Friday 15 June 2001

Today's picture is a screenshot from the 9th and final adventure in the Ultima series of PC games. A cross between an adventure game and a role playing game, Ultima had a great following back in the early 1990es. The company that published it, Origin, also launched the popular space opera Wing Commander, with lots of spaceship fighting and stuff. Their motto was: "We create worlds".

They created worlds

Origin was bought by Electronic Arts, like so many other game companies. It is dead now. Dissolved. Not profitable enough for their corporate masters. The guy behind the Ultima games got out in time. Richard Garriott, affectionately known as Lord British, was living rather well when last he was in the news. That would be when Origin was dissolved, and he and his friends from the "original" Origin held a memorial party or some such.

The games from Origin were always state of the art when they were released, running only on the newest hardware. I can't say that I bought any of them immediately upon release, as I never had the computer to run them. Ultima IX for instance must be a year or two old, but I bough mine fairly cheap today. Copyright 1999. My, how time flies. :)

I particularly remember with fondness the first Wing Commander game. I got it for free with my sound card, if memory serves. And it really did show off the hardware. Then again, a sound card was such a great leap into virtual reality at the time, that I could sit for a long way just listening to the music while the credits were rolling. Heh. Dreaming myself away into outer space. They created worlds, indeed.

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The rapidly improving hardware is reflected in the long series of Ultima games, from the stick characters in the first game and onward to the almost photographic landscapes of the last, with realistically changing weather. However, in terms of gameplay and content, the curve did not go the same way. The height of the series was probably around Ultima 5, perhaps even 4.

The first trilogy were pretty straight adventure games with a dash of roleplaying. Sword and sorcery. Kill or be killed. The next trilogy was very different, focusing on ethics. Yes, and this was probably why it became such a cult hit. In Ultima IV, the player had to establish the 8 virtues, defining himself by good deeds. Killing baddies was still considered a good thing, but you were not supposed to slaughter anything that moved. Some problems had other solutions. This climaxed in the sixth game, where an obvious alien invasion of baddies turned out to be something entirely different, and the solution quite unexpected.

The third and last trilogy disenchanted many fans by its darkness. The questioning of ethics went too far for many tastes, as the hero was forced to do some really dubious stuff. I remember particularly in Ultima 7 part 2, Serpent Isle, that there was a lot of meeting interesting women and killing them. The paranoia that permeated the whole game eventually put me off from ever completing it. I saw in the hint book that you were also supposed to kill your best friends. Not my style, not even in a game. The next to last game was the infamous Pagan, which had some rituals patterned on ceremonial magick from our own world. You were supposed to use pentagrams with red and black candles and eventually summon a demonic presence. More stuff like that.

The last game in the series, Ascension, seems to back up a bit. The manual at least indicates that restoring the virtues is a priority. And magickal power is dependent on good deeds. Now that is something I like to see. :) But since the game is very mouse intensive, I cannot play it much. My right hand hurts already. So I can't tell you how it develops. Anyway, this was meant to be the last game in the series too. It is meant to provide closure. I doubt I will ever play it all the way through, but it was kind of interesting to see.

Graphically, the game now sports a camera trailing behind the Avatar. This pretty much makes the old feature of a whole party meaningless, not that there has been any such since Ultima 7. It also makes some of us sorry that Origin no longer provides a female avatar ... This blond guy is certainly no Lara Croft. If you have to look at someone's backside for several weeks, some customization would be in order. Uh, that was an attempt at humor. But the camera placement remains a grudge. The broader slanted top-down view of earlier games was far more comfortable.

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If my hand could take much more writing, I'd spend some more time creating worlds myself. I am up to another magic fantasy story, but typing is rather hard on me these days. Teenage marsupial hero yellow magic fantasy. Now that is creative. But more about that if it amounts to anything. For now, good night. May you all be well!