Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress

Trivia

Little known is the fact that the IBM PC port is supposed to be played on an IBM CGA with a *composite* color monitor (EGA/VGA cards only emulate the display of an RGB monitor). Using that configuration, the pink-striped water becomes blue, the pink-speckled street tiles become red, and the cyan trees become green (see DOS screenshots).

There exist a freeware EGA graphics patch, which adds some decent colors to replace that original CGA -misery.

Ultima II was never re-released by Origin as a single game. They had trouble getting the publishing rights back from Sierra, and it wasn't until Electronic Arts published the Ultima Collection almost 15 years later that the game was commonly available for purchase again.

While designing the game Richard Garriott went to see the movie Time Bandits repeatedly just to copy down the map seen in the film and incorporate it into his game. He eventually decided that the map didn't actually make much sense but still wanted to include a cloth map with every copy of the game. Every publisher in the industry turned him down because of the cost, except Sierra.

The idea for "moongates" came when Richard Garriott and his friends saw the movie Time Bandits by Terry Gilliam. After watching the characters in the movie pop about in time through tiny windows that appeared and disappeared, Garriott decided to make his own map, and the idea for the game followed.

In it's original release this game was published by Sierra. For one reason or another, this didn't work out, and Richard Garriot left and published Ultima III under his own outfit. Origin later bought back the rights to Ultima II from Sierra. However Sierra still left their mark on this game as the Ultimate Weapon(tm) which you need to defeat Minax is a quicksword called Enilno, a name taken from another Sierra franchise.

Richard Garriot in general and the various Ultima devlopment teams in particular have something of a reputation for hiding various inserted oddness into the series. For example, in the map of the solar system in this game Earth is at coordinates (6,6,6). Make of that what you will.