The resurrection of an old Commodore 128 sorta got me thinking about all the old cool games I used to play, such as the Ultima series. If you grew up in the 80’s, this is THE best game series not so much for their graphics (which were, for the time, pushing the envelope of what was possible) but rather because of their unique story lines.
For those who may not remember, the Ultima series was created by Richard Garriott, aka Lord British, who went on to form Origin Systems (which sadly got swallowed up by EA.)
Ultima 1 – 3, The Age of Darkness, had you fighting various baddies to save a land called Sosaria (although Ultima 2 took place on Earth.) Ultima pit you against an evil wizard called Mondain, Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress was his apprentice Minax screwing around with time, and Exodus: Ultima III was their hell-spawn creation out to destroy Sosaria.
Ultima 4 – 6, The Age of Enlightment, had you going on a quest to become The Avatar, the embodiment of virtue, and then the repercussions that your quest caused. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar is considered to be one of the more innovative games of its time, since instead of the usual pattern of “kill this, gather loot, and eventually kill some big bad guy,” in Quest of the Avatar you were on a quest to ultimately better yourself. Ultima V: Warriors of Virtue brought you back to save the Kingdom of Britannia when Lord British was lost in an expedition to explore the newly-formed Underworld, and Ultima VI: The False Prophet brought a new threat – a race of Gargoyles who were being killed off because of something you did back in Ultima IV. This was something new – typically you finished a game and everyone celebrated, you were the hero, and all lived happily ever after. Ultima VI threw in a big twist – what you did in Ultima IV might have been great for the humans on Britannia, but it was disastrous to someone else, and now you had to deal with the results of your actions.
Ultima 7-9, The Age of the Guardian, takes place about 200 years after the events of Ultima VI. A seemingly benevolent being calling itself The Guardian has decided he wants to rule Britannia, and a new religious group called The Fellowship is helping him do it. You seal off his entrance route in Ultima VII: The Black Gate, defeat him once again (and learn more about the world’s history) in Ultima VII Part 2: The Serpent Isle. The Guardian banishes you to a strange world in Pagan: Ultima VIII, where you practically destroy the place in order to get home (something that did not sit too well with fans.) In Ascension: Ultima IX, you manage to defeat the Guardian once and for all, but you sacrifice yourself in the process. (Aside from the game being delayed and plagued with bugs, it left many plot holes and was a pretty big disappointment as a series ending.)
The Collectors Edition of Ascension came with a CD that included every Ultima game from 1-8 (it didn’t include the two Ultima Underworld games unfortunately) as well as Akalabeth (the first game created by Richard Garriott, which had nothing at all to do with Ultima but was later re-released with a brief tie-in introduction.) With the exception of Ascension, none of the Ultima games will run under Windows XP or Vista – Ultima was originally written for an Apple ][, and later ported to Commodore and finally the PC. Ultima 1-4 were CGA/EGA graphics, with Ultima 5 featuring 16 color graphics if you had a Tandy system. (I remember playing it at Radio Shack when I worked there.) So, to make them work on newer systems requires an application called DOSBox, which emulates the old DOS environment so games such as these will run. There is a version available for Mac OS X – how perverse is that, playing circa-1980 DOS games on a MacBook Pro.
I did some web searching, and came up with some modern updates for a few of the games. UX4 is a Mac version of Ultima IV, and includes updated graphics and sound. Exult was originally a port of Ultima VII to X-Windows, but it now runs under Windows and OS X. (This is an accomplishment and a half – Ultima VII used a rather strange memory manager that prevented it from running under Windows. In fact it was kinda hard to make it work under DOS due to its strict memory requirements.) I also found Pentagram, a Mac version of Pagan. There are also some rather ambitious projects to re-write several Ultima games to use the Dungeon Siege or the Morrowind engines (most of which will probably never be completed.) All of these require the original game data to avoid copyright issues.
So tonight I played Ultima VII. Sure, compared to what is possible today the game is sorely outdated in terms of graphics, but the story line of U7 and the games leading up to it are, well, timeless. Every game before it, and just about every game released now, all deal with the same concept – you gotta go kill something. You never met this thing, and it didn’t really do anything bad to you, but you have to go kill it because you’re told to. (An exception to this might be Halo, since you ultimately team up with your enemy to defeat an even bigger enemy, which takes a page from Starcraft, and the Warcraft universe seems to be heading in that direction as well.) So you spend the entire game killing lesser creatures, collecting armor, weapons, and money to purchase more armor and weapons, until the game finally ends with a climactic battle between good and evil. You win, everyone gets drunk and parties for a week, and all is well until the sequel comes out and sends you off against the big evil brother out for revenge. Sure, there have been variations on that theme – maybe you’re not a big beefy space marine, perhaps instead you’re a meek farmer who takes up a sword out of necessity. Maybe you’re a scientist who happens to be in the right place at the right time and knows how to swing a crowbar. Maybe, just maybe, you break the mold and are a female who can kick just as much ass as your male counterparts. (I am intentionally leaving out the entire genre of Japanese games that all star a super-enhanced hero with a sword larger than an SUV who can call upon demonic powers that would have most people wetting themselves.) Compare that to the storyline in Ultima 4 – you show up, you have no idea why you are there or what you’re supposed to do. You wander around, gathering followers, and learn about this spiritual quest to become something called an Avatar. To do this, you have to live by eight virtues, and become someone people can look up to. Throughout the game you run into a lot of enemies, and there is a lot of killing, but there is no epic final ultimate battle to win the game. You fight your way down into the depths to find a Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, answer questions to show that you learned something while playing, and bang, that was the end. The game did not lead you by the hand either, like most games do today. You actually had to THINK. You had to keep notes. You had to remember where people were. You didn’t have a built-in journal or floating arrows that led you straight to your destination, nor did the game assume that you had the IQ and attention span of a fruit-fly and dumb everything down for you.
It was great.