The Digital Antiquarian - Worlds of Ultima

The Digital Antiquarian writes about the Worlds of Ultima.

The Worlds of Ultima

23 Feb

In the very early days of Ultima, Richard Garriott made a public promise which would eventually come back to haunt him. Looking for a way to differentiate his CRPG series from its arch-rival, Wizardry, he said that he would never reuse an Ultima engine. Before every new installment of his series, he would tear everything down to its component parts and rebuild it all, bigger and better than ever before. For quite some time, this policy served Garriott very well indeed. When the first Ultima had appeared in 1981, it had lagged well behind the first Wizardry in terms of sales and respect, but by the time Ultima III dropped in 1983 Garriott’s series had snatched a lead which it would never come close to relinquishing. While the first five Wizardry installments remained largely indistinguishable from one another to the casual fan, Ultima made major, obvious leaps with each new release. Yes, games like The Bard’s Tale and Pool of Radiance racked up some very impressive sales of their own as the 1980s wore on, but Ultima… well, Ultima was simply Ultima, the most respected name of all in CRPGs.

And yet by 1990 the promise which had served Richard Garriott so well was starting to become a real problem for his company Origin Systems. To build each new entry in the series from the ground up was one thing when doing so entailed Garriott disappearing alone into a small room containing only his Apple II for six months or a year, then emerging, blurry-eyed and exhausted, with floppy disks in hand. It was quite another thing in the case of a game like 1990’s Ultima VI, the first Ultima to be developed for MS-DOS machines with VGA graphics and hard drives, a project involving four programmers and five artists, plus a bureaucracy of others that included everything from producers to play-testers. Making a new Ultima from the ground up had by this point come to entail much more than just writing a game engine; it required a whole new technical infrastructure of editors and other software tools that let the design team, to paraphrase Origin’s favorite marketing tagline, create their latest world.

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More information.

Ach, the memories. The Savage Empire opened my eyes to its open world a decade before open worlds were a thing. A departure from the CRPGs I had become used to, sure, but what a living, breathing alternate world for me to explore. And crafting without recipes, yay!

Its a pity how one man managed to successfully destroy his own legacy. It would be more meme worthy than Molyneux.... Except that RG is too irrelevant today to be remembered by large gaming communities.

Bizarre

Ultima 6 had three games built off the same engine. Ultima 7 had two.

It's almost like Bioware caught whatever Garriott had/has. Such decent starts, such appalling conclusions.

Lucky Day said:

Bizarre

Ultima 6 had three games built off the same engine. Ultima 7 had two.

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The whole story is about that very fact and how Richard Garriott promised to never do that.

Thank you Silver for posting a link to this here!!!

I was 18 when U4 was released, 23 when U6 arrived. Needless to say, I'm old…er now. The article brings back great gaming memories.

One thing younger readers interested in this bit of history may want to understand is that Garriott wasn't alone in his "mission" to never reuse technology. Maybe his direct competitors were more flexible on the matter than he was, but from 1977 throughout most of the 1990s… those were the days when everyone was chomping at the "bit" for a few more colors and prettier, less jaggy pixels. We still do it today, but today it's about hyper-realisim when back then it was just… well… anything better than atari 2600.

On the part of the article about sales topping out at about 200-250k units, I think one very important mention is omitted. I think I was paying about $40 or $50 for an ultima game in those days (that's $77.82 - $97.28 in today's value). That's pretty expensive right there. But wait, there's more! Since Garriott pushed the envelope with processing power for each new game, 200-250k of us had to spend money to either massively upgrade our computers OR buy a new computer outright. This was very much par for the course in those days. I read more than just a few times in then-current gaming magazines speculations that Garriott helped spur hardware sales with each new release of a game. If you wanted to play Strike Commander at anything better than a slide show, you were definitely buying a new rig.

Looking back in 20/20 hindsight, I'd have to agree with the likes of Sir Tech, that re-using technology was definitely the way to go. But who knows, had Garriott adopted that philosophy early on, maybe he would have never stood out. Or maybe he would have been twice as successful. It's hard to say, and Monday morning quarterbacking is a lot different than putting your butt and $$$ on the line and making the best choices you can with whatever info you have.

With all of Garriott's contemporary missteps these days, I certainly still have respect for the man who delivered many hours of enjoyment to me over two decades. Those games were a ton of fun.

bjon045 said:

The whole story is about that very fact and how Richard Garriott promised to never do that.

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Exactly!

TheMadGamer said:

I think I was paying about $40 or $50 for an ultima game in those days (that's $77.82 - $97.28 in today's value). That's pretty expensive right there.

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Not that this is your point, but I disagree that $80-90 is expensive for a game. Games cost a &*^%ton of money and resources to make. The currently flooded (in the Biblical sense) market has resulted in a race to the bottom where most people get really twitchy if an indie dev wants more than $15 for his game, or sometimes less. This may be the number one problem facing developers right now. Games are basically worthless to consumers and the sub-AAA industry is run on sweat and tears.

screeg said:

Not that this is your point, but I disagree that $80-90 is expensive for a game. Games cost a &*^%ton of money and resources to make.

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My remarks that $40-$50 for an Ultima game was "expensive" was really a reflection on my side of the purchasing equation. Back then, I was netting about $1,200.00/month. $1,000.00 of that went to rent and a car payment. The rest was for incidentals (i.e. food, clothes etc.). I didn't have a lot of discretionary income at the time, hence my "expensive" comment. I would have been better to say, "expensive for me at the time."

Price is one of the reasons I never owned any of the Worlds of Adventure games. Add the latest Wizardry, Might and Magic, and gold box game into the equation and being similarly lowish income, there wasn't much left for "side games". Games had a longer shelf life back then though, and you could pick up things later one for a decent reduced price if you had a local software store that didn't like old inventory. But that was long before anything like Steam existed.

I also remember getting upgrades of one sort or another for both Ultima VI and later Ultima VII. It wasn't until Ultima VIII that the cycle finally broke. My next full PC upgrade didn't come until Fallout/EverQuest time frame, and my income was such by then that I was starting to pick up a more diverse set of games and PC upgrades were very regular after that.

Darkbridger said:

Games had a longer shelf life back then though, and you could pick up things later one for a decent reduced price if you had a local software store that didn't like old inventory. But that was long before anything like Steam existed.

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Yes, but Steam has made games MUCH cheaper, both the initial price that many people bitch about and the series of inevitable sales which in not much time at all brings games into everyone's range. That's not even getting into regional pricing, for which I'm sure many non-Western gamers are grateful.

My ultimate point being that people are generally really spoiled and don't consider that devs need a chance to actually make some money.

screeg said:

Yes, but Steam has made games MUCH cheaper, both the initial price that many people bitch about and the series of inevitable sales which in not much time at all brings games into everyone's range. That's not even getting into regional pricing, for which I'm sure many non-Western gamers are grateful.

My ultimate point being that people are generally really spoiled and don't consider that devs need a chance to actually make some money.

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Absolutely. That's why a game could be a hit back then with a few hundred thousand copies sold, while today it requires a much larger number to make back the much larger budget. The phone/app thing is really what spurred the race to the bottom. Developers then turned into buskers... here's an app... throw me a dollar every once in a while if you like it. Then they added the psychology/addiction mechanisms and things went south in a hurry. Once the phone/app guys found it easy to port their game to Steam, things went from bad to ugly. Older gamers are a niche that generally can't keep a modern developer afloat anymore.

There's no cost with digital software either - there's no shipping, no packaging and your sales can theoretically go on forever because there's no worry about replacing supply. Once the development and marketing costs are covered, its free money.

You are not limited by the number of units on the shelf. There's no retailer that needs a cut and no staff to hire to ring you up at the counter.

It is also simple - you don't need a vehicle to go out and get it and bring it back. The same medium used to purchase it on is 99% likely the same where it will be played.

Yeah the savings alone from not having to package and print so much materials should really keep prices at the stage they are now. That's why I laugh when I see a game on GoG or Steam nowadays at like fifty bucks plus, it's simply a matter of looking around for deals or waiting a month to six till the price comes in line. Even switch games, which do have materials involved take a very realistic plunge a few weeks/months after launch.

All right, distribution costs are *lower* but did everyone suddenly forget Steam's ~30% cut? Not exactly nothing.

So let's do a little napkin math: development costs have tripled while simultaneously prices have fallen 75% ($60 --> $15) over the past 20 years. That's in dollars *unadjusted for inflation*. And though there are no retail and distribution costs, Steam takes 30% off the top.

Does that sound like everything's nice and evened out?