Lessons In Video Game History: the Ultima Saga, Part One

[NamerOfStars]

I have, for the past several months, been playing through the Ultima series of video games, and have decided that those of you who've never played them ought to hear about the series that more or less INVENTED the electronic RPG as we know it (I might have more to say after I finish with these; rarely do gamers look back to appreciate what happened in the hobby before they were born). So let's hop in our time machine and go back to the guy who started it all: Richard Garriott...

He was also, briefly, an astronaut

who in 1979, at the age of 18, released the first Ultima game! "Which was called 'Ultima'?". No. Which was called "Akalabeth: World of Doom", after a chapter in the Silmarillion. Which means that technically, we should start with THIS guy:

The Man himself

"Wait a minute!" I hear you say, "That's not Tolkien!". No. That's G.K. Chesterton, one of the twentieth century's greatest authors, and in the unlikely event you've heard of him at all, it's due to his detective stories, which is nothing short of a tragedy- not that those stories are bad, but there's SO much more to the man. He was a personification of Awesome, and was also an open admirer of Catholicism, at a time when that was a social death sentence in England. His work was one of the major motivators that pushed Tolkien into writing (one of his hesitations was actually BEING Catholic), and a major influence on him as well. Not just in writing, either- here he is pulling off an incredible feat:

Can you guess what it is?

It's "wearing a British army uniform and still looking like a nerd". Anyway, Chesterton inspired Tolkien, who drove Gygax, who created Dungeons and Dragons, which inspired, well, pretty much everyone who played it. Including the members of Garriott's D&D group, who nicknamed him "British" for reasons that vary based on when he's telling the story; sometimes it's as simple as "he was born in the UK", sometimes it's as obscure as "he wore a digital watch". That nickname, however, would be used as the name of Lord British, the king of- well, you'll see.

Akalabeth was a very simple game, even in comparison to the rest of the early series, but it was head and shoulders above most of its competition at the time. The evil sorceror Mondain, second-born of king Wolfgang, killed his brother to usurp the throne. But he was twisted by the dark magics he used, and went off to build dungeons filled with monsters, and generally spread terror and death; standard evil sorcerer stuff. But then the hero British showed up in Akalabeth, drove Mondain off, and was proclaimed king by a grateful populace. This is where you come in: the land is still full of monsters, and you've got to help eliminate them! In order, you're tasked with killing a thief, then a giant rat

Harder than it sounds

then an orc, a viper, a carrion crawler, a gremlin (oh, I'll have more to say on THEM later, believe me!), a demon, and a balrog. Once you've killed each of them (after turning the quest in each time), you're knighted, and the game is over. If you started with a higher wisdom stat, though, you might be able to skip a few of those quests.

See those numbers on the right? Yeah, you didn't have experience points; when you left a dungeon, you'd gain HP based on how far you got and how many monsters you killed. Go too far down, and you'd risk running out of life before you could escape- but if you left too soon, you wouldn't get down far enough to face the more challenging monsters, which gave more XP. It was a delicate balancing act, and the price of failure was having to restart (save your game? what is this "saving" of which you speak?. You could find magic amulets that could fire a blast, cast a transformation spell (which had a 45% chance of reducing all your attributes to 3, a 45% chance of backfiring and costing half your health, and 10% chance of increasing your attributes by 50%), or magically raise or lower you a dungeon level- but you could only choose which would happen if you were a mage. If you were a fighter, it was random, but you were able to use any weapon you found. And the food. Okay, so you need food to live. Every step on the overworld (and every few inside a dungeon) consumes some- no surprises there. But if you run out, you die. Immediately. And gremlins?

The sneaky little bastard behind the ladder

They steal HALF your food with every hit. Then they run away. And they don't drop it if you kill them, either; it's just GONE. Although it obviously wasn't intended as such, Akalabeth was really more of a proof-of-concept for the games that would follow.

So let's move on Ultima proper. Ultima I, the First Age of Darkness, begins a bit more auspiciously (in a gameplay sense): Mondain is back, and you, the player, have been summoned from our world into the land of Sosaria by Lord British to kill him once and for all (why British himself can't do it is never addressed). There's just one problem: Mondain is invincible. He's used his power to create a gem of immortality. So you have to go back in time to destroy it before he finishes creating it. Makes sense- but first you need to prove yourself worthy being trusted with the gems that power the time machine. So you distribute 30 points among your six stats, choose from one of four classes and one of four races (which can further modify your stats), your purely aesthetic gender and off you go, starting with 150 hit points, 200 food, 100 pence, two daggers, and a suit of leather armor. The game DOES have a stamina attribute, but I never found raising it to do anything related to hit points- or anything else, for that matter. This time around, magic takes the form of purchasable single-use scrolls, with availability varying upon class (cleric spells never failed, while wizards got more firepower). You also gain XP and levels now, but all they really do is increase the difficulty of monsters on the overworld map. As a bonus, you can now pay cash to Lord British at his castle, and he'll increase your HP. Fighting monsters isn't as profitable as it was in Alkalabeth, and you need to buy scrolls, most of which are pricier than amulets, so it helps make up for that. Nor is what you need to do as clear: much of the plot is found out by talking to people. Sosaria's a much bigger world than Akalabeth was.

So once you gain enough HP, you start going to see the local kings- the world is divided into four continental regions, but since you can't walk on water, you're stuck in this first one (the Lands of Lord British, appropriately enough). This is his castle:

Gwino (Gwenno, in later games) is in EVERY castle, and WON'T SHUT UP

It has magic ponds that give you food and weapons, a bunch of guards who'll attack if you steal anything, and a princess being held captive for some reason. Each of the four regions has two castles, and each king wants you to do a quest: four will give you stat boosts if you visit distant landmarks and return; four will give you the gems you need for the machine if you travel into a dungeon and kill a dangerous enemy. Each also has a captured princess.

So once you've got enough money, you can buy a ship and travel to another continent- or buy a hovercraft, and not have to sail around coastlines. "A hovercraft?" you say "I thought this was a fantasy game!" It is- see?

Phasers are a vital part of the fantasy genre

So once we all all four gems, we're good to go, right? Well, no- we still don't know where the time machine IS. For that, we need the help of a princess. So we just need to rescue one of them, right? No- not only do we have to rescue them, we need to prove our worth to them by buying a space shuttle and destroying a bunch of TIE fighters.

You thought I was kidding, didn't you?

Once that's done, we finally get the princess's help (the good news is that getting the key to her cell requires killing Gwino, which DOES finally shut her up), find the time machine, and go back to fight Mondain. We swipe his gem, and blast the ever-loving CRAP out of him until he turns into a bat (apparently, he's also a vampire). But if we keep shooting, he goes down, and Sosaria is saved!

And I'm only two games in and already a third of the way through the character limit, so I'll stop here for now. Stay tuned for "Ultima II: Wait, WHAT?"!

[Grond21]

This is a minor point. But I love GK Chesterton. He's a brilliant author and saw so clearly the problems that we are dealing with today. His knowledge and understanding was practically prescient

[NamerOfStars]

Glad to hear it! So many these days dismiss him as just "an old [and therefore, ignorable] religious guy".