they could create all sorts of unique stories in their heads."

Any doubts that players and critics would dismiss Ultima IV's trials as simplistic were dispelled when, two weeks before the game's release in September 1985, Robert stormed into Richard's office and read aloud from a letter written by one of Origin's quality assurance (QA) testers. The man was threatening to resign over one of the scenarios in the Stygian Abyss that mandated players to kill children in order to progress. "I was stunned," Richard Garriott recalls. "I said, 'I have no idea what this guy's talking about.' Robert said, 'I don't know, either, but whatever it is, we need to find it and get it out of the game. Whatever is creating this feeling, we'd better get out of the game.'"

Richard and Robert walked across the top floor of the garage and found the tester. The man sat stiffly at his desk, wrestling with whether or not to leave his job over what he viewed as a violation of good taste. Richard asked him to pull up the room responsible for his outrage. It flickered into existence on the screen, and he recognized it at once. Cages hung in all four corners of the room. Each cage was full of children. In the heart of the room, between the four cages, was a lever. Pulling it lowered the cages and released the children, who swarmed the player and attacked. The only way out was to kill the children and bolt for the exit... or so it seemed.

Relieved, Garriott explained the scenario. "Now, this was not a test, but I knew it would looklike a test: no one in their right mind would think it's okay to kill children in a game about virtue, and yet I surrounded you with children that were attacking you."

The QA tester breathed a sigh of relief. It turned out the children were monsters in disguise. Although the tester was assuaged, Robert was not. Privately, he insisted that Richard remove the room, reasoning that Origin would suffer irreparable damage to its reputation if a parent group misinterpreted the trial. Lord British refused. Ultima IV was predicated on being virtuous, and the QA tester had recoiled at the notion of taking an action meant to be viewed as morally abhorrent—precisely the type of response Richard hoped to illicit. The QA tester's reaction proved that video games stimulated emotions common associated with film and literature.

Moreover, there were actually multiple ways to solve the room, as well as other such scenarios in Ultima IV. Players could cast a spell to lull the "children" to sleep, invoke other magic to scare them off, or simply avoid them and make a break for the egress. On top of engaging players emotionally, the game would engage players mentally.

Robert crossed his arms and restated his position. The room had to go. Once again, Richard rejected the notion. At an impasse, Robert played his ultimate trump card. He called their parents.

"Usually, when arguments broke out, my dad would agree with my brother and my mom would agree with me," Garriott says. "That's usually how things went down: we invoked parental involvement, but nothing got settled because they were split. This was the only time in company history where my mother sided with my brother."

Where Robert had badgered and insisted, Helen tried coaxing. It's only one room, she reasoned. Better to cut one room than suffer bad publicity. Richard raised the stakes: either the room stayed, or he'd scrap the game. Helen and Robert relented.

With fingers crossed and breath bated, Richard and his family waited for critics and consumers to pass judgment on Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar when it released in September of 1985 The verdict arrived quickly: instant masterpiece. In 1987, Computer Gaming World praised the game for advancing the RPG genre past looting corpses and overthrowing a big bad. Ultima IV went on to become the first game in five years to dethrone Wizardry I: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord from its coveted spot at the top of the reader's poll for favorite game.

As for Helen's and Robert's concerns, they proved unfounded. "The room stayed, we published the game, and no one noticed the room. No one complained about it," Garriott says.

Thirty years removed from Ultima IV, Garriott believes the morality systems he engineered might represent his finest work. "If I am to think of things I'm proud of from my game-design past, Ultima IV is still a pinnacle design moment for me. Part of that was the concept of the avatar, but another part was how to answer the question: How do you make sure people don't disconnect, and instead play with sincere, emotional ties to their characters?"

 

[grimace]

A spry Katherine Couric says the computer games industry isn't just for kids anymore.

A piece on ORIGIN's Ultima series from the April 28th, 1993 episode of Today.

https://youtu be/ABQiKCC1UC0

 

[Infinitron]

Joe Garrity gets some respect: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/02/15/meet-the-man-who-runs-the-origin-museum/

Meet the man who runs the Origin Museum, collecting the history of Wing Commander and Ultima



In the basement of an unassuming suburban home just outside Washington, D.C., you’ll find one of the largest collections of documents, data, images and props from Origin Systems, the company behind the Ultima and Wing Commander game series of the 80s and 90s.

The Origin Museum is owned and curated by Joe Garrity, and has been running since 1999, when Garrity lived in Virginia. Over the past 18 years, former Origin staff have donated entire offices worth of documents and even source code to the museum.

When Electronic Arts needed someone to catalogue their Origin Systems holdings, it was Garrity that they turned to. The museum’s collection of continuity polaroids from the production of Wing Commander: Prophecy were scanned and used in the 2003 Game Boy Advance version of the game.

And the development documents that GOG.com bundles with its Origin games were all originally scanned by the museum before being published on the Ultima Codex and Wing Commander Combat Information Centre fan sites by Garitty’s long-time collaborators Kenneth Kully and Ben Lesnick.

RPS: How did you go from being a dude with a few Ultima games to running a whole museum?

Joe Garrity: Just like everybody else, I was playing games and I looked at my bookcase and went: “Wow, all these games came from the same company. What else are they doing?”

This was around the time eBay started. People were breaking down their collections in the late nineties, and I was obsessed with Ultima VII at the time. So I was buying every one- or two-dollar Ultima VII that was out there, and it didn’t really cost me anything – that was lunch money.

In late 1999, my wife Paula – who was my girlfriend at the time – wrote letters to Garriott and Chris Roberts and Denis Loubet and George ‘The Fat Man’ Sanger and all these people, and said: “I’m taking my boyfriend on a secret vacation and he talks about you guys as if he knows you. But he’s never met you and I think it would be the thrill of a lifetime for him if you could find time to share a handshake or give him an autograph.”

And these people invited us into their homes.

On that trip, we’d been invited to visit Origin Systems. As it turned out, Richard Garriott got fired from Origin that weekend, so we didn’t get to meet Richard – he wasn’t there anymore.



The whole thing had been arranged by Michelle Cadell, his personal assistant (who is Mariah in the Ultima games), and when we met her she was kneeling in the doorway of Richard’s old office, packing his items in cardboard boxes with tears streaming down her face, apologising for the circumstances while we stood there feeling awkward.

So we got our tour while there were people walking out with cardboard boxes of their personal items. And we got to see everybody else, but we never got to meet Richard on that first trip.

But Michelle must have reminded him, because a year later, my wife is in the shower and the phone rings. She says: “I get out of the shower in a towel and I pick up and say hello, and hear somebody go ‘Hello Paula, this is Richard Garriott, a.k.a. Lord British, and I wanted to find out if you had some time to speak with me.'”

And she’s standing there in a towel and the first thing she said was “Fuck you, William,'” because she thinks it’s my neighbour messing with her. And there’s a pause and she hears: “No. This is actually Richard Garriott.”

But he thought it was funny – thank God. That was her opening line to Richard. She told him “fuck you”. And he invited us to visit him.

We went the next year and spent three hours at his freaking house hanging out. At the time he was doing the plans for his new castle. He actually had the cardboard model that the architects had made, he takes it down from the shelf and puts it on the floor and sits down on the floor cross-legged like a nine-year-old and says: “This is the design of my new castle.”

So he’s sitting there with his legs crossed on the floor and he goes: “Come here. You have to see.” So I sat down on the floor, literally laying there on my stomach looking at it, and he was getting excited like a nine-year-old over his new toy and I was excited for him and everything just washed away – all that nervousness [about meeting].

We next met him at a convention when his then-girlfriend remembered the wine baskets Paula had made up as a gift. She walks us through to this VIP area and says “Richard, this is the nice couple that brought us the wine.”

And that’s how we got our in, you know? After that, I’m sure Richard told people “No, no, they’re not nut jobs, they’re good folks.”



RPS: What do you think are the coolest or most significant items in the museum, either personally or historically?

Garrity:The most historically significant artefacts are the original game development documentation, advertising proofs from the Creative Services department, photographic slides for the original game box artwork, and some digital files of data and graphics from unreleased games which would have been lost if not for our efforts.

Some of the games in the collection are definitely rare from a historical standpoint. The original copy of Akalabeth (Ultima 0), with a certificate of authenticity documenting that this was an actual copy made by Richard Garriott in 1979 on his mother’s kitchen table. Rare early titles such as Caverns of Callisto and Escape from Mount Drash are historical gems as well.

Personally, I love the physical props and costumes from Origin’s full-motion-video games. Having helmets and uniforms used in the production of Wing Commanders 3, 4, and Prophecy definitely gets me excited.

Of course, the heads and other costume pieces of Hobbes (Origin’s in-house nickname for the tiger-like Kilrathi character called Ralgha nar Hhallas) and Prince Thrakhath from Wing Commander 3 are definitely prized pieces. Showing a fan of the Crusader series some of the costumes that were used in the actual production of the game brings a smile to my face – I share their excitement every time.

RPS: We talked about how the museum got started, but what was your own first Origin game? What got you started on this kick?

Garrity: I’d bought Ultima IV for my C64 back in 1985, but didn’t play it much. The real breakthrough for me was my first PC in early 1991 – a 386 DX33 with four megs of RAM and a Soundblaster! I went to my local Walden Books – back then, games were sold in bookstores – to take a look around. The salesman asked me what type of system I had. When I described my beefy PC, he instantly put Wing Commander in my hands, and said, “This is the game you want.” It’s been a love affair ever since.



RPS: Your old flyers say “open to the public by appointment” – do you often get people coming to see the collection or is it mostly online now?

Garrity: The collection is not open to the public anymore – that was an idea from a long time ago. Mostly the collection is shown on the Big Box PC Game Collectors Facebook page, and occasionally in presentations to special events, like when EA or a big Ultima fan get-together calls.

RPS: Where would you like the museum to go next?

Garrity: Where should the Museum go next? Well, I need a full organization of all the items in the collection – while I love preserving these artefacts, it’s not my full-time job. I have responsibilities as an employee, a husband, and a father, which leaves little time to do a full and complete inventory of the Museum. The upside to this is that I’m always finding new and unusual items that I didn’t know I had!

Next would be doing a full preservation on some of the items. The Kilrathi heads came to me in less-than-stellar condition, and were never created to stand the test of time. The foam latex that makes up these costumes is degrading at an alarming rate – Hobbes is literally falling apart. I’d love to get them restored, but that’s expensive to do properly.



RPS: And if you had unlimited resources – what would your dream future for it be?

Garrity: A brick-and-mortar building would be fantastic – to build a Museum open to the public on computer gaming and game preservation would be the ultimate dream. While keeping the games themselves from degrading, and losing the data, I think the most important aspect is keeping the memory of these games alive.

Giving people a place to actually play these games, look at the scripts and costumes, understand the excitement of those days of early game development. That’s all are part of preserving the games’ history. Helping people remember these great games keeps them alive.

RPS: What inspires you to keep it all going?

Garrity: Truly? The excitement it generates. I still am knocked out by people’s appreciation for these pieces of history. When I see that there are folks out there that share the same passion for these tidbits of 25- or 30-year-old information, it always gives me the energy to continue hunting for another lost item, artefact, or story. I’m also inspired by the developers who appreciate that their long hours of work back then are still valued by the fandom.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

I just found this on reddit. Since I like that retrowave stuff and I think the theme song of Ultima 6 is the best in series, here goes:



I think its pretty awesome, I only wish it was longer.

 

[taxalot]

Joe Garrity is a very strange fellow, like most Ultima Dragons.

 

[dagrims]

I think its pretty awesome, I only wish it was longer.

You sound just like my (Canadian) girlfriend.

 

[Morkar Left]

Joe Garrity is a very strange fellow, like most Ultima Dragons.

They are geeks. Which was normal then for rpg players. Ordinary people were the exception. Then it became cool to be a geek and normal people jumped on. Now playing WoW, watching ST and Star Wars, buying the toys and LARP became accepted, especially with the rise of the internet and videostreaming. Now you have to be the new kind of geek (probably bundled with vegan livestyle and drinking green tea instead of coffee and soya milk instead of cow milk) or you are considered a "strange" geek. I like the older ones more, no matter how strange they are. At least they have usually better taste and are more self-aware.

 

[Infinitron]

YAAAAAAAAAS: https://www.filfre.net/2018/02/the-worlds-of-ultima/

The Worlds of Ultima
23FEB


Proud papa Warren Spector with a copy of Worlds of Ultima II: Martian Dreams.

Spoiler

In the very early days of Ultima, Richard Garriott made a public promise which would eventually come back to haunt him. Looking for a way to differentiate his CRPG series from its arch-rival, Wizardry, he said that he would never reuse an Ultima engine. Before every new installment of his series, he would tear everything down to its component parts and rebuild it all, bigger and better than ever before. For quite some time, this policy served Garriott very well indeed. When the first Ultima had appeared in 1981, it had lagged well behind the first Wizardry in terms of sales and respect, but by the time Ultima III dropped in 1983 Garriott’s series had snatched a lead which it would never come close to relinquishing. While the first five Wizardry installments remained largely indistinguishable from one another to the casual fan, Ultima made major, obvious leaps with each new release. Yes, games like The Bard’s Tale and Pool of Radiance racked up some very impressive sales of their own as the 1980s wore on, but Ultima… well, Ultima was simply Ultima, the most respected name of all in CRPGs.

And yet by 1990 the promise which had served Richard Garriott so well was starting to become a real problem for his company Origin Systems. To build each new entry in the series from the ground up was one thing when doing so entailed Garriott disappearing alone into a small room containing only his Apple II for six months or a year, then emerging, blurry-eyed and exhausted, with floppy disks in hand. It was quite another thing in the case of a game like 1990’s Ultima VI, the first Ultima to be developed for MS-DOS machines with VGA graphics and hard drives, a project involving four programmers and five artists, plus a bureaucracy of others that included everything from producers to play-testers. Making a new Ultima from the ground up had by this point come to entail much more than just writing a game engine; it required a whole new technical infrastructure of editors and other software tools that let the design team, to paraphrase Origin’s favorite marketing tagline, create their latest world.

But, while development costs thus skyrocketed, sales weren’t increasing to match. Each new entry in the series since Ultima IV had continued to sell a consistent 200,000 to 250,000 copies. These were very good numbers for the genre and the times, but it seemed that Origin had long ago hit a sales ceiling for games of this type. The more practical voices at the company, such as the hard-nosed head of product development Dallas Snell, said that Origin simply had to start following the example of their rivals, who reused their engines many times as a matter of course. If they wished to survive, Origin too had to stop throwing away their technology after only using it once; they had to renege at last on Richard Garriott’s longstanding promise. Others, most notably the original promise-maker himself, were none too happy with the idea.

Origin’s recently arrived producer and designer Warren Spector was as practical as he was creative, and thus could relate to the concerns of both a Dallas Snell and a Richard Garriott. He proposed a compromise. What if a separate team used the last Ultima engine to create some “spin-off” games while Garriott and his team were busy inventing their latest wheel for the next “numbered” game in the series?

It wasn’t actually an unprecedented idea. As far back as Ultima II, in the days before Origin even existed, a rumor had briefly surfaced that Sierra, Garriott’s publisher at the time, might release an expansion disk to connect a few more of the many pointlessly spinning gears in that game’s rather sloppy design. Later, after spending some two years making Ultima IV all by himself, Garriott himself had floated the idea of an Ultima IV Part 2 to squeeze a little more mileage out of the engine, only to abandon it to the excitement of building a new engine of unprecedented sophistication for Ultima V. But now, with the Ultima VI engine, it seemed like an idea whose time had truly come at last.

The spin-off games would be somewhat smaller in scope than the core Ultimas, and this, combined with the reuse of a game engine and other assets from their big brothers, should allow each of them to be made in something close to six months, as opposed to the two years that were generally required for a traditional Ultima. They would give Origin more product to sell to those 200,000 to 250,000 hardcore fans who bought each new mainline installment; this would certainly please Dallas Snell. And, as long as the marketing message was carefully crafted, they should succeed in doing so without too badly damaging the Ultima brand’s reputation for always surfing the bleeding edge of CRPG design and technology; this would please Richard Garriott.

But most of all it was Warren Spector who had good reason to be pleased with the compromise he had fashioned. The Ultima sub-series that was born of it, dubbed Worlds of Ultima, would run for only two games, but would nevertheless afford him his first chance at Origin to fully exercise his creative muscles; both games would be at bottom his babies, taking place in settings created by him and enacting stories outlined by him. These projects would be, as Spector happily admits today, “B” projects at Origin, playing second fiddle in terms of internal resources and marketing priority alike to the mainline Ultima games and to Wing Commander. Yet, as many a Hollywood director will tell you, smaller budgets and the reduced scrutiny that goes along with them are often anything but a bad thing; they often lend themselves to better, more daring creative work. “I actually liked being a ‘B’ guy,” remembers Spector. “The guys spending tons of money have all the pressure. I was spending so little [that] no one really paid much attention to what I was doing, so I got to try all sorts of crazy things.”

Those crazy things could only have come from this particular Origin employee. Spector was almost, as he liked to put it, the proud holder of a PhD in film studies. Over thirty years old in a company full of twenty-somethings, he came to Origin with a far more varied cultural palette than was the norm there, and worked gently but persistently to separate his peers from their own exclusive diets of epic fantasy and space opera. He had a special love for the adventure fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this love came to inform Worlds of Ultima to as great a degree as Lord of the Rings did the mainline Ultima games or Stars Warsdid Wing Commander. Spector’s favored inspirations even had the additional advantage of being out of copyright, meaning he could plunder as much as he wanted without worrying about any lawyers coming to call.

The Savage Empire, the first Worlds of Ultima, is thus cribbed liberally from The Lost World, Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic 1912 adventure novel about a remote region of South America where dinosaurs have survived extinction. The novel’s narrator, an opportunistic journalist named Edward Malone, becomes Jimmy Malone in the game, a companion of yours who bends his journalistic talents to the task of becoming a sort of walking, talking quest log. As in the book, your ultimate goal in the game is to unite the feuding native tribes who live in the lost valley in order to defeat a threat to them all — said threat being a race of ape-men in the book, a race of giant insects in the game. (The closest thing to the ape-men in the game is a tribe of Neanderthals who actually fight on your side.) And yes, as in the book, there are dinosaurs in The Savage Empire — dinosaurs of all types, from harmless herbivores to the huge, ferocious, and deadly tyrannosaurus rex. Along with the insect race, who are known as the Myrmidex, they’re your primary enemies when it comes to combat.

The Savage Empire does add to the book’s plot the additional complication of a mad scientist who has already arrived in the Valley of Eodon. He isn’t bad by nature, but has been driven to his current insanity by a mysterious stone found there. Now, he plots to use the stone to take over the world. In an affectionate tribute to their guiding light, he was named by the development team Dr. Johann Spector, with a dead ringer of a portrait to match.


Evil Warren… err, Johann Spector.

Arthur Conan Doyle was an enthusiastic proponent of much of the flawed pseudo-science of his day, from eugenics to phrenology and craniometry to, late in his life, the spiritualist movement. He was likewise afflicted with most of the prejudices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It’s thus not hard to imagine how The Savage Empire could have gone horribly off the rails, what with the animal-hide-bikini-clad princess who serves as your romantic interest and the many “savage” dark-skinned tribes — each modeled on (stereotypes of) an example of same from real-world history — waiting for your party of white men to swoop in and save the day. One might feel especially worried upon learning that Warren Spector wasn’t even around very much to oversee his young charges. After laying out the setting, characters, and basic plot in the form of a twenty-page outline, he moved on to act as producer on the first Wing Commander game, leaving The Savage Empire in the hands of its producer Jeff Johanningman — the source of Dr. Spector’s first name — its designer Aaron Allston, and its “director” Stephen Beeman.1


The Savage Empire‘s cover art marks a major departure from Richard Garriott’s noble policy of refusing to fill his Ultima covers with the buxom women in chainmail bikinis that dominated among the series’s peers. The Avatar’s companion here isn’t dressed in chainmail, but the leather bikini she is wearing is positively straining to keep her naughty bits under wraps. On the other hand, the cover art is right in keeping with the pulpy adventure stories the game evokes, so we can perhaps forgive it.

Note also that “Lord British” takes first-writer credit for a game he had nothing to do with. Cheeky fellow, isn’t he? Royalty evidently did have its privileges. Meanwhile the contributions of poor Warren Spector, whose 20-page treatment got the whole project started, went completely unacknowledged, not only on the box but in the credits list found in the manual.

But I’m happy to say that Johanningman, Allston, Beeman, and the others on their team did a surprisingly good job of skirting a fine line. The Savage Empire is definitely pulpy — it was always intended to be — but it never spills over into the offensive. Origin paid a dedicated researcher named Karen E. Bell, holder of a completed PhD, to help them get the feeling of the times right. The various tribes are handled, if not quite with nuance — this just isn’t a very nuanced game — with a degree of respect. At the same time, the game manages to absolutely nail the homage it was aiming for. The manual, for instance, takes the form of an issue of Ultimate Adventures magazine, and can stand proudly alongside the best feelies of Infocom. Clearly the development team embraced Spector’s vision with plenty of passion of their own.

The worst failing of the fiction — a failing which this game shares with its sequel — is the attempt to integrate the pulpy narrative with that of Britannia in the mainline Ultima games; Origin was still operating under the needless stipulation that the hero of every successive Ultima, going all the way back to the first, was the same “Avatar.” For The Savage Empire, this means among other things that the game has to take place in our time rather than in that of Arthur Conan Doyle — albeit a version of our time full of weird anachronisms, like the big box camera with the big magnesium flash that’s carried around by Jimmy Malone.


Origin may have hired a PhD to help with their research, but they don’t take their commitment to anthropology to seriously. I don’t think any real native people had a Larry, Moe, and Curly of their own.

The game design proper, on the other hand, is impressively nonlinear in the best Ultimatradition. Once you’ve figured out that your mission is to convince all of the eleven tribes to make common cause against the Myrmidex, you can begin negotiating with whichever of them you please. Naturally, the negotiations will always boil down to your needing to accomplish some task for the tribe in question. These quests are interesting and entertaining to see through, forcing you to employ a variety of approaches — and often, for that matter, admitting themselves of multiple approaches — and giving you good motivation for traipsing through the entirety of the Valley of Eodon.

The Savage Empire stands out for the superb use it makes of the “living world” concept which had been coming more and more to the fore with every iteration of the mainline Ultima series. Indeed, it does even more with the concept than Ultima VI, the game whose engine it borrowed. The Savage Empire is a game where you can make charcoal by pulling a branch from a tree and burning it in a native village’s fire pit. Then make a potassium-nitrate powder by collecting special crystals from a cave and grinding them down with a mortar and pestle. Then get some sulfur by sifting it out of a pit with a wire screen. Combine it all together, and, voila, gunpowder! But, you ask, what can you actually do with the gunpowder? Well, you can start by borrowing a digging stick from the villagers, taking it down to a riverbank, and pulling up some fresh clay. Fire the clay in the village kiln to make yourself a pot. Put your gunpowder in the pot, then cut a strip off your clothing using some handy scissors you brought along and dip it in the local tar pit to make a fuse. Stuff the cloth into the top of the pot, and you’ve got yourself a grenade; just add fire — luckily, you also brought along some matches — at the appropriate time. This is just one example of the many intriguing science experiments you can indulge in. Don’t try this at home, kids.

Yet for all its strengths, and enjoyable as it is in its own right, The Savage Empire is just the warm-up act for Martian Dreams, the real jewel of the Worlds of Ultima series. This time around, Spector got to do more than just write an outline of the game: he was in charge of this project from beginning to end, thus making Martian Dreams the first game published by Origin — and, for that matter, the first computer game period — that was a Warren Spector joint from beginning to end.


Martian Dreams‘s version of Ultima‘s gypsy is none other than Sigmund Freud. It’s evidently been a hard life so far for Sigmund, who would have turned 39 years old the year the game begins. More seriously, my cursory research would indicate that about 90 percent of players misread the intent of his initial question. He’s not really asking you which parent you felt closer to; he’s trying to find out what gender you are. Many a player, myself included, has gone through the character-creation process trying to answer the questions honestly, only to be confused by arriving in the game as the opposite gender. Call it all those distant fathers’ revenge…

Martian Dreams‘s premise is certainly unique in the annals of CRPGs. In fact, it’s kind of batshit insane. Are you ready for this? Okay, here goes…

Our story begins with the historical character Percival Lowell, the amateur astronomer who popularized the idea of “canals” on Mars, and along with them the fantasy of a populated Mars whose people had built the canals in an effort to recover water from the icecaps of a doomed planet slowly dying of drought. It’s 1893, and Lowell has built a “space cannon” capable of traveling to Mars. He’s showing it off at the Chicago World’s Fair to many of the “leaders of the Victorian era” when a saboteur ignites the cannon’s propellant, sending the whole gang rocketing off to Mars. In addition to Lowell himself, the unwilling crew includes names like Sarah Bernhardt, Calamity Jane, Andrew Carnegie, Marie Curie, Wyatt Earp, Thomas Edison, William Randolph Hearst, Robert Peary, and Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Fast-forward two years. Signals from Mars indicate to the folks back on Earth that the gang survived the trip and landed safely. Now you’re to try to rescue them in a second space cannonball, accompanied by — because why not? — Nellie Bly, Sigmund Freud, Nikola Tesla, and a dodgy doctor named C.L. Blood (the most obscure historical figure of the lot but one of the most interesting). Also along for the ride is your old friend Dr. Johann Spector, now freed from the insanity that led to megalomania in The Savage Empire and happy just to be your genial boon companion in adventure.


The good Johann Spector.

Upon arriving on the red planet, you find that the air is breathable, if a bit thin, and that sentient — and often deadly — plants roam the surface. You soon begin to make contact with the previous ship’s crew, who are now scattered all over the planet, and the game coalesces around the interrelated goals of learning about the Martian civilization that once existed here and figuring out a way to get your own lot back to Earth; in what can only be described as a grave oversight on your part, it seems that you neglected to devise a means of returning when you set off on your “rescue” mission.

Your reaction to Martian Dreams will hinge on your willingness to get behind a premise as crazy as this one. If the idea of getting fired out of a cannon and winding up on Mars doesn’t put you off, the million smaller holes you can poke in the story very well might; suffice to say that the fact that you boarded a cannonball headed for Mars without any semblance of a return plan is neither the only nor even perhaps the most grievous of the plot holes. Chet Bolingbroke, better known to his readers as The CRPG Addict and a critic whose opinion I very much respect within his favorite genre, dismisses the game’s whole premise with one word: “stupid.”

In defense of the game, I will note that this is very much a period piece, and that within that context some of the stupider aspects of the overarching concept may begin to seem slightly less so. Jules Verne, a writer who always strove for scientific accuracy according to the lights of his time, published in 1865 From the Earth to the Moon, in which a trio of Victorian astronauts flies to the Moon rather than Mars using the technique described in Martian Dreams. The same technique then cropped up again in Georges Méliès’s 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. (Méliès, a French illusionist who became the father of cinematic special effects through that film and others, is another of the historical figures who make it into Martian Dreams.) And then, too, the question of whether there might be an oxygen atmosphere and an alien civilization to breathe it on Mars was by no means settled until well after the turn of the twentieth century; Percival Lowell went to his deathbed in 1916 still a devout believer in his Martian canals, and he was by no means alone in his belief.

Other incongruities may be more difficult to dismiss with a hand-wave to the nineteenth century, but the fact remains that vanishingly few CRPGs have ever made much sense as coherent fictions. Players who love running around inside fantasy worlds in the character of dwarves and elves, casting spells at dragons, might want to be just a little careful when throwing around adjectives like “stupid.” After all, what do all those monsters in all those dungeons actually eat when there aren’t any adventurers to hand? And wouldn’t the citizens of all these assorted fantasy worlds do better to put together a civil-defense force instead of forever relying on a “chosen one” to kill their evil wizards? Martian Dreams‘s premise, I would submit, isn’t really all that much stupider than the CRPG norm. It’s merely stupid in a very unique way which highlights incongruities that long exposure has taught us to overlook in the likes of Dungeons & Dragons. One might say that just about all CRPG stories are pretty stupid at bottom; we forgive them an awful lot because they make for a fun game.

If we can see our way clear to bestowing the same courtesy upon Martian Dreams, there’s a hell of a lot to like about its premise. Certainly the historical period it evokes is a fascinating one. Much of what we think of as modern life has its origins in the 1800s, not least the dizzying pace of progress in all its forms. For the first time in human history, the pace of technological change meant that the average person could expect to die in a very different world from the one she had been born into. Many of the changes she could expect to witness in between must have felt like magic. The invention of the railroad transformed concepts of distance almost overnight, turning what had been arduous journeys, requiring a week or more of carriage changes and nights spent in inns, into day trips; just like that, a country like England became a small place rather than a big one. And if the railroad didn’t shrink the world enough for you, telegraph cables — aptly described by historian Tom Standage as the “Victorian Internet” — were being strung up around the world, making it possible to send a message to someone thousands of miles away in seconds.

Much of modern entertainment as well has its roots in the nineteenth century, with the genre literatures arriving to greet a new mass audience of readers. While the mystery novel was being invented by Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle, science fiction was being invented by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells (the latter of whom we meet on our trip to Mars). Meanwhile the soap opera was being invented by Charles Dickens and his contemporaries, who published monthly installments of their novels for a fan base who gathered around the nineteenth century’s version of the office water cooler, obsessing over what would happen next to Little Nell or Oliver Twist. Celebrity too as we know it today has its origins in this period. When Dickens would give public readings of his novels, his female fans would scream and swoon in the throes of a sort of proto-Beatlemania, while Buffalo Bill Cody’s globe-trotting Wild West Show made his face by some accounts the most recognizable in the world by the turn of the century. (Buffalo Bill too is to be found on Mars.) And modern consumer culture begins here, with the first shopping malls opening in Paris and then spreading around the world. I could go on forever, but you get the point.

Martian Dreams proves adept at capturing the spirit of the age, conveying the boundless optimism that surrounded all of this progress in a period before the world wars and the invention of the atomic bomb revealed the darker sides of modernity. The Ultima VI engine’s look has been reworked into something appropriately steampunky, and a period-perfect music-hall soundtrack accompanies your wanderings. The writing too does its job with aplomb. To expect deep characterizations of each of the couple of dozen historical figures stranded on Mars along with you would be to ask far, far too much of it. Still, the game often does manage to deftly burrow underneath the surface of their achievements in ways that let you know that Spector and his team extended their research further than encyclopedia entries.


Theodore Roosevelt is portrayed as an awkwardly self-conscious mix of bravado and insecurity rather than the heroic Rough Rider and Trust Buster of grade-school history textbooks. Martian Dreams‘s take on the man seems to hew rather close to that of Gore Vidal, who in one of his more hilarious essays labelled Roosevelt “an American sissy.”


Martian Dreams‘s portrayal of Vladimir Lenin manages in a single sentence of dialog to foreshadow everything that would go wrong with Karl Marx’s noble dream of communism as soon as it took concrete form in the Soviet Union.

Some of the more obscure historical figures have the most amazing and, dare I say it, inspiring stories of all to share. Do you know about Nellie Bly, the young woman who checked herself into a psychiatric hospital to report first-hand the abuses suffered there by patients? Do you know about George Washington Carver, a black man who was born into slavery and became the foremost expert of his era on the techniques of sustainable farming, publishing research that has saved literally millions of lives? Even the travelers who wind up being the antagonists of the group — Grigori Rasputin, the infamous “mad monk” of late Czarist Russia, and Emma Goldman, an American anarchist activist and occasional terrorist — have intriguing things to say.

Thanks to some technology left behind by the Martians, you’ll eventually get a chance to visit many of these people inside their dreams — or nightmares. These sequences, the source of the game’s name, illuminate their personalities and life stories still further. In the case of Mark Twain, for instance, you’ll find yourself riding down a river on a paddle wheeler, trying to collect the pieces of his latest manuscript and get them to the publisher before the money runs out — about as perfect an evocation of the life the real Twain lived, writing works of genius in order to remain always one step ahead of the creditors dogging his heels, as can be imagined.

A Gallery of Eminent Victorians

The purely fictional story of the apparently dead Martian civilization is crafted with equal love. Over the course of the game, you’ll slowly revive the technology the Martians left behind, restoring power to the planet and getting the water flowing once again through Percival Lowell’s beloved canals. In the process, you’ll learn that some of the Martians still live on, at least after a fashion. I won’t say more than that so as to preserve for you the pleasure I got out of Martian Dreams. I approached the game completely cold, and found myself highly motivated to make the next discovery and thereby set into place the next piece of a mystery I found genuinely tantalizing. The story that gradually emerges fits right in with the classic lore of the red planet, with echoes of Lowell’s pseudo-science, H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s tales of John Carter on Mars. By the time of Martian Dreams, Origin was at long last beginning to hire dedicated people for the role of writer, instead of handing the task to whatever programmer or artist happened to not have much else going on at the moment. Games like this one were the happy result. Notably, Martian Dreams is the first Origin game to credit one Raymond Benson, a veteran of musical theater who would go on to make a profound impact as the head writer on Ultima VII, the next entry in the mainline series.

The worst aspect of the storytelling is, once again, Origin’s insistence that Martian Dreams fit into the overall story of Ultima‘s Avatar. With this Worlds of Ultima installment being explicitly rather than implicitly set in the past of our own Earth, the contortions the writing must go through to set up the game are even more absurd than those of The Savage Empire. This game whose premise already had the potential to strain many gamers’ credibility past the breaking point was forced to introduce a layer of time travel in order to send the Avatar and his companion Dr. Spector back to 1895, then to engage in yet more hand-waving to explain why our historians haven’t recorded trips to Mars in the 1890s. It’s all thoroughly unnecessary and, once again, best ignored. The game works best as alternate history with no connection to any other Ultima except perhaps The Savage Empire.


The dust storms evidently did one hell of a number on Mars…

I prefer Martian Dreams to The Savage Empire largely thanks to better writing and a richer theme; it doesn’t play all that radically different from its predecessor. It makes somewhat less use of the Ultima VI engine’s crafting potential — there’s nothing here close to the complexity of making grenades in The Savage Empire — but it is a longer game. Thanks to its more developed story, it can’t avoid being a bit more linear than its predecessor over the course of that length, but it never feels unduly railroaded. In my book, then, The Savage Empire is a very good game, while Martian Dreams is a great one.

I must admit that I enjoy both of these games more than any of the mainline Ultima games that preceded them. The latter by the dawn of the 1990s had accumulated a lot of cruft in the form of fan service that just had to be in each new installment. These games, by contrast, were able to start with clean slates — aside from the dodgy attempts to insert the Avatar into them, that is — and the results are tighter, more focused designs. And what a relief it is to escape for a little while from Renaissance Fair fantasy and all that excruciating faux-Elizabethan English! In an uncharacteristic fit of bravado, Warren Spector a few years after Martian Dreams‘s release called it “the best Ultima game ever.” On some days, I’m sorely tempted to agree. Only Ultima Underworld and Ultima VII — both released after Martian Dreams — make the debate at all complicated for me.


The biggest single improvement Worlds of Ultima made to the Ultima VI engine was to move conversations from the corner of the screen, as show above…


…and into the main display.

Still, it wouldn’t do just to praise these two games that I like so very much without pointing out some significant weaknesses. I wasn’t overly kind to the Ultima VI engine in my review of that game, and most of the criticisms I levied there apply to one degree or another here as well. The Worlds of Ultima teams did take some steps to improve the engine, most notably by moving the text that accompanies conversations into the main window instead of cramming it into a tiny space in the corner of the screen. At bottom, however, the Ultima VI engine remains caught out in an uncertain no man’s land between the keyboard-based “alphabet soup” interface of the earlier Ultima games and the entirely mouse-driven interfaces that were yet to come. Some things are much easier to do with the keyboard, some with the mouse — an awkward arrangement that’s only made more frustrating by the way that the divisions between the two categories are so arbitrary. You can get used to it after an hour or two, but nobody would ever accuse the interface of being elegant or intuitive. I’m sure that plenty of players over the years have found it so bafflingly opaque that they’ve given up in disgust without ever getting a whiff of the real joy of the game hidden underneath it.


The Ultima VI engine has a peculiar problem conveying depth. What looks like a stair step here is actually meant to represent an unscaleable cliff. As it is, it looks like we’ve joined the long tradition of videogame characters who can walk and run hundreds of miles but can’t hop up two feet.

In light of this reality, I’ve often seen the Worlds of Ultima games called, in reviews both from their own day and from ours, good games trapped inside a bad game engine. It’s a pithy formulation, but I don’t feel like it quite gives the whole picture. The fact is that some of the problems that dog these games have little or nothing to do with their engine. The most pernicious design issue is the fact that there just isn’t quite enough content for the games’ geographies. It’s here that one fancies one can really start to feel their status as “B” projects at Origin. The Savage Empire sports an absolutely massive abandoned underground city — as big as the entire jungle valley above it — that’s for all intents and purposes empty, excepting only a couple of key locations. I don’t know the full story behind it, but it certainly seems like a map that’s still waiting for the development team to come back and fill it up with stuff. Martian Dreams has nothing quite this egregious, but points of interest on the vast surface of Mars can nevertheless feel few and far between. Coupled with a strange lack of the alternative modes of transport that are so typical in other Ultima games — one teleportation mechanism does eventually arise, but even it’s very limited in its possible destinations — it means that you’ll spend a major percentage of your time in Martian Dreams trekking hither and yon in response to a plot that demands that you visit — and then revisit, sometimes multiple times — locations scattered willy-nilly all over the planet. Warren Spector himself put his finger on what he cogently described as “too much damn walking around” as the biggest single design issue in this game of which he was otherwise so proud.


Mars is mostly just a whole lot of nothing.

Another description that’s frequently applied to these games — sometimes dismissively, sometimes merely descriptively — is that they aren’t really CRPGs at all, but rather adventure games with, as Computer Gaming World‘s adventure critic Scorpia once put it, “a thin veneer of CRPG.” Once again, I don’t entirely agree, yet I do find the issues raised by such a description worthy of discussion.

Proponents of this point of view note that combat is neither terribly important nor terribly interesting in Worlds of Ultima, that magic has been reduced to a handful of voodoo-like spells in The Savage Empire and removed altogether from Martian Dreams, and that character development in the form of leveling-up is neither all that frequent nor all that important. All of which is true enough, but does it really mean these games aren’t CRPGs at all? Where do we draw the lines?


The Savage Empire‘s limited graphics and uninspiring combat manages to make the idea of encountering dinosaurs — dinosaurs, for Pete’s sake! — feel kind of ho-hum.

A long time ago, when I was going through a taxonomical phase, I tried to codify the differencesbetween the adventure game and the CRPG. The formulation I arrived at didn’t involve combat, magic, or experience levels, but rather differing philosophical approaches. Adventure games, I decided, offered a deterministic, bespoke experience, while CRPGs left heaps of room for emergent, partially randomized behavior. Or, to put it more shortly: the adventure game is an elaborate puzzle, while the CRPG is a simulation. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself whether it’s possible to write a walkthrough listing every single action a player should take in a game, knowing the game will always respond in the same way every time and that said walkthrough will thus be guaranteed to get the player to the winning screen. If you can, you certainly have an adventure game. If you can’t, you may very well be looking at a CRPG.

When I first made my little attempt at taxonomy, I was thinking of early text adventures and the earliest primitive CRPGs. Yet the distinctions I identified, far from fading over time, had become even more pronounced by the time of Worlds of Ultima. Early text adventures had a fair number of logistical challenges — limited light sources, inventory limits, occasional wandering creatures, even occasional randomized combat — which were steadily filed away concurrent with the slow transition from text to graphics, until the genre arrived at 1990’s The Secret of Monkey Island, perhaps the most iconic exemplar of the classic point-and-click graphic adventure. CRPGs, meanwhile, remained much more simulation-oriented, emergent experiences.

So, where does this leave us with the Worlds of Ultima? Well, these definitely aren’t games that can be played by rote from a walkthrough. They sport monsters and people wandering of their own free will, a day-to-night cycle, character attributes which have a significant effect on game play, emergent logistical concerns in the form of food (The Savage Empire), oxygen rocks which allow you to breathe more easily (Martian Dreams), and ammunition (both). Many of the problems you encounter can be dealt with in multiple ways, most or all of which arise organically from the simulation. All of these qualities hew to the simulational focus of the CRPG. Sometimes they can be a bit annoying, but in general I find that they enhance the experience, making these games feel like… well, like real adventures, even if they aren’t the sorts of things that are generally found in adventure games.

Yet I do agree that these games aren’t quite CRPGs in the old-school 1980s sense either. Layered on top of the foundation of emergent simulation is a determinstic layer of narrative, dialog, and even set-piece puzzles. The closest philosophical sibling I can find among their contemporaries is Sierra’s Quest for Glory series, although the latter games have radically different looks and interfaces and were generally purchased, one senses, by a different audience.

Some of the infelicities that can arise in the course of playing the Worlds of Ultima games have at their root a failure of the two layers to account for one another properly. When I played The Savage Empire, I broke the narrative completely by exploiting the simulation layer in a way that the game’s developers apparently never anticipated. Well into the game, after recruiting eight of the eleven tribes onto my team, I got confused about what my next goal should be in a way that I won’t go into here. Suffice to say that, instead of uniting the rest of the tribes and leading them in a coordinated attack on the Myrmidex lair, I went after the murderous insects on my own, accompanied only by an indestructible robot I’d befriended. I devised a strategy for hiding behind the robot when the insects attacked, and thereby made it at last to the heart of the nest, destroying the mystical stone that was the source of the Myrmidex’s power (and of Dr. Spector’s insanity). Just like that, and much to my shock, the finale started to play; I had thought I was just solving another quest. In its way, this anecdote is an impressive testament to the emergent possibilities of the game engine — although it would have been even more impressive had the narrative layer recognized what had happened and accounted for my, shall we say, alternativesolution to the problem of the Myrmidex. As it was, I saw an endgame movie that assumed I’d done a whole bunch of stuff I hadn’t done, and thus made no sense whatsoever.


Exterminating bugs with the help of my trusty (and indestructible) robot pal.

Whatever else you can say about it, it’s hard to imagine something like this happening in The Secret of Monkey Island. As CRPGs in general received ever more complex stories in the years that followed the Worlds of Ultima games, they took on more and more of the traditional attributes of adventure games, without abandoning their dedication to emergent simulation. Sometimes, as in Worlds of Ultima, the layers chafe against one another in these more modern games, but often the results are very enjoyable indeed. Largely forgotten by gaming history though they have been, the Worlds of Ultima games can thus be read as harbingers of games to come. In their day, these games really were the road not taken — in terms of adventure games or CRPGs, take your pick. Indeed, I’m kind of blown away by what they managed to achieve, and not even bothered unduly by my rather unsatisfying final experience in The Savage Empire; somehow the fact that I was able to break the narrative so badly and still come out okay in the end counts for more than a final movie that didn’t make much sense.

Unfortunately, gamers of the early 1990s were rather less blown away. Released in October of 1990, The Savage Empire was greeted with a collective shrug which encompassed nonplussed reviews — Computer Gaming World‘s reviewer bizarrely labeled it a “caricature” of Ultima — and lousy sales. With the release of Martian Dreams in May of 1991, Origin re-branded the series Ultima Worlds of Adventure — not that that was an improvement in anything other than word count — but the results were the same. CRPG fans’ huge preference for epic fantasy was well-established by this point; pulpy tales of adventure and Victorian steampunk just didn’t seem to be on the radar of Origin’s fan base. A pity, especially considering that in terms of genre too these games can be read as harbingers of trends to come. In the realm of tabletop RPGs, “pulp” games similar in spirit to The Savage Empire have become a welcome alternative to fantasy and science fiction since that game’s release. Steampunk, meanwhile, was just getting off the ground as a literary sub-genre of its own at the time that Martian Dreams was published; steampunk’s founding text, the novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, was published less than a year before the game.

For all that the games were thus ahead of their time in more ways than one, Worlds of Ultimaprovided a sobering lesson for Origin’s marketers and accountants by becoming the first games they’d ever released with the Ultima name on the box which didn’t become major hits. The name alone, it seemed, wasn’t — or was no longer — enough; the first chink in the series’s armor had been opened up. One could of course argue that these games should never have been released as Ultimas at all, that we should have been spared all the plot contortions around the Avatar and that they should have been allowed simply to stand on their own. Yet it’s hard to believe that such a move would have improved sales any. There just wasn’t really a place in the games industry of the early 1990s for these strange beasts that weren’t quite adventure games and weren’t quite CRPGs as most people thought of them. Players of the two genres had sorted themselves into fairly distinct groups by this point, and Origin dropped Worlds of Ultima smack dab into the void in between them. Nor did the lack of audiovisual flash help; while both games do a nice job of conveying the desired atmosphere with the tools at their disposal, they were hardly audiovisual standouts even in their day. At the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in June of 1991, Martian Dreams shared Origin’s booth with Wing Commander II and early previews of Ultima VII and Strike Commander. It’s hard to imagine it not getting lost in that crowd in the bling-obsessed early 1990s.

So, Origin wrote off their Worlds of Ultima series as a failed experiment. They elected to stop, as Spector puts it, “going to weird places that Warren wants to do games about.” A projected third game, which was to have taken place in Arthurian England, was cancelled early in pre-production. The setting may sound like a more natural one for Ultima fans, but, in light of the way that Arthurian games have disappointed their publishers time and time again, one has to doubt whether the commercial results would have been much better.


The Worlds of Ultima games will occasionally reward major achievements with a lovely graphic like the one above, but it’s clear that their audiovisual budgets were limited.

I’m a little sheepish to admit that I very nearly overlooked these games myself. In light of the awkward engine that powers them, I was totally prepared to dismiss them in a passing paragraph or two, but several commenters urged me to give them a closer look after I published my article on Ultima VI. I’m grateful to them for doing so. And I have a final bit of wonderful news to share: both The Savage Empire and Martian Dreams have been officially re-released as free downloads on GOG.com. Whether you’re a fan of Ultima and/or old-school CRPGs in general or not, I can only suggest as strongly as I know how that you give these games the chance they were denied in their own time, promising yourself beforehand that you’ll make a good solid effort to get used to the interface before you drag them back over to the trashcan of history that’s sitting there on your computer’s desktop. You might just find that your perseverance is amply rewarded.

(Sources: the book Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show: An American Legend by R.L. Wilson; New York Review of Books of August 13, 1981; Origin’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of May 17 1991, June 21 1991, and August 7 1991; Computer Gaming World of March/April 1983, March 1986, March 1991 and September 1991; Questbusters of August 1990, January 1991, and August 1991. Online sources include an interview with Warren Spector published in the fanzine Game Bytes in 1993 and republished on The Wing Commander Combat Information Center; RPG Codex‘s 2013 interview with Spector.)

 

[LESS T_T]

Cool article about the old Worlds of Ultima game series I worked on back in the early 90’s (Savage Empire and Martian Dreams). Given how few copies those games sold I’m always amazed how much interest there is in them today. You can just call me King of the Cult Classics!

 

[Infinitron]

Weird: http://exodus.voyd.net/2018/03/15/u3-upgrade-v3-3-sosaria-mod/

Release 3.3 includes a few new features, the largest of which is the inclusion of Sosaria Mod. This enhancement allows you to play Ultima III on the Lands of Lord British map from Ultima I.

In order to achieve this (for those who are interested in the details) I had to break out several data tables into external mod files. This includes the names of map files as well as the location of the towns, dungeons, moongates, exotics, etc and the inclusion of some logic to support and return the data to the game. Some mod-specific events, like the appearance of Dawn, were highly custom and had to be rewritten so that it could appear in a different location by mod. ULTIMA3.MODincludes all of the game data tables associated with the original game world, while SOSARIA.MOD is of course for Sosaria Mod. Theoretically, others could follow this pattern to contribute game world mods if they were so included. (why not a Britannia-shaped world?)

In addition to Sosaria Mod, v3.3 also includes the Start a New Game feature accessible from the in-game bootup menu, replacing the u3reset tool. Please do not use u3reset any longer, as it does not work with Sosaria Mod.

Another feature is the inclusion of a new Upgrade Toolthat streamlines the installation/upgrade process. If you’re installing on Windows, just run u3upw from Windows Explorer. DOS and Linux ports are also provided, as usual. This replaces the previous binpat/binunpat tools.

Lastly, it fixes the nasty bug associated with the Invalid Action sound effect introduced in v3.2 that I posted about here.

For more information, please read the release notes.

http://exodus.voyd.net/projects/sosaria-mod/

Why Sosaria Mod?

When I began playing the Ultima series back in 1990, I started with Ultima 6. By then the world of Britannia and its history had been firmly established. The manuals and the NPC’s in-game talked about the lore of the earlier games as if those events occurred in the same setting and all these things happened in one connected and consistent world.

I did not realize until years later when I went back to play the prequels that this history was not as stable as it was made out to be as there were some glaring continuity problems. The inter-game narrative was connected in the manuals by the Triad of Evil, but the setting was largely disconnected. The Sosaria’s of Ultima 1 and 3 barely resembled each other, and Ultima 2 took place entirely on Earth. Furthermore, Ultima 4 had no resemblance to its predecessors save for the namesakes of some cities.

What if we could take those disparate worlds and make them more consistent with each other? What would Ultima 2 feel like if it took place in Sosaria? What would Ultima 3 feel like if that Sosaria was consistent with the one in Ultima 1? And can it be slightly less difficult to imagine this world could become Britannia? That’s the driving purpose behind Sosaria Mod – make the game worlds of the first trilogy consistent with one another, and possibly later lore.

Why choose the Lands of Lord British from Ultima 1?

Note that the four continents of Ultima 1 are modifications of Richard Garriott’s original D&D campaign map, while the Sosaria of Ultima 3 is actually closer to the original. He talks about this in the Avatar Adventures interview:

“Then for Ultima III, since I wasn’t going to be doing the time travel theme again, I didn’t need Earth. So I went back to a modified Earth, this place Sosaria. It didn’t really look much like the first one, but I know it was, because when I built the first one I drew in my old D&D world and cut rivers through it and cut it up into separate land masses. Ultima I actually had four maps on it, but they are just a flip and translation of the ones you see for Ultima III. Pretty close to it, just cut up. Ultima III is actually a truer representation of my old D&D world.” – Ultima: The Avatar Adventures, p364

However, despite this information, I decided to embrace Ultima 1’s layout for this mod rather than the Ultima 3’s for several reasons.

1. All other continents in U1, including Lands of Danger and Despair (aka Serpent Isle), are transformations of the LoLB continent. Since Serpent Isle’s shape is canon, a case could be made that the LoLB in U1 would make more sense to carry forward.
2. The LoLB map can be transformed into Britannia with less work. It still requires a massive cataclysm to have taken place, but the persistent towns like Moon, Britain, and Yew are near the appropriate geographic spots already.
3. The U3 world map is already currently in use as the main continent in Shroud of the Avatar. With SotA being a successor to Ultima even in terms of world lore, it did not feel appropriate to reuse the same shape in Sosaria Mod.