“Consider this,” says the gypsy at the start of Ultima IV, and puts a moral dilemma to the player: a host who agrees to a treaty but insults your country at dinner. Do you bear the slurs, or demand an apology? Seven questions later the game has decided who you are. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer, Scorpia, spotted what was missing: “There is no central evil to defeat here; no Mondain, no Minax, no Exodus.” For three games Richard Garriott had sent players to kill a wizard. In 1985 he asked them to become a better person instead. The series that made that turn had begun six years earlier, in a computer shop in Houston, and it went on to put Britannia online.
Fast facts
- Creator: Richard Garriott, who signed his games “Lord British”.
- Publishers: California Pacific (Ultima, 1981), Sierra On-Line (Ultima II, 1982), then Garriott’s own Origin Systems from Ultima III (1983).
- Main series: nine numbered games, Ultima (1981) to Ultima IX: Ascension (1999).
- Spin-offs: the Worlds of Ultima games (1990–91), Ultima Underworld (1992) and Ultima Online (1997).
From Akalabeth to Ultima
Garriott told Computer Gaming World in 1986 how it started. He learned Dungeons & Dragons in 1977, wrote 28 small role-playing games at school on a Teletype that ran on paper tape, and after leaving school worked in a ComputerLand store, where he met an Apple II (“Wow! Graphics!”). The result was Akalabeth, with “perspective-view dungeon graphics”. The store owner talked him into selling it himself; he spent $200 on zip-lock bags, and when a copy reached the publisher California Pacific “there were tickets waiting for me at the airport”. He told the German magazine PC Player in 1999 that California Pacific sold 30,000 copies of Akalabeth at five dollars each to him, and that he first called his next game Ultimatum before shortening the name to Ultima for copyright reasons.
California Pacific published Ultima in 1981, then ran into financial trouble. Other publishers wanted the sequel, but Garriott wanted “a cloth map enclosed in a nice box, rather than just the ziplock with a disk in it”. Sierra On-Line agreed and published Ultima II in 1982. He did not feel Sierra was “author friendly”, so in 1983 he, his brother Robert and Chuck Bueche started Origin Systems, and Ultima III: Exodus was its first product. Each game took longer to write: Akalabeth three months, Ultima nine, Ultima II and III a year each and Ultima IV two years. Garriott rewrote every Ultima from scratch.
The Quest of the Avatar
Ultima IV (1985) grew from two things, Garriott said. He had seen a television programme about the Avatar of Eastern religions, “a perfect being”, and he had started getting fan mail from players who read things into his games. In the earlier Ultimas a champion of good often had to steal from shops to survive; he wanted a game where that was not the answer. “It is intended that it be you, the player, traveling in the lands of Britannia,” he said, and the character-building questions were there so the player would feel “responsible for that character’s deeds”.
He built the virtues from three principles, Truth, Love and Courage, which he noticed in The Wizard of Oz (the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion), and combined them into eight: Compassion, Valour, Honour, Justice, Humility, Sacrifice, Spirituality and Honesty. Working out which virtue came from which principles was left for the player. The world was 16 times the size of the earlier games’, 256 by 256 tiles, and its dungeons held 11-by-11 rooms, each designed by hand. The bridge trolls, Garriott admitted, went in a week before release, “when I finally found a spot to put in the ten lines of code”. Computer Gaming World gave Ultima IV its Adventure Game of the Year award.
A bigger Britannia
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny followed in 1988, and Ultima VI: The False Prophet in 1990 threw out almost everything players knew. Scorpia wrote that after five games “of established style and pattern, this one came as a shock”: the alphabet-long list of commands was gone, the world and its towns were drawn at one scale, fights happened on the map instead of a separate combat screen, and “just about any object in the game can be taken, moved, or manipulated, whether it’s a pair of pliers or a grandfather clock”. It took her several days to get used to. The new interface worked with a mouse or the keyboard. The British magazine ACE called Ultima VI “yet another quantum leap in playability”.
Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992) finished the move to a mouse-driven game with no typing and set the story two hundred years on, in a Britannia infiltrated by a friendly-seeming cult, the Fellowship. Computer Gaming World’s Charles Ardai admitted he had been warned off it by people who had not played it. “Well, they understood wrong,” he wrote, and compared it to “a really good fantasy novel”. The series reached a lower point with Ultima VIII: Pagan (1994), which exiled the Avatar to another world and asked him to jump and run. PC Player reported that Lord British apologised to fans in an open letter.
The last numbered game, Ultima IX: Ascension (1999), was more than five years in development and arrived in a state Computer Gaming World could not forgive: “Another ULTIMA, another huge disappointment.” Its reviewer praised the most detailed world yet seen in a role-playing game but found it choppy even on the fastest machines, and the magazine withdrew it from contention for its role-playing game of the year because “the boxed release was so buggy”.
Underworld and Online
Two spin-offs pointed ahead. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (1992), developed for Origin by Blue Sky Productions, put the player in a first-person, freely moving 3D dungeon. ACE called it “the closest thing I’ve seen to Virtual Reality … on a home computer”.
Ultima Online went into public beta in the United States in 1997 and drew 50,000 would-be testers. Edge described a Britannia where non-player characters had their own “living and feeding patterns”: kill the sheep grazing near a dragon’s lair and the dragon comes into town for food. Early in the beta a player killed Lord British himself. After launch, players who were unhappy with lag, bugs and player-killing staged a drunken protest at Lord British’s castle, and Garriott wrote an open letter asking for patience; Origin said it had made more than 3,000 fixes. By early 1999 Origin put its paying players at more than 100,000. In 2004 Computer Gaming World called Ultima Online “the first successful MMORPG ever released” (see the history of the MMORPG).
On other machines
The early games spread from the Apple II to the Commodore 64, IBM PC, Amiga and others. On consoles, in January 1989 Electronic Gaming Monthly noted that Ultima had become the third NES cartridge with a battery to keep a game in progress, after The Legend of Zelda and its sequel. In Britain the series was sold through MicroProse in the late 1980s and then Mindscape; the Origin Systems entry has the detail.
Influence
Ultima and Wizardry were the American role-playing games that Japanese designers learned from: a Final Fantasy artist told Retro Gamer that Dragon Quest had combined the two with manga culture (see JRPG and Western RPG). John Carmack remembered using an Apple II sector editor to give himself gold in Ultima III. When Computer Gaming World opened its Hall of Fame in 1988, Ultima III and IV were among the first games in it; by 2004 Ultima VI and Ultima Underworld had joined them.
Later history
The single-player series ended with Ascension. Garriott left Origin in 2000 and set up Destination Games, which Computer Gaming World reported in 2001 had joined the Korean online publisher NCsoft; the magazine’s headline began “ULTIMA is dead”. EA closed Origin in 2004 (see Electronic Arts). Ultima Online outlived the studio that made it. After Origin it was run by EA, then Mythic Entertainment, and from 2014 by Broadsword, and it is still running. Garriott’s own later role-playing game, Shroud of the Avatar, from his company Portalarium, was released in 2018.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 26, March 1986, pp. 18–21, interview with Richard Garriott: D&D in 1977, 28 school games, ComputerLand, Akalabeth and the zip-lock bags; California Pacific, Sierra and the cloth map; founding Origin with Robert Garriott and Chuck Bueche, Ultima III as its first product; development times; the Avatar, Truth, Love and Courage and The Wizard of Oz; the 256 by 256 world, dungeon rooms and the bridge trolls; the Adventure Game of the Year award.
- Computer Gaming World issue 25, January 1986, p. 12, Scorpia, Ultima IV review: the gypsy’s seven questions, the eight virtues, “no central evil to defeat here”.
- PC Player (Germany), October 1999, pp. 170–176, Origin history with Garriott’s own account: Akalabeth’s 30,000 copies, Ultimatum, Ultima II in 1982, the open letter after Ultima VIII.
- Computer Gaming World issue 72, June 1990, pp. 11 and 66, Scorpia, “Scorpion’s View” of Ultima VI.
- ACE issue 39, December 1990: Ultima VI’s “quantum leap in playability”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 98, September 1992, pp. 92–94, Charles Ardai, Ultima VII: The Black Gate review.
- Edge issue 9, June 1994, p. 64: Pagan – Ultima VIII review.
- Computer Gaming World issue 187, February 2000: Ultima IX: Ascension review and its disqualification from the role-playing award.
- ACE issue 55, April 1992: Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, developed by Blue Sky Productions.
- Edge issue 49, September 1997, news: Ultima Online’s public beta, 50,000 testers and the living ecosystem. Edge issue 54, January 1998, news: the protest at Lord British’s castle and Garriott’s open letter.
- Computer Gaming World issue 160, November 1997: a player killed Lord British during the beta.
- Computer Gaming World issue 177, April 1999, news: Origin’s statement on “more than 100,000 paying ULTIMA ONLINE players”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 243, October 2004, Hall of Fame: Garriott and Origin; Ultima Online as “the first successful MMORPG”; the Ultima games in the Hall of Fame. Issue 45, March 1988: the charter Hall of Fame inductees.
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 1, January 1989, news: Ultima’s battery back-up on the NES.
- Retro Gamer issue 108, November 2012, pp. 56–62, “Final Fantasy: the complete history”: a designer on the first Final Fantasy on Dragon Quest, Ultima and Wizardry.
- Fabien Sanglard, Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D (2017), appendix G: Carmack and Ultima III.
- Computer Gaming World issue 206, September 2001: Destination Games and NCsoft, “ULTIMA is dead”.
- Wikipedia, “Ultima Online” and “Richard Garriott” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): Ultima Online’s operators after Origin and its continued running; Garriott leaving Origin in 2000; Shroud of the Avatar (2018). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online