As a kid I was thrilled to meet Lord British at the Apple Fest in Boston (1985, I think?). I told him all about how I loved his game and he said that since I liked it so much why didn't I present at his kiosk?
Later I realized that I was telling him I loved his game which was unreleased and already being copied illegally.
I was pretty obsessed with learning enough Apple IIe assembly to reproduce the tile graphics of ultima but never got close. These days... there's a community dedicated to reverse engineering the source code for Ultima and fixing bugs: https://xu4.sourceforge.net/ and even a team that made a modern Apple IIe Ultima-like (https://www.6502workshop.com/p/nox-archaist.html)
Another thing I realized, playing Nox archaist, is that much of the modern game mechanics already existed at that time: it was key to pay tons of attention to arming your fighters and using the right spells by your cleric and magician. I never knew I was supposed to optimize my builds when I was a kid, so my teams always ended up wimpy and dying. I learned how to hex-edit my player's disk sectors to give them 99 HP, which made the end game much easier.
I read the book (well, up to a point; I stopped playing CRPGs in early 90s to concentrate on school). I did not know about PLATO, which hosted wizardry-like games before Wizardry existed, and the authors of Wizardry played those games.
Ultima VII: Part 2 is one of the best games ever made imo. I still remember waiting for the UPS truck to deliver it to my rural childhood home. One of the great things about these games is that they were packaged with real maps, ankhs, sometimes coins and other artifacts. Really pulled me in as a youth. I wore an ankh as a necklace for several years and still consider Garriott a personal hero.
7:2 is amazing but I’d put 5 over it. Five was the last of being able to “talk” to the game. Something that we haven’t been able to do really in mainstream games until now with LLMs. I’m really hoping for an updated 5 style with really conversations here soon that gives the same sort if magic 4 and 5 did for me then.
Yeah this is one of the things that made me sad when dialogue heavy - especially voice-acted - games became the norm. Wizardry VII was another good example, it really increases immersion when you have to remember things and prompts aren't just multiple choice. But I suppose people said that about drawing your own maps too, and I'm not sure I want to go back to that. :)
Should you want to try map drawing again, it's alive and well in games like Grimrock, Etrian Odyssey, and others. In Etrian Odyssey, you use the lower screen as a map drawing tool.
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss in 1992 was I think the first PC game I really obsessed about. From the first-person 3D (well, 3D environment, 2D sprites) combat, the runes and repairing items, it was an early "immersive" game. I took copious notes as well as buying any games magazine that had gameplay tips. Its sequel, Ultima Underworld 2 (1993), never really captured me in the same way.
It was a "sequel" in name only. In reality, a kickstarter cash-grab with neither attention to detail nor significant effort put into it. Not as bad as the utter fiasco that turned out to be "shroud of the avatar" [0] but still a solid FU to those who backed it.
It's more than clear that old school gaming pioneers have completely ran out of ideas and are taking advantage of a nostalgic playerbase in order to keep the cash rolling in (I hear Garriott's latest NFT game has vanished), cratering their reputation in the process.
They are not the ones to push the medium further. Fresh ideas will require fresh, young, unknown visionaries.
Ultima VII: Part 2 was my favourite of the series as well. The world of Serpent Isle had such a rich setting, and folklore. There was something really haunting and beautiful about the world they created. I feel like they really took the things that made U7 great, and perfected it. In case anyone hasn't read it. Here's a great interview with one of the lead designers that explains why the story pivoted in the way it did:
100% agreed about U7 being kind of the best game ever. It was utterly mindblowing for me back in South Africa in the 90s, pre-internet, to have this massive "living" world. It's unfortunate that U8 was such a let down :/
My computer was barely up to playing U VII and unfortunately I played it over summer break the year it came out, and a bit the following, and never finished it.
Instead I got all the spoilers for Starflight from Usenet and finished it.
>I do wonder that no one thought of it in even the relatively brief history of videogames prior to Ultima; it does seem a fairly obvious approach, after all. On the other hand, I can’t point to a specific example that would give me grounds to really challenge the claim. ... Ultima‘s tile-graphics engine was not so much the work of Garriott as of a friend of his who was the only other person to have a significant role in the game’s design and implementation: Ken W. Arnold (not the Ken Arnold who created Rogue).
I'll comment briefly on this as someone who spent a couple of years trying to build an Ultima-esque tile graphics game on the Apple II. Ken had a clever insight that eluded me completely: "Don't try to draw the tiles one at a time, dummy."
Ken's code was fast enough to be useful in an interactive fullscreen game because it drew an entire row of 280 pixels at once, then went back over the same row of map data, reusing the indexes for the next 14 lines in that row of tiles. There was less indirection and practically no overhead compared to drawing individual 2-byte-by-14-row block shapes.
Conversely, anyone trying to draw one tile at a time would have ended up with a low update rate, or would have been forced to draw the map in a small window. Either way, a worse gameplay experience would have resulted, especially if you were (as I was) comparing your work to Ultima.
> A good example of the same kind of thinking, much later, would have been Abrash's exploration of the undocumented "Mode X" on the MCGA cards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X), without which Wolf3D and Doom would have been much less awesome.
Neither Wolf3D or Doom used Mode-X, they're both 320x200 "Mode-Y" games IIRC.
Thanks -- I'll remove that postscript, as it appears to be wrong. A quick search doesn't make the story 100% clear, so it's better not to spread potential misinfo.
Conveniently both your examples have received technical deep dives by Fabien Sanglard, who has made both the relevant texts freely available in PDF form [0][1].
Mode-X was an annoying video mode to actually make use of without a performance hit. So despite its highly desirable combination of square pixels and 256-colors, it didn't see much use in games from the DOS days. 13h (320x200x256) was far more common because of its contiguous, linear frame buffers. Mode-X needed annoying bank switching where the first bank had pixels 0,4,8... and second bank pixels 1,5,9... and so on. The VGA was such a PITA.
Huh, well that's reason #27 that my ultima-like tiles never rendered fast enough.
I was making the equivalent of sprites (hex codes) and I think you could even draw them from BASIC (although looping in BASIC was too slow to update the tiles).
Are you thinking of shape tables? Those were 'vector' based (sort of), hexy, usable from BASIC but too slow for anything 'real', at least, not on a Ultima-sized game type of scale.
yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_table
after I realized I coudln't do this in BASIC fast enough I went down the assembly route but never could figure out the various math bits required to deal with the weird addressing of Apple IIe high res graphics.
Yeah, I think the effective purpose of shape tables was to waste the time of the zillions of kids who thought they could write a game that way. Although I did make myself a crappy Rally X clone (although my 'inspiration' was Super Off Road) using shape tables for the (two) cars and that mostly worked. For a pile of tiles it would be hopeless though.
It's difficult to overstate just how influential D&D was in video games, I don't think there's anything else remotely at that scale. Ultima and Wizardry would inspire the creation of the first JRPGs, and on it went. Maybe it's partly because D&D was becoming popular among nerds just as personal computers were becoming semi-affordable.
And it's not even just RPGs, literally any game with the concept of experience points and levels ultimately owes some small debt to Gary and Dave.
It is interesting how Western and Japanese computer RPGs both take inspiration from D&D, but how they went in completely opposite directions.
Western RPGs focused on the player character aspect, offering a lot of freedom and very little characterization. You are the adventurer and this is your story. The downside, compared to tabletop RPGs is that the story is limited as computers can't react to every situation like human GMs can.
Japanese RPGs focused on the storytelling aspect. Trading freedom for a much better developed story. You are not a player character anymore, you follow another character in a story.
What they have in common is the combat and XP system, though the D&D connection is usually made more obvious in the Western RPGs. For example dice rolls are often made explicit, whereas in Japanese RPGs, you may only see the final result of your actions.
Still grinding my way through the Goldbox games. Same party as I started with in Pool of Radiance ~1995 is now somewhere halfway(?) through Pools of Darkness. Not sure if I am going to try to complete the rest of the Goldbox after that, or continue with something more modern. My queue of CRPGs to play "once I'm done with the Goldbox games" is getting ridiculous.
Put all the games in a git repo, scripts to launch the games in Dosbox, all the game-files and documents installed from GOG (originally the ones from the old Wizworx CDROM). Version-control is great, since there is a limit to number of saves in the game. And keeping notes of every thing I do, every time I load or save, really helps keep my sanity in the branching alternative time-lines that are created when savescumming through a CRPG.
What I liked about U4 was the "morality" system required to advance the game. Sure it was kind of canned and could be gamed - in fact you had to grind out the last few virtues you need to elevate, but as a kid it felt meaningful compared to standard hack and slash. Don't know of any other game that tried to do something like that. Great thing about U4 was that it did and it doesn't really drag down gameplay. In later ultimas the system existed to some extent, but was watered down and kind of muddled.
Of course you could also say screw that, rip off the blind reagents vendor and make cheap fireballs to kill everyone in town and take their gold, but you then couldn't win the game or even get the best weapons - the mystics.
Even today the 8 virtues are probably still a halfway decent ethics system to follow IRL, though you'll never be able to whack your enemies with a mystic sword.
That poster is right, although I think their take is overly simplistic. There are a lot of reasons, and a lot more nuance. But it really was one of those perfect moment in time type things. It couldn't have happened exactly that way any earlier, nor later.
Yeah, that's how I feel about early WoW too (vanilla/TBC), it just was how it was then, and that'll never happen again. Gotta love it where it was, and remember those good experiences. It was a really cool time to be a gamer with a decent computer and net connection and family/friends to play it with, and that's good enough to look back on and appreciate. Like so many things in life, "you can't go back", even if all the game code and infra still runs exactly the same.
We loved ultima 3 growing up. A bunch of us were playing it in middle school and we'd occasionally swap hints about how to advance. Before the internet thats all we had.
Out of our group, at least one of us had a real copy of each game, making the spell books and instructions available... The cloth maps were fun, but I don't think we used them during game play.
The games were a bit of grind, but we didn't care.
I do like the Ars Video on how they spent all this time on the "ultima online ecosystem" only to have it not work out..
Ultima III had this weird quirk where you could draw a "path" across the map by killing monsters and not opening the chest they'd drop. We'd do that between towns / important locations: we'd surround our desired line with unopened chess all around or path, leaving only one "square" line (a line with a width of one square).
That way it'd be very rare that monsters would spawn in our path and we could travel across the map really quick.
That trick wasn't working in Ultima IV anymore.
As a sidenote, I find this one mindboggling: an Apple ][e with a MIDI interface which Ultima V supported back in... 1988. The Apple ][e is hooked to old Roland gear. It looks and sounds georgous, amazing stuff (skip to 12m to hear a demo):
They were a wall: monsters couldn't occupy the same tile as a chest. Of course there was no such thing as pathfinding, monsters just made a beeline for you and got hung up on the first obstacle.
Ultima 7:2 taught me more about DOS memory management than anything else. Had to handcraft a menu-driven autoexec.bat / config.sys monster to get that thing going. HIMEM.SYS ... oh the memories.
A single KB too much in a mouse driver and you were unable to start the game. Oh you want sound? Roland MT-32 or Soundblaster Pro? But how will you load all those drivers in those first 640K of RAM?
I remember having specific 'boot disks' with the right autoexec.bat / config.sys combinations for a bunch of different Origin Systems games. I know I definitely had them for Ultima VII, and Wing Commander Privateer. Another amazing game I put many, many hours into.
I ended up doing the same thing, eventually I had a menu which would boot a minimal DOS, one with all the bells and whistles, one for going straight to doss hell, another for Windows, games, etc. Cool that others independently arrived at this solution.
Heh. I remember putting the underworld disk in the 1541 while on the surface. When you moved out of the sector the map would update with chests and monsters strewn about above ground. Putting the regular disk in again it would right itself eventually.
The c64 with Ultima III and IV brought my D&d dreams to the screen. Was a wonderful thing to pursue during summer vacation.
I've been enjoying playing a single-player/small-scale multiplayer mod of Ultima Online inspired by the early Ultima games called Ruins & Riches.
If you have nostalgia for Ultima and/or Ultima Online I strongly recommend it.
It doesn't have a dedicated webpage anymore, but there's some reddit posts describing it's current state, see e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/ultimaonline/comments/10axsri/ruins...
Watched the first couple of these. Good way to get the feel of the games (some came out before I was born, wow) without having to dedicate a lot of time to grinding. Thanks for the link!
Enjoyed playing a friend's copy of Ultima 1 so much, I bought Ultima 2 for my Mac and played it through in black and white --- which was quite the contrast to the full-colour cloth map (which I really wish I still had).
I’ve played ultima a lot since i was 10 until I was like 15, emulating it with wine on linux I think has contributed to my ability to troubleshoot issues
There's also followup articles on all the subsequent Ultima games (except IX), the Worlds of Ultima games, and Ultima Underworld on the same site - search https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/ for "Ultima". Garriot and Origin in general also come up in some of the other posts, mainly in the posts on Wing Commander.
> Like so much in Garriott’s early games, simply because it sounded cool; certainly this title has no more bearing on the game’s plot, such as it is, than does the name Ultima.
I mean, the name doesn't even have a bearing on the game's genre, let alone its plot. I'd say Ultima was a space shooter if I'd only heard its name.
You mean like an 8-bit space shooter like Gradius or Blazing Lazers for Turbo Graphix?
If so, I definitely agree. Actually sounds way more dope as a space shooter, tbh. Like the "ULTIMAte" fighter spaceship. Would also explain why even a novice pilot with an NES controller can still annihilate 100 other ships before going down.
Later I realized that I was telling him I loved his game which was unreleased and already being copied illegally.
I was pretty obsessed with learning enough Apple IIe assembly to reproduce the tile graphics of ultima but never got close. These days... there's a community dedicated to reverse engineering the source code for Ultima and fixing bugs: https://xu4.sourceforge.net/ and even a team that made a modern Apple IIe Ultima-like (https://www.6502workshop.com/p/nox-archaist.html)
Another thing I realized, playing Nox archaist, is that much of the modern game mechanics already existed at that time: it was key to pay tons of attention to arming your fighters and using the right spells by your cleric and magician. I never knew I was supposed to optimize my builds when I was a kid, so my teams always ended up wimpy and dying. I learned how to hex-edit my player's disk sectors to give them 99 HP, which made the end game much easier.