Ultima Underworld - The Freedom to make bad Choices

Chris Payne looks back at the Ultima Underworld games in the Gamesindustry - Why I Love - series:

Ultima Underworld and the freedom to make bad choices

Why I Love: Quantum Soup's Chris Payne gets lost in the many innovations of The Stygian Abyss

Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on GamesIndustry.biz intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other's work. This installment was contributed by Chris Payne, managing director at Quantum Soup Studios and former senior game mechanics programmer at Traveller's Tales.

I'm writing this largely for the benefit of everyone who wasn't lucky enough to enjoy this classic back in 1992. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss was released during my A-levels, and by the time Underworld 2: Labyrinth of Worlds arrived, I had a glorious summer between finishing my exams and leaving for university to escape into Britannia and beyond. I did not see a lot of sunshine that year, and the effect of such ground-breaking games on me at a time when I was just setting out to become a developer was profound.

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My memory of the game, being in middle school at the time, was disapointment that there wasn't much human contact since that's whaat I had loved from Ultima 7. The second one almost had you interact with the peanut gallery but was even more frustrating since they were just out of reach.

Basically I wanted an Ultima game and this wasn't one. Unknowning at the time that this would be a trend for every game made after 7.

One of the best games from that era. Nuff said.

Super influential for me, and probably the biggest reason I got into the games industry. I still remember seeing it playing on the demo screen at some mall video game retailer and being completely in awe. It was the first game I ever saw that made me feel like I was there. The game ended up being much deeper than I expected, and I am in agreement with the important points the article makes. Overcoming the looming specter of failure -especially due to your own missteps- makes any victory far sweeter.

Man I really wish I had played this back then.

I tried getting into UU many years later, but it was quite dated by the time I got around to it. I definitely feel like I missed out on something special.

There are games that you simply will never ever forget. For me, this was two of them, memorable to this very day.

One of the reasons I got a PC was UU2. I was quite a religious Amiga fanboy at the time - but the avalanche of 3D games, including Alone in the Dark, X-Wing and - especially - Ultima Underworld just made my little war seem all the more ridiculous.

Incidentally, it was also a great lesson in stupidity

I was not into rpgs back then, so missed playing these. I was a chess nut back then, too busy playing chess all the damn time…

Great games. My only issue when they came out is they didn't feel like Ultima.

Yes, the original game was the first dungeon game with sloped floors and underground rivers that pulled you along. I remember Electronic Boutique giving out a demo disk that just showed a video of all the new stuff they did in this game. Watching that several times only made me want to play it more. I spend many hours playing this game when it first released and they lived up to the hype, so cant wait to play the new one now :-)