There are possibly more games bearing the name of Ultima than there are
in any other series. Depending on how you count, they even beat
Final Fantasy!The Ultima games are the most long-lived and successful in the CRPG genre largely because of the depth NPC and story interaction offers. You don't just ask characters you meetWhere's this?orAny rumors?; You ask them about themselves, their lives, and the world around them. In the Ultima games, NPC's have virtual lives. They have personalities, concerns, goals, even schedules. — Justin A. Hussel in a Daggerfall review, now offline
There are possibly more games bearing the name of Ultima than there are
in any other series. Depending on how you count, they even beat
Final Fantasy!
Back in 1981, when the first one came out, it was a revolution. This was an RPG that was not mostly hack'n'slash, but puzzle-oriented.
Unique is also the system of virtues, which are part of your character profile: Humility, Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Sacrifice, Honor, and Spirituality. They were introduced in IV. 1999, in an interview for CDMag, Richard Garriott said this about their origin:
Ultima III was Origin's first product, so it was also the first time I got mail directly from users. So I'd see these letters that called the game a satanic perverter of America's youth. Suddenly I realized how much people were reading into these really simple games that I'd never intended to have within them.
I took this very seriously. Suddenly I said,
Gee, I really do need to pay attention to what goes into my games,because they are affecting people in certain ways, or they're reading things into my beliefs or the message I was trying to relate, or they've learned something that I never put there. So I said,Boy, it would be a lot better if I paid attention to what I put there.It was a combination of eye-opening, and a growing sense of responsibility, combined also with being the age where I was moving out of my parents' house. I was like,
Alright, I'm on my own,andOh no, I've got to make these tough decisions.It got me thinking about what the point is to making these games, and what it is leading to.So the first decision was that I wanted to do a game where it was important how you fulfilled the role of being this virtuous hero. I said to myself,
Well, how do I write a game about being virtuous?
In IV and V, these virtues are your character creation. The gypsy asks you a series of questions that will single out one virtue. This virtue will determine your profession (aka character class) and your starting location in the game.
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NES | SNES | ||
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| Ultima I | 80 | 83 | 86 | EGA | 87 | |||||
| Ultima II | 82 | 83 | CGA | 83 | 85 | 85 | ||||
| Ultima III | 83 | 86 | 86 | 86 | 87 | |||||
| Ultima IV | 85 | 86 | 85 | EGA | 87 | 87 | 88 | 90 | ||
| Ultima V | 87 | 88 | 88 | 89 | 90 | 90 | ||||
| Ultima VI | 90 | VGA | 90 | 91 | 91 | 92 | ||||
| Ultima VII | 92 | 94 | ||||||||
| Ultima VIII | 94 | |||||||||
| Ultima IX | SVGA | 99 |
This table lists only the main, numbered, Ultima games, not the extras like Ultima Underground, Ultima Online, or the Worlds of Ultima games, and is by no means complete as far as platforms are concerned.
Technically, the biggest steps were between V and VI and between VIII and IX. With VI, Origin moved from the Apple ][ to the PC as main platform and replaced the simple two-color tiles with elaborate VGA graphics. And Ultima IX was a 3D game.
Story-wise the games are divided into three trilogies, with the greatest changes between the first and second trilogy, when the virtues and the term "Avatar" were introduced and the setting changed from Sosaria to Britannia.
Ultima IX (Ascension) stands outside the trilogy of trilogies, it is their conclusion and synthesis.
Revival projects and modernizations exist for practically all of the Ultima games, including Akalabeth, or Ultima 0, as it is sometimes called by fans. Akalabeth was Richard Garriot's first game in 1978, written in Basic for the Apple ][. A DOS port was included in the 1998 Ultima Collection. There is a remake project by Minerjr.
It really is Ultima 0. Literally, if I go into a dungeon, the exact same code is used in Ultima I. The only thing we added was the bitmapped graphics for the outdoor areas. I created Akalabeth for me, in the summer after my senior year in high school when I was working at a ComputerLand store. The owner convinced me to self-publish the game, so I went out and produced 200 ziplock bags, coversheets and printed manuals. None of these have disks because they were expensive, and I'd only copy them when I needed them. I created 16 of them, and sold 15 in the store. Then a publisher in California got hold of it and purchased the publishing rights.—Richard Garriott in an interview with CDMag
These pages were originally developed by William Herrin for the Ultima Dragons. As best as lore has it, Lord British was so impressed with the site that he decided to make it an official part of the Origin web. The site contains some of the best and most unique information available on the Ultima Universe.
