The Birth of Ultima

After his success with Akalabeth, Garriott was infused with ambition and determined to make a new game that would make the other seem primitive by comparison. Garriott considered his earlier game a hobby project that had stumbled into the commercial sector by accident: "I had been working for my own enjoyment and edification, not my dinner."

The new game would be a commercial endeavor from the start, targeted at a larger audience. Garriott teamed up his friend and coworker Ken Arnold (nicknamed "Sir Kenneth") to create a tile-based graphics system reminiscent of a miniatures tabletop, which requires much less storage space and allows for large, colorful environments.

Garriott used this system to depict the vast countryside but incorporated the wireframe, first-person perspective of Akalabeth for the dungeons. Switching between these perspectives gave players of the game an impression of vastness; the game felt more like a world than a dungeon. The product was finished in 1981, and Ultima was published by California Pacific, the same company Garriott had relied on for Akalabeth.

Perhaps what impressed gamers and critics more than the graphics was the truly epic size of the game. Indeed, rather than limit itself to one time period, the setting moves from the Middle Ages to the Space Age. There's even a sequence featuring first-person perspective space flight and combat! Critics marveled at how characters starting off with maces and other crude weapons ended the game with phazors and blasters.

There are also several nice twists, such as monsters (gelatinous cubes) that destroy armor and others that take the character's food. As with the previous game, food is a serious and constant concern. However, if the character dies, the player can try to resurrect him. The only problem here is that the character might materialize on a water tile and be unable to move away -- an infuriating bug.

The early Ultima games offered monochromatic wireframe perspective in dungeons. Garriott had developed these techniques in the earlier Akalabeth.

The game also handles hit points in an unusual way. Instead of regenerating by resting or healing, the character must either buy hit points from the king or receive them as he leaves dungeons. Of course, if the player runs out of hit points, the character dies and must be resurrected. I'm not sure the system makes much logical sense, but it didn't seem to arouse much disdain from critics.

The system also differs somewhat from D&D rules for character creation -- instead of rolling randomly for stats, the player is given 90 points to distribute across six categories: strength, agility, stamina, charisma, wisdom, and intelligence.

Of course, a sensible distribution depends on the choice of type, or class: fighter, cleric, wizard, or thief. There are four races to choose from, one being hobbits -- perhaps a nod to Tolkien. We'll see this point distribution system show up in many later games, though it's unclear if it's really an improvement over the more traditional model based on rolling three six-sided dice.

In addition to the 3D dungeons, Ultima featured colorful top- down modes. Here's the famous Castle of Lord British, who is seen here in the throne room on the upper right.

The storyline builds on Akalabeth's. The evil wizard Mondain has enslaved the lands of Sosaria using a gem of power that makes him completely unstoppable. It's the player's mission to travel back in time and kill him before he can make the gem and take over the world. Solving the game means traveling across vast distances, fighting random encounters along the way.

The game was originally available only for the Apple II+, though ports followed for the Atari 8-bit computers in 1983. In 1986, the game was rewritten in assembly language and updated with better graphics and a few other small changes. This version was ported to the Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and MSX platforms and is more familiar to most gamers than the original.