Transcription
[Music] After the release of Ultima, Richard Garriott found himself alongside a small handful of pioneers in a new frontier. The age of the personal computer was underway, and while PCs weren't ubiquitous yet, entrepreneurs and developers saw potential in them. While there are many legendary stories to be told from this time, there's one company and the couple who founded it that are particularly relevant to the story of Ultima 2.
Ken Williams was born on October 30, 1954. He was a quiet, scholarly child, escaping his less-than-ideal home life with long hours at the library, the chess club, the marching band, and any other extracurricular activity he could engage with. Throughout his childhood and teenage years, Ken held on to one goal in particular: a relatable goal, an ambiguous goal, but not necessarily an attainable goal. Ken wanted to be filthy rich.
The 10-year-old Ken Williams would sit in the back of courtrooms during criminal trials, dreaming of becoming a respected lawyer. At the library, he read books about big shots and businessmen living the life he wanted for himself: nice cars, big houses, supermodels. A materialistic vision for his future, perhaps, but harmless dreams from the son of a TV repairman in a lower-middle-class California neighborhood. Owing to his avoidance of home life, Ken spent a lot of time powering through his school projects and finishing his homework in a timely manner. Thanks to his discipline, he graduated high school at the tender age of 16 and immediately went off to college, where he'd major in physics. An absurd work ethic, multiple side hustles, and a fondness for partying kept him wrapped up in his own world, but that's when he met Roberta.
Roberta Lynn Huer, like Ken, had been a quiet child. Unlike Ken, what occupied Roberta's time wasn't work, study, or extracurricular activities, but engaging with her own overactive imagination. She spent her childhood in Lodi, California, a quiet town with a population of around 10,000 at the time. Being the daughter of a horticulturalist and a homemaker, Roberta's life was quiet, and that suited her fine. She found escapism in stories, both reading literature and spinning yarns of her own. In high school, Roberta managed to overcome some of this shyness, but not in a way that set her family's mind at peace. She began partying and dating some men who couldn't quite meet her father's approval. That is, until she met Ken Williams.
With a pack of cigarettes rolled into his shirt sleeve and a silver tongue, Ken tried to impress her with a badass facade, but Roberta's judgment of character was just too good. This guy was a geek. They fell in love, love, and married just 5 days after Ken's 18th birthday.
While Roberta had her stories, Ken began to develop a creative outlet of his own. It started in 1971 when he first glimpsed a mainframe terminal in the UCLA labs. On the screen was a strategy game based on the TV series Star Trek. Like so many young pioneers, Ken was struck by the potential of interactive experiences. He enrolled in a computer programming course, which at the time involved punching holes in card stock, sending them to a card reader, and confirming hours later whether or not the program ran successfully. His performance in other courses suffered, but his grades in computer programming were very impressive.
At this time, Roberta was pregnant with their first child. Having already been struggling with finances, it became clear that Ken would have to put school on the back burner. He dropped out, listless and unsure of how he'd proceed.
"Sure, I'd like to get into the computer field, but hey, what's the hurry? I can always start my training tomorrow. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow."
To learn how you can train to become a computer programmer, operator, or technician, call Control Data Institute now before tomorrow passes you by.
After being fired from a factory job, an advertisement caught his eye. The Control Data Institute would turn him into a full-fledged computer programmer with only 9 months of study. The icing on the cake was the potential salary: $8,000 to $110,000 a year, equivalent to roughly $60 to $75,000 today. Not quite the stepping stone to millionaire life young Ken had hoped for, but with a baby on the way, compromises would have to be made. And in a newly emerging industry, who knows where this path would take him?
Ken had a great experience at trade school. He felt that his fellow students and teachers were of like mind, and he excelled in his courses. He was actively involved in the birth of the modern computer industry. After graduating, he spent 6 years in a number of different working environments. All in all, he changed jobs at least 14 times. He learned a lot about the various emerging types of technology in the industry, and he provided his family with a stable income. Throughout his experiences, though, Ken found those old dreams of prosperity creeping back into his mind.
By the late '70s, Roberta herself was becoming a competent programmer. She understood a fair bit about the complexities of computers purely by osmosis. The home computer market was finding its footing at the time, and the couple saw an opportunity. After several more years of job hopping, Ken had settled on a job at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. Here, he was given a teletype and an acoustic modem, which allowed him to connect remotely to MIT's mainframe. He excitedly looked for the Star Trek game that he'd seen years ago, but to no avail.
Instead, he found a game with a simple text interface, presenting him with a scene: "Scene: You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully." Ken stood there, likely thinking the same thought that many in this situation would think: "So, so what?" There were no instructions, no graphic interfaces, just a description of a place he'd have to imagine in his mind's eye. At a loss, he typed the word "help" and was instructed in the playing of the game. A game that inspired an entire generation of developers, Richard Garriott included. The game was Colossal Cave Adventure.
While the text adventure certainly piqued Ken's interest, it was Roberta who found herself downright enraptured by it. The game, which is now considered to be one of the most influential ever made, was right at the crossroads of Roberta's various interests. It was a story that demanded the use of one's imagination, playable on a home computer, and you, the player, dictated the flow and outcome. Roberta became quite taken with text adventure games in general, eventually feeling compelled to propose an idea. While at dinner, Roberta told Ken that she wanted to make an adventure game. The concept for this involved uncovering clues, finding treasure, and unmasking a killer in a classic murder mystery. To quote Ken, "Roberta was a woman on a mission, and when Roberta wants something, the only thing to do is get out of her way."
They wrestled with technical hurdles, but being a shrewd and inventive programmer, Ken was able to implement actual graphics by way of simple pictures. This was an unexpected boon that helped the game stand out among other text-based adventures. With Roberta's instinct for game design and Ken's ability to put her ideas on screen, the two eventually released Mystery House in May of 1980. The game was programmed on and for the Apple II, a computer in which the Williamses saw the future. It was an instant hit, with computer stores near and far calling Ken and Roberta, asking for more copies. They quickly developed an infrastructure for distribution and got to work making more software. Online Systems, which would come to be known as Sierra Online, was born.
With Roberta at the designing helm and Ken dealing with programming, Sierra produced several profitable games in sequence, including some more interesting ventures. The Sierra name became synonymous with ambition and creativity among gamers, and among young programmers, it became known as the place that you wanted to work. Ken and Roberta hired many young, bright-eyed programmers. This was the first generation whose formative years were steeped in computer expertise, and now they were hungry for success.
"One thing that scares me is all these kids that are like 13 or 14 that are going to computer camps right now, right? They're going to be pretty computer literate by the time they get to be 20 or 25. Where does that leave me?"
Rather than having a traditional office where their employees would clock in at 9:00 and leave at 5:00, Sierra would act as a veritable compound. Employees would be given the option of having their own dormitories, creating a family atmosphere where everyone wanted the best for each other and the company. For a software company that did things differently than almost any other, few aspects about Sierra were quite as unique as its structure.
So, what happens when you mix a group of college-aged individuals in a dorm-like setting with the couple who were seeing more money in a few months than they'd collectively seen over their whole lifetimes? You get parties, you get liquor, you get drugs. It was the '80s, and Sierra's output was pretty insane. So I'm guessing cocaine, but that's just speculation. The Friday afternoon parties at Sierra's compound were known far and wide. They'd periodically receive visits from industry icons like Steve Wozniak or celebrities like Richard Kiel, who'd played the James Bond villain Jaws. There was a rockstar ethos surrounding the culture of the computer game industry back then, and the Williamses relished it. For all the wild parties, the work ethic at Sierra didn't suffer one bit. Their games were fresh and innovative, and their development cycles were efficient. This reflected in the company's astronomical growth. Over a 3-year period, they were constantly looking for new talent and bold ideas to help bolster Sierra's good name.
And that's where Richard Garriott comes in. Richard, fresh off his success with Ultima, was searching for a publisher to meet his unique demands. Though he was no Richard Kiel, he was becoming recognizable in the still-niche space of computer RPGs. He met with Ken and Roberta in 1982, looking to produce a sequel to Ultima. The couple were more than happy to court the young developer. Garriott agreed to join Sierra only under certain conditions. First of all, he was to be given complete creative freedom in Ultima's story and design. Next, he wanted to be paid a much larger royalty than he'd been given at his previous publisher, California Pacific. Finally, he didn't want his games released in Ziploc bags like a child selling Twinkies out of their locker. He wanted his games to be packaged in durable, board game-style boxes. These would include cloth maps depicting the game's world, all with quality and size of his choosing.
Who did this kid think he was? No publisher in their right mind would agree to these demands. It was extremely uncommon to see PC games in any but the barest minimum packaging. The cost of goods associated with manufacturing games was meant to be just that: the games. Big boxes adorned with colorful art and high-quality cloth maps would have greatly increased the overhead of the product, and to what effect? At the end of the day, it was the games that the consumers were buying. It wasn't uncommon to see gamers throw their boxes away after unsealing the contents. Back then, it was seen as a pointless expenditure. But Richard stood his ground. He proved a formidable negotiator, and Sierra agreed to his terms, despite the lack of pragmatism in his demands. Sierra was looking to set themselves apart creatively. Maybe there was something to his obsession with presentation. That Sierra had more money than it knew what to do with was just icing on the cake.
Garriott would be given his creative freedom, his royalties, and his maps. In exchange, Sierra would retain the rights to Ultima 1, should the nearly defunct California Pacific be willing to part with it. And they were. This would lead to a Sierra re-release titled Ultima 1: The Original, a profitable venture which put even more eyes on the series.
Now, as mentioned, to believe that the aesthetic of software packaging should have care and thought placed into it was not a commonly held sentiment at the time. Garriott, owing to his admiration of works by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, figured that the creation of a world was the sum of many parts. A handmade map can say so much about the universe it relates to. Not only can it depict the geography of the world itself, but context clues regarding its culture and even mysteries surrounding the cartographers themselves. Elements such as these maps, small books about a game's lore, and manuals penned from the perspective of an in-world citizen would all create a tangible reflection of the game's universe. In short, these "fiefs," as the included big box goodies would come to be known, made the world of a game feel real, as though it existed outside of itself.
At this time, games were developed on a conveyor belt, meant to be consumed, and then you'd buy the next one. But this sense of lore would allow games, like literature, to feel evergreen. Shared experiences would be relevant long after a game's release, their worlds and inhabitants the subject of discussion by like-minded enthusiasts. Production costs increased, but the impression "fiefs" would leave on players would itself be of tremendous value. The included maps and goodies would become a staple of the Ultima series. Big box PC games as we know them were popularized, at least in part, due to the obstinance of one skinny kid who wasn't yet old enough to drink.
Garriott commenced work on Ultima's sequel immediately, and with that came a difficult but necessary decision. The basic programming language in which Garriott was proficient was bottlenecking his ability to do the things he wanted to do. Ultima had released in a somewhat patchwork state. He knew that if he wanted the sequel to realize its potential, he'd have to learn Assembly Language. This would prove troublesome.
During this period, Richard was attending university, and there was an inverse correlation between his income at home and his grades at school. One of the classes he was attending was a programming course for Assembly Language, which seems like a perfect fit, doesn't it? Well, it was actually a huge problem. To understand why, it's worth noting that assembly actually refers to many potential different instruction sets. These instruction sets reflect the type of processor being programmed for. For instance, Richard's classes were teaching him how to code in Assembly 6809. During those late nights after school, he'd use Assembly 6502 while working on Ultima 2. The language was principally the same, meaning he was able to apply his education to the development of Ultima 2. And yet, due to that similarity, he was making granular but noticeable formatting mistakes in his schoolwork. His programs ran, but they weren't efficient, and that cost him big marks.
"I'll explain it the way my math teacher explained it to me when I was in 12th grade: forget flying colors, you're just not passing."
Richard came to understand that he simply wouldn't be able to code Ultima 2 while attending classes. Two and a half years into his education, he dropped out of the University of Texas and devoted himself entirely to the development of Ultima. His parents were understandably quite upset. There was a high level of education in the Garriott family, with Richard's siblings all having graduated post-secondary. His brother Robert, in particular, was working on his second master's degree, which made Richard's decision look even more hasty to his parents. Eventually, they acquiesced and allowed him to pursue what was undeniably a fulfilling and increasingly lucrative prospect for Richard. They agreed to accept his decision, as long as he promised to go back to school when the game industry inevitably ceased to exist. To quote Richard Garriott, "As of several years ago, I'm still waiting."
While Richard is often seen as the sole designer, programmer, and writer in these first few Ultima games, it's important to acknowledge that he's always had help. Like Ken Arnold did on the first Ultima, Tom Loughry served as a seasoned helper on Ultima 2. Loughry was an ex-coworker of Garriott's, having worked with him at California Pacific. With a background in Assembly Language, he would act as a mentor, guiding Garriott away from the trappings of BASIC and making him lean into assembly. In addition to Loughry, Garriott enlisted the help of several friends and associates: Ken Arnold came back, along with Chuck Bush, one of Richard's first D&D buddies, and his old neighbor, Keith Zabalaoui. With his future contingent on the success of Ultima 2, Richard's leadership skills were put to the test. His hard work and enthusiasm proved infectious, and they worked around the clock until, on August 24, 1982, Ultima 2: The Revenge of the Enchantress was released by Sierra Online.
Like the first game, Ultima 2 was developed for Apple II computers. At their core, the first two games share more DNA than any other numbered entries in the entire Ultima series. Graphically, the games are comparable, with the second game reusing many tiles and sharing many limitations. Mercifully, the animated water in the IBM version has been altered to not make your eyes explode out of your head when you look at it. Both games are totally absent any kind of music, and the scant few sound effects are identical.
Gameplay-wise, most changes are subtle, with character creation, combat, and exploration acting in much the same way. Where Ultima 1 and 2 tread different paths is in their structure, in the kind of games they're trying to be. But before that, a brief note about the ports. For the most part, we get the expected smattering of differences between platforms. The Atari 800 version looks almost identical to the Apple II. The Commodore 64 version features full-color graphics rather than the black backdrops of other versions. The FM Towns Marty version continues to punch so far above its weight that it's not really a fair comparison. I tell you, anyone who owned a Marty back in the day was the toast of the town. Like with Ultima 1, the version that we'll largely be looking at is the one available from GOG.
The IBM PC port, unlike the first game, has a few things that really hold the unmodified IBM version back. Richard Garriott was not a fan of IBM PCs, but his contract with Sierra stipulated the right to port Ultima 2 to this platform. On a surface level, the IBM allowed for a maximum of four colors to be displayed. This gave the game an uncharacteristically dark and dreary palette, even compared to the technically limited Apple II. Underneath that surface, the game is being held together by masking tape and prayers. It's prone to "divide by zero" errors, which, in layman's terms, is the computer's way of saying, "Help! Help me! Something is going horribly wrong." Its frame rate was also uncapped, leading to problems. Its maps were broken, and it required a whole reinstall if you wanted to make a new character, just to name a few issues.
You may be asking yourself, "Why are we playing this version that's so obviously inferior?" The answer to that is the Ultima 2 upgrade patch. This patch, which was created by Voyager Dragon all the way back in 2001, not only brings the IBM version up to par with others, it makes this version the ideal way to play the game. In addition to myriad bug fixes, the patch allows the user to choose from a number of graphical upgrade options. I've chosen the 16-color EGA, bringing it in line with the Ultima 1 PC port that I've covered. This alone makes the experience much more enjoyable. With our version selected, there's nothing left to do but boot up the game and give it a go.
As with its predecessors, Ultima 2's story is dictated to us by a section in the instruction manual. "Having now slain the evil wizard Mondain, the people of Earth are free to enjoy a generation of peace. Yet, rumors abounded of it..." Wait, hold on a second. Earth? The last game took place in Sosaria, and now we're talking about Earth? People have jumped through a lot of hoops trying to make sense of this discrepancy, but, uh, I don't know. I just don't see mention of Sosaria anywhere, not in the manual and not in the game. Perhaps, like real-world mythology, legends commingled with real events and became a muddled mess of different interpretations. Maybe they just figured nobody would think that hard about it.
Whatever the case, Ultima 2 takes place on Earth, or at least a fantastical representation of it. Mondain's apprentice, an enchantress named Minx, has spent the years since Ultima 1 gaining power until, in the year 201111, she eliminated life itself in a nuclear firestorm. You play as the Stranger, a person of seemingly no significance who managed to escape Minx's devastation by slipping into a mysterious time gate. This gate sends our hero back through history, giving them a chance to aid Lord British in the defeat of Minx and save the world once again.
As with the original, the game begins with character creation. The options available are pretty much the same, but there is a greater significance to your choices. In the original game, differences between the four classes were largely insignificant. Here, they changed the game in noticeable ways. The fighter is given a more significant stat boost than any other class, with a +15 out of a possible 99 for strength. However, the fighter cannot cast spells, full stop. Ultima 1 allowed any class to cast spells, barring certain advanced abilities. Now, the previously desirable, if not altogether necessary, spells such as "ladder up" and "ladder down" aren't available to everyone. You'll have to get through dungeons the old-fashioned way: by falling through the floor and screaming like the rest of us plebs.
The cleric, on the other hand, is built for dungeon crawling. In addition to "ladder up" and "ladder down," the cleric has several unique abilities for use in dungeons only: "pass wall," a spell borrowed from D&D, destroys the wall in front of you, allowing you to circumvent obstacles; "surface instantly" teleports you out of a dungeon, no fuss, no mess, just leave. "Prayer" is also a little bit less random in Ultima 2, now acting as a 50% chance to simply kill the enemy in front of you.
The wizard is functionally similar to the cleric, with a different list of usable spells. "Magic Missile" is a reliable source of solid damage. "Blink" will teleport you randomly somewhere on the same dungeon level, which just sounds horrible. Why would you want that? Finally, the "kill" spell is what it sounds like: it kills. It is expensive, though, so it's not easily abused. The real downside of these spells is that they can only be used in dungeons, which really diminishes their usefulness in the game.
Finally, there's the thief: a jack of no trades and a master of even fewer. A thief is less likely to be caught stealing, that's about the size of it. It's not a totally valueless trait, but thieves are easily outclassed by the others, so they're mostly relegated to challenge runs or role-playing, if that's your thing. Once again, you select your name, sex, and race. I'm all about the Bobbits, which are now back to being called Hobbits. I don't think there's a solitary line of plot-related dialogue in either of these first two games, and I'm already struggling to keep up with the lore. Hobbit it is.
The game begins, as all good fantasy RPGs do, with your character walking around Duluth, Minnesota. Hey, like I said, Ultima 2 takes place on Earth, which means the world map is comprised of some familiar places. I wonder what Manitoba is like. Well, it sucks. While having a map of the entire world sounds a little intimidating, the size and scope of Ultima 2's map is pretty manageable. There's only a small number of towns, dungeons, and other landmarks, especially compared to the first game. There's reasons for that, which we'll talk more about later. Despite the relatively small world map, there's something going on underneath the game's surface that greatly expands the complexity of exploring: time travel. Ultima 1 ended with the protagonist going back in time to defeat Mondain, but the role time travel plays in the actual gameplay has been greatly expanded.
In Ultima 2, you begin the game in 1423 BC. It largely resembles the world we know, with a few exceptions, such as a land bridge allowing access to Eurasia from Alaska. The game essentially gives you no direction in the beginning. Fair game, I mean, we just popped out of a mysterious time door from thousands of years in the future. Speaking of time doors, these are your tickets to other periods of history. Walking around, engaging in combat, or simply standing still will all cause time to pass. This affects the movement of enemies and NPCs, the depletion of your food stockpile, and also the appearance of time doors.
Stumbling across these time doors will seem somewhat random at first. You might just be making your way to a town when suddenly a mysterious square appears. You try to ignore it, but something about the square... it's calling your name. "Come on, touch the square. Don't you want to know what happens?" So you do, and then you get stranded on an island with no way back. Or so it seems. Wait long enough, and a time gate will appear on the island as well. It'll seem like the only way to understand where and when the time gates lead is a matter of trial and error, but that's not actually the case.
Beyond being a cool piece of memorabilia, the cloth map serves a pragmatic purpose. In the instruction manual, there's a page showing five different symbols and explaining what each one means. There's this symbol representing a time before recorded history, when the world was comprised of one continent: Pangaea. This symbol corresponds to 1423 BC, while this indicates 1990 AD. There's the aftermath period, a post-nuclear hellscape with the world literally shattered into pieces. Finally, there's the Time of Legends, a place outside of spacetime and a pocket in which Minx's strength is at its highest. These runes and their descriptions may come across as esoteric flavor text, but take a closer look at your cloth map, and you'll find it dotted with pairs of these symbols connected via lines. These represent where you'll find time gates in-game. The first of the two symbols indicates the time period in which you'll find the time gate. For example, this one will be found in 1423 BC. The second symbol shows the time period in which you'll end up: 1990 AD. Here, finally, the line shows the point at which the time gate will spit you out. It's an extremely helpful and clever way to tie the in-game mechanics with the real-world goodies from your game box. Having to reference the map and plan your routes really does make the game feel like an adventure through space and time.
This is especially true because, unlike Ultima 1, locations in Ultima 2 are sparse but more meaningfully tied to the story and your progression. No longer are there a thousand forgettable towns made up of one screen, but a small selection of fully explorable cities that you'll be visiting again and again. Cobblestone roads guide the player to and from the city's various establishments. NPCs will have unique dialogue depending on their type. It is what it is, but it's unique dialogue, and there are different types of NPCs: fighters, guards, clerics. You can actually identify the kind of person you're speaking to, which is a massive step up. "Please, I have a family to feed!" Hey, this guy is pretty funny.
Outside of the towns, various other aspects of the game have been innovated or expanded upon. Weapons have stat requirements now, making playing a fighter and investing in strength feel like a worthwhile path to take. Enemies can target specific body parts in battles, leaving you temporarily immobilized or unable to attack. It's mostly just really annoying, but it's cool that it's there. There are even items and layers of protection that help prevent status ailments, such as boots preventing leg paralysis. Of course, there's also the time gates, which just expand the overall scale and feeling of adventure here to a significant degree.
Not every change made in Ultima 2 benefits the game, though, and some affect it outright adversely. On the mixed end of things, the importance of dungeon crawling is seriously diminished. In a callback to Ultima 1, dungeon crawling was the meat and potatoes of the entire game. You'd receive quests to kill certain monsters and be sent into one of the game's many maze-like dungeons to hunt down and kill your target. It was necessary in order to complete those games. In Ultima 2, not only do you not have to set foot in a dungeon even once, it's actually a mostly inefficient way to get things done. Aside from the FM Towns Marty version, which has a necessary item located in dungeons, Minx reigns supreme. No longer do you gain bonus hit points for killing enemies in dungeons. Now, the only way to increase your HP is to visit the castle of Lord British and pay him 50 gold. This is, in some sense, the game's way of leveling up.
There are experience points in Ultima 2, and your character will level up once you reach 100, but it's pretty much just nominal. The only function leveling up serves is acting as a general marker for your progress and doesn't seem to have any noticeable impact on the game itself. The main method of character advancement in this game is actually maliciously cryptic.
In the year 1423, you'll find various establishments such as weapon stores, taverns, chapels, the usual fantasy fare. In the year 1990 AD, things are different. You'll still find weapon or armor stores selling the same gear, but you'll also find a McDonald's. "Excuse me, McDonald's?" Remember how YOLO the BS saying "Hoyo!" in the last Ultima game? Well, in Ultima 2, Ronald McDonald sings, "Try our new ride-through!" Oh my God, it actually has a ride-through! Ultima 2 takes the cultural references and overall weirdness of Ultima 1 and cranks it up to a fever pitch.
In order to level up your character stats, you'll have to head to New San Antonio in the year 1990. Here, you'll find the Hotel California. Speaking to the clerk yields no rewards, but pressing 'O' to offer him money will give you a chance to raise a single stat. In the original, unpatched games, the stat raised would be random, and there was a chance that no stats would raise at all. If you accidentally raised a stat past 99, it would reset to zero, forcing you to start again. It's hilariously obtuse, and I mean, completely insane. The Hotel California? Isn't it enough for that to be one of the three songs my dad has on his shop radio all the time? I don't play Ultima 2 to be reminded of the [expletive] Eagles, man.
Now, some of the zanier elements adjacent to the original game make a bit more sense contextually. Aircrafts, rockets, and phasers feel less out of place when the world is covered in time portals. The truth is that the cloth map, time travel, and general zaniness of Ultima 2 were actually the product of inspiration. Around the time that 1 was released, Richard Garriott became a big fan of Terry Gilliam's 1981 sci-fi fantasy film Time Bandits. The plot of the film centers around a young boy named Kevin who, along with six dwarves, is sent on an adventure through history. The group find their way into different time periods by using an ethereal map marking the location of holes in the fabric of spacetime. Sounds kind of familiar, no? It's no coincidence that both the movie and the game have a location called the Time of Legends. Ultima's identity wouldn't be crystallized for some time, which leaves the first few entries, especially Ultima 2, feeling truly unique in comparison. It was clear that Richard didn't really know what kind of world Ultima was supposed to be, or if it had even survived long enough for another sequel. He was throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what would stick. It culminates here in a game that's outrageously creative and bizarre on paper, but not one that's necessarily fun to play as.
As mentioned before, Ultima 1 and 2 would tread different paths in terms of their structure. In Ultima 1, you're given a level of freedom in how you approach your goals, but you have a set list of goals nonetheless: talk to kings, complete quests, collect the gems, etc. Ultima 2's goals are mechanically simpler but require more investment from the player. Aspects like weapons and armor having stat requirements would be an example. There's also changes made to vehicles. In the original, it was a simple matter of having enough money, well, and a vacuum suit if you didn't want your head to explode after reaching space. In Ultima 2, you can buy a horse with money, but acquiring all other vehicles has become more complex. To pilot a boat, you'll need to walk around fighting enemies until a pirate ship spawns and heads to the shoreline. From there, you can enter the ship only on the condition that you own blue tassels. In order to get blue tassels, you need to fight human enemies until you get lucky and one of them drops the item. Upon docking, tassels are consumed, so ideally, you already know what you're going to do with the boat. However, boats you've stolen persist through the game, so if you leave a time period then come back, you'll find it waiting in the same spot.
Stealing the plane is similar and, in fact, it's the first of a few major quests in the game. You'll need the plane in order to reach a specific area, and there's only one accessible in the New San Antonio hangar. So, you reach the hangar. Now what? Well, you need keys to open doors. How do you get keys? You kill guards. Guards will always drop keys upon their death. How do you kill guards? Well, it's a combination of health, equipment, and good old-fashioned luck. How do you get health? You pay Lord British. How do you get money to pay him? You fight enemies for gold. Only, you'll need to constantly use that money to top up your health and food in order to fight more enemies. You can make fighting more efficient by having higher stats or better equipment. How do you get higher stats? You need money. How do you get better equipment? You need money. What's the best way to get money? Having stats, more health, and better equipment. This is the vicious circle of Ultima 2. Where the quest presented in a similar framework to Ultima 1, the game would be 25 minutes long, but that's not the case here. You need optimal stats and maximal health. Money rules Ultima 2's runtime. It is everything in this game. You can find equipment in deeper levels of dungeons, but it's an ineffective way of gathering resources unless you're playing a spellcaster. That "ladder up" and "ladder down" spell really changes everything. You need to spend money to make money in Ultima 2. So, character advancement is incremental. As the game goes on, you'll develop strategies to just corral enemies into lines and eliminate as many of them as possible. "Clumsy bludgeoning." Please, you have selected clumsy bludgeoning.
So, as I was saying, we need to break this airplane out of its hangar. Getting in requires keys, and actually starting the plane itself requires a different resource called the skull key. It works the same way tassels do for ships. Once you have the plane, it's home free, right? No. The New San Antonio customs office is packed full of guards waiting to throw your ass out of the plane and knock you senseless. This is why everyone is such a stickler about taxes. They need to keep a dozen 1930s strongmen on payroll for just such an occasion. So you'll need a massive health pool before even attempting this plane heist. Guards are some of the toughest enemies in the game. Finally, once you make it out of town, you're free to fly around. Okay, I can't move.
Well, talking about Ultima 1, I mentioned that the game's control scheme is really spread out to simulate all the different actions one can take. This is even more so the case in Ultima 2, which has a separate command for every single letter key on the keyboard. Some commands, like 'J' to jump, are functionally useless. You just use it if you really want to imagine your character jumping, anyway, rather than just hopping in your vehicle and cruising away. Now, you actually have to launch your plane, otherwise you'll be moving it around on its wheels, unable to pass terrain like trees and water. As obnoxious as it is to sometimes have all of these different commands, I appreciate the consistency and realism Garriott was grounding this absurd game world in. But certain context-sensitive commands sharing a key wouldn't have been the end of the world.
Dungeons are dark and must be illuminated with torches via the 'I' key or a light spell if you're a mage. Pressing the 'P' key simulates the passage of time, allowing you to speed up the arrival of time gates. For instance, if you have a magical helmet, pressing the 'V' key allows you to have a bird's-eye view of your current location. There's much more going on under the hood, which is likely a result of the increased fidelity offered by Assembly Language. However, rather than expanding on certain fundamental aspects from the first game, many of them have been pared out altogether. As mentioned, dungeons take on a much less important role. They're mechanically very similar to both Ultima 1 and Akalabeth, acting as a black wireframe maze in which to find items and slay monsters. The key difference is that Ultima 2's dungeons aren't procedurally generated based on a seed; they're all handmade, which you'll especially notice if you make your own grid-based map, as I did here.
Ultima 2 also doesn't feature quests from kings, as the first game did. The only king in the game is Lord British himself, and the only quests available are those organically tied to the story you're left to uncover on your own, piecing things together with tips from a bartender or dialogue from certain townspeople. It's a shame because even the simple "hunt a monster" style quests the series had been doing up to this point really would have done a lot for the game's variety. There's also no more landmarks to find, and the space segment from the first game has all but disappeared. But more on that shortly.
These first two Ultima games tiptoe into a story-based direction, but despite the increased focus on dialogue, it's really easy to lose sight of what your goal is for most of the game. Poverty is the real enemy. If you didn't own an instruction manual, you likely wouldn't even know who the enchantress from the game's title is.
Once you have the plane, you can fly around to previously inaccessible land masses in each era. You'll learn of a powerful ring, a father whose blessing must be earned, and a mysterious Planet X. None of it will make a lick of sense, and you'll spend most of the game wandering aimlessly and hoping for some direction. However, with our newfound ability to take to the skies, we can navigate the destroyed aftermath era with ease. Touching down in Europe, you'll find the last bastion of resistance: the Pirate's Harbor, having been built atop the ruins of the Soviet Union. You can find familiar sites such as Red Square, Red Magic, and Red Lobster. Okay, Richard, you know what? There's such a thing as having too much fun. Okay, we're rapidly approaching that point.
Speaking of fun, there are several state-sanctioned jesters who appear to be having a bad time. "Don't worry, Chuckles, it'll be over soon." Unlike the first game, where we could just purchase a shuttle at any transportation store, space travel is a bit harder to come by in Ultima 2. We have to rely on the Soviet space program. This means kicking down the door, slaughtering every guard in the city, and stealing their rocket ship. Just don't forget your space-proof power armor, or you'll die instantly.
So, the space, space saga from the original is considerably different here. There's no ship-to-ship combat, no manual piloting of the spacecraft, and no arranging yourself in the correct orientation to hit hyperspace. The only visual indication that you're in space is the star screen. From here, you're prompted to punch in three coordinates: a Xeno, Yako, and Zabo number. Coordinates for every planet are located in the instruction manual, and since the game takes place on Earth, the planets available are all those from our own solar system. In Ultima 2, you can finally live out your childhood dreams of landing your shuttle on a gas giant. Just note that when the game says "press any key to land," it means land where your ship currently is, so make sure you're, you know, not over water. Unless you're on Mercury, in which case, even land is a poor idea. Apparently, you can visit the Village of the Preppies located on Jupiter to eat a "preppy isod burger," or Neptune's Computer Camp, which bears a striking resemblance to the Sierra compound with noticeably less liquor and also goblins for some reason. There's a building here called "Poor Debbie's Pool." Between that and the "preppy isod burgers," I feel like the entire space adventure is like one big inside joke that I'm the privilege of witnessing, if not understanding. Don't worry, I wouldn't forget about everyone's favorite planet. I'm talking, of course, about Pluto. What's this? I'm getting word that since Ultima 2's release, Pluto has had its planet status revoked. I guess instead, we'll have to touch down on Uranus, home of the town of New Jester. I wonder why they call it that. Well, "Hey there, fellas. What's, uh, what's going on?" "Oh, for the love of God, somebody start the ship! Somebody send out the clowns!"
After having enough fun to last a lifetime, we can finally head to Planet X. On this mysterious planet, you'll find Castle Barataria. For some reason or another, you need the blessing of Father Antos, who awaits you somewhere in the castle. With Queen Susan's blessing, I'm sorry, Susan is a funny name for the queen of a Planet X, all right? Anyway, despite her blessing, you still need to slash and stab your way through the castle, slaughtering guards until you find Father Antos, who says, "You have earned my blessing. Return and claim the ring." I just can't help but notice the bulk of Ultima 2's quests involve the want and killing of people just doing their job. I guess you could say that the depiction of in-game morality wasn't very high on the priority list, not yet, anyway.
As I mentioned, the Time of Legends is a period in which the enchantress was biding her time and developing her power, so finding her in this epoch is a sure thing. The problem is that her castle is heavily guarded, not only by some very tough enemies but also by an impassible barrier. Impassible for all but the one who bears the Force Field Ring. In order to find this ring, you must first accept Father Antos's blessing and then find the person in New San Antonio who currently holds the ring. Apparently, it's an old man underneath a tree. Are you [expletive] kidding me, Richard? You offer the old man 500 gold, take hold of the ring, and head off to the Time of Legends.
But hold it. You'll need the best equipment, maximum health, and stats as high as they can be without resetting back to zero. This likely means some pre-endgame grinding. And if that wasn't exciting enough, you actually can't even damage the enchantress with standard weapons. You need a special blade called the Quicksilver Sword. How does one acquire this Quicksilver Sword? You go back to New San Antonio and start killing guards again. Instead of busting into the hangar, you're breaking into the city prison. Although, it's customary to steal the plane again, just for the hell of it. This prison is populated with a number of nameless, faceless bad guys, except for one: Santre the Swashbuckler. He warns you, "Beware! I have a quick blade." It's down to you, the player, to intuitively know that you've got to press 'O' and offer him 500 gold, at which point he'll give you the Quicksilver Sword. It also requires a minimum 49 agility to wield, so stat advancement via the equally cryptic Hotel California level-up system is non-optional, regardless of your class.
Eventually, you make it to Minx's Fortress. One of the enemies here is completely invincible, which forces you to use a particular item called the Strange Coin. Using this causes the time negation effect, allowing you to circumvent monsters frozen in place while you hunt down the teleporting enchantress. This might be the most interesting thing that Ultima 2 actually does with its combat. Here, you have to think carefully about your movement, avoiding the invulnerable monster and making a break for it while negation is active, hurting its and other monsters around impassible walls while you survive by the skin of your teeth. As long as you have the Quicksilver Sword in hand, you'll eventually strike down Minx. Time itself changes to reflect your victory. The destruction of the future is stopped, and the world is saved once again. That was Ultima 2.
Frankly, there's a lot of [expletive] in Ultima 2. Simply navigating the adventure requires you to make a lot of assumptions. Some of the puzzling elements of the game are covered in the manual or hinted at with dialogue in-game, but there's not nearly enough feedback to make sense of it all. I get the distinct impression that Garriott wasn't necessarily intending to have everyone finish the game, per se. Not with these first few entries. In the original Apple II release, there's no way to increase your character's strength, making space travel impossible unless you build your character in a specific way. For such an oversight to slip past seems to indicate that Garriott saw the meat of the game is just mucking around, killing monsters, doing dungeons, stealing food from stalls, just role-playing as you would with a group of D&D.
And D buddies on a Saturday night. The problem with that, perhaps more obvious with 40 years of hindsight, is that the core gameplay itself isn't interesting enough to hold Ultima 2 together. The variety in activities helps alleviate the boredom, but it's hard to imagine many players back in '82 making it far enough to experience the prison break or interplanetary exploration. You're often just too busy trying to make enough money to not die. It very much feels like a game you're intended to spend a lot of time with until you accidentally stumble across plot progressions. It's hard to look past how dumbfounding that makes the game feel these days. Even in comparison to Ultima 1, it's no surprise that the second game is seldom cited as a fan favorite, to say the least.
Still, it's not accurate to say that this game didn't do anything for Ultima or games in general. It's an incredibly important product, full of impressive advancements over its predecessor. The cities are large, large, and explorable, populated with unique institutions, full of NPCs with dialogue. From the locations to the changes made to vehicles, to the fact that the game now features interplanetary exploration rather than just floating through infinite space, Ultima 2 feels like a more intimate experience than the first. It feels like a handcrafted adventure, something from which shared experiences could be had. A game brimming with personality, humor, and surprises around every corner. It may not always be mature, and its ideas may not be fully formed, but the experimental nature of its world makes you feel like you're on the ground floor of something bold and fresh, something that's not quite there but heading in the right direction. It's a game that's sometimes a delight to play, and very often a buggy, messy grind, but an important piece of software in any case.
Upon release, Ultima 2 was a bit of a problematic game. It was chalk full of bugs, ranging from minor inconveniences to game-breaking problems, which even subsequent ports failed to address. Even without taking bugs into account, Ultima 2 just wasn't universally seen as an improvement over its predecessor, the way that game was over Akalabeth. This was largely seen as a result of the deadline placed upon the team by Sierra. Less than one year may have been sufficient development time for most computer games in the early '80s, but it just wasn't enough for Ultima 2. In spite of this, the game did well for Sierra, selling some 50,000 odd copies within a few years. It seemed that consumers could see its ambitions through the miasma of bugs and obtuse progression systems.
Yet, the pressure was on now more than ever. With the precedent set, competition began to stiffen, and of all Ultima's competitors, few were as formidable as that of the Wizardry series. The second Wizardry game, titled The Knight of Diamonds, was released in 1982 as well. It wasn't obvious that its release caused much damage to Ultima 2 sales, but it was a symptom of something more existential. Innovative studios with driven programmers and creative designers were invading this niche RPG space. It was no longer enough for Richard to rest on his laurels; he'd have to once again change the game, both literally and figuratively, if he wanted to thrive.
Unfortunately, as they so often are, these dreams were held up by the business end of things. No matter where Richard worked, it seemed one thing was certain: he'd be surrounded by substance abuse. Well, this may have been a good fit for some, Richard found it distasteful and distracting. Sierra and Ultima should have been a match made in heaven, but it was quickly becoming a relationship from hell. On top of the mismatch in work culture and priorities, there was a feeling that Sierra was mishandling the intellectual property. This included a failed tie-in and re-releases for which Garriott wasn't reimbursed what he thought fair. Communication broke down, and Garriott, despite relinquishing the rights to Ultima 1 and 2, left Sierra, citing financial woes as his chief concern. Ken Williams later acknowledged that he may not have treated Richard with the respect he deserved and still considers him "the one that got away" for Sierra. Years later, Garriott would regain the rights to the first two games, but for now, there was nowhere to move but forward.
Sierra is a legendary company. Ultima is a legendary game series. In some sense, it's a real shame that these titans had to part ways. Both were conceived under similar circumstances by people with similar visions, hopes, and dreams. Both would ultimately tread a similar path, but that's a story for another day. The roller coaster ride that was the story of Sierra would continue through mergers, failures, successes, and the great video game crash that would come only one year after Garriott's departure. Sierra had recently invested in game cartridges, which would become nearly worthless overnight. In spite of overwhelming odds, Sierra weathered the storm and hit its stride. Soon after, games like King's Quest, Phantasmagoria, and Quest for Glory would all leave a lasting impact on PC gaming. Regardless of their disagreements with Lord British, Ken and Roberta Williams stand alongside him as pioneers of a then-emerging art form. They saw potential where few others could, whether that be on the screen of the Apple II or in the mind of a college kid with an overactive imagination.
The question of a publisher hung over Richard's head like a sword of Damocles. The Ultima train was still rolling, and the potential was there, but at this time, video game publishers didn't operate in ways that we know them to. In the scramble to hop into this burgeoning industry feet first, there was little by way of professionalism. It was more like a loose conglomeration of no-nothings who saw dollar signs and bet their chips on software. Following his exit from Sierra, Richard began speaking to his brother, Robert Garriott, an expert in business management and economic systems. At this time, he was just finishing up his second master's degree, which involved exhaustively studying the business of, would you believe it, entertainment software. He had no experience playing or developing games, and he wasn't a particularly creative type, but Robert was uniquely qualified to understand the business angle of computer games. It was a real "are you thinking what I'm thinking" moment.
Next time on the Ultima retrospective. Howdy viewer, I just want to say thank you for watching this. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed making it. This type of project is right up my alley, and, uh, as expected, just writing and researching the series is bringing me a lot of joy. I know the first few games are a little less exciting across the grand scale of the Ultima-e, but they're important games, and it's good to lay a foundation that way. Once we hit the fours, the sevens, and the Underworlds, we'll hopefully have, uh, the context to understand everything surrounding them. Anyway, I just want to say thank you to my patrons for your patronage. Having that monthly windfall really makes me more enthusiastic about branching into videos like this where it's just, I, I'm never sure how they're going to do, kind of more niche stuff, I guess you could say. If you'd like to help support this channel while also gaining access to bonus videos, uh, such as a recent Shadowgate review I did for the NES, and other assorted goodies, fees, as it were, please, please consider checking out my Patreon. Link is in the description. I really appreciate it.
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