Ultima VII: The Black Gate

1001 Video Games

Ultima VII appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Armageddon

There is a high level spell called Armageddon which kills every person in the game except for yourself and Lord British. If you go back and talk to him he will exclaim "What have you done!?!"

Credits

• If you sit through the credits then another option will be available to view quotes humourous quotes from the development staff. At the end of this the butterfly from the intro floats onto the screen then blows up, followed by an evil cackle from the Guardian, apparently uttering gibberish. However, it is simply a sound sample that is played backwards. When reversed, The Guardian says "I am the Pagan Lord", apparently an early hint at the sequel. A recording is available at the Ultima Dragons FTP Archive.
• As an interesting testament to the credibility of the Ultima VII end credits, EA , far far later, actually took "Voluntarily rated MP-13 (for Mature Players)" logo from the game credits and put that to the The Complete Ultima VII budget release box.

Dead people room

There is a room in the mountains east of cove (can only be accessed with the cheat) where all the people who have been killed go. Most of them are alive and well and you can even talk to them.

Experience points

In case you're wondering, completing mini quests DOES give you experience! For example, the first mini quest you receive in Paws (the Serpent Venom thief story) when completed, gives you and your companions (ie. Iolo and Spark) 75 experience points. Even the very small mini quests which only involve talking to people and conveying conversations to other people "may" give you and your companions experience points.

Exult

There is a project called Exult out there on the web that will allow you to play Ultima VII on a Win9x machine. The only catch is you have to have the original files. The creators of Exult had to work from the ground up to make the game playable, considering the original source code to Ultima VII is not available to the public.

Fellowship

The Fellowship was was largely inspired by many "new age" religions and cults of the time, but most notably it was inspired by the Church of Scientology. Garriott's main inspiration was reportedly the infamous TIME Magazine Scientology article of May 1991. Among other things, regular Fellowship members don't know what is happening in the higher levels of the cult hierarchy, which is typical to cults in general. Batlin's character is very obviously inspired by L. Ron Hubbard's persona. There is even a "personality test" in the game.

Interactivity

The game is famous for offering a high interactivity; almost every item in the game world can be used. The option to bake bread has become synonymous for this.

Lord British

If you manage to kill Lord British (the black rock is handy for this) you will find in his corpse (amongst other stuff) a lightning bolt which acts as a missile weapon and is how he casts spells if you fight him.

References: Electronic Arts

The game starts with the quote:

"Avatar! Know that Britannia has entered into a new age of enlightenment...Under my guidance, Britannia will flourish, and all the people will rejoice! And pay homage to their new... Guardian!".

The Guardian is a character inspired by the attempted takeover of Origin Systems in the early '90s and hints at EA. This links is proven while playing: the three items that power the evil generators in-game are a cube, a sphere and a tetrahedron, the former EA logo.

Richard Garriott also sneaked in a more subtle reference to Electronic Arts. Take a look at the characters Elizabeth and Abraham for example. Just take the first letters of their names. Elizabeth and Abraham have a high-ranked profile in the fellowship (e.g. EA in the publishing business) and go around and perform seemingly helpful tasks (like dragging the Avatar to the shelter in Paws for resurrection every time he dies), but in fact they are murderers and are in a conspiracy to bring a destructive powerful-being, the Guardian, into Britannia.

It's unsure if the reference goes that deep, but Origin originally thought that EA might help it gain more profit and reach more gamers, but EA's counter-productive strategies ended up destroying what made Ultima special and thereby reducing sales.

References: Star Trek

Certain residents of Serpent's Hold bear a striking resemblance to the crew of the USS Enterprise in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, both in their names, their occupations, their characters and sometimes their appearance.

Here's a breakdown: * Lord John-Paul, Commander of the Keep - Jean-Luc Picard, Captain of the Enterprise * Sir Richter, second in command - Commander Riker * Sir Horffe, a Gargoyle raised by Human parents, Captain of the Guard - Lt. Worf, a Klingon raised by Human parents, Chief of Security * Sir Denton, a knight known for his ability to solve problems and puzzles, for being overly detailed in everything he says and for not being able to tell jokes that are funny, wears a full suit of armour all the time - Lt. Commander Data, the Android * Sir Jordan, a blind bowyer and tinkerer - Lt. Commander Geordi LaForge, the blind Chief Engineer * Lady Leigh, red-haired healer - Dr. Beverly Crusher, Chief Medical Officer * Lady Tory, adviser and empath - Counselor Deanna Troi

References

• In a series cross-over, there is a farm near Britain where the farmer would tell you about a craft that fell from the sky and the big cat man who appeared from it. Sure enough, in his field there was a Kilrathi vessel. If you clicked on it, it would play the Kilrathi theme from Wing Commander II.
• In Gilberto's house in Trinsic you can find a book titled Struck Commander, detailing the adventures of a band of mercenaries that ride flying carts. Much like in Origin's Strike Commander.

Sherry

In Ultima VII: The Black Gate, you meet Sherry the Mouse (in Ultima VI) for the last time. She's nursing kids at the Royal Nursery at Lord British's castle and cannot be recruited.

SNES port

A fairly simplified version of this game was ported to the Super Nintendo console system. Although the same basic graphics were used, the game engine was changed drastically to be even more action oriented. The console version removed the companion NPCs (although they did appear as characters in the different villages) and featured the Avatar only who you controlled in a run-and-slash manner Legend of Zelda style. A great deal of the environment interactivity was removed, and the plot was also sanitized as well (instead of the grisly blood soaked ritualistic murder which the PC version opens with, in the console version you are simply told that the blacksmith was "kidnapped"). More information can be found in its game entry.

Soundtrack

The credits sequence started to go more and more movie-like towards the end, with usual disclaimers ("any resemblance... is purely coincidental", "no animals were harmed"... etc), logos of the technologies being used (Voodoo logos etc), and finally, "Soundtrack CD available from Origin". That was only added as a gag to make the credits look absolutely movie-like, but (because the game obviously has some pretty good music) people started asking Origin about the soundtrack album. Ultima VII: Part Two - Serpent Isle had same sort of credit display - but with a text "Soundtrack CD NOT available from Origin, so don't ask!"

However, Origin did eventually release Origin Soundtrack Series volume 2, which contains some of the tunes from both of these games.

Voodoo memory manager

This game used what Origin called the "voodoo memory manager". What this really was, was no memory manager at all - not even a DOS extender. It used memory beyond the first megabyte directly by popping the processor into flat 32-bit mode; since DOS couldn't access that memory directly, it was used to cache resources (mostly graphics) to improve performance. Needless to say, this "memory manager" was completely incompatible with any real memory manager, including any variety of MS Windows.

Ultima VII: The Black Gate programmer and MobyGames contributor weregamer:

A few years and a couple of jobs later, when Windows 95 was in early beta, I was part of a program where MS engineers working on it met with developers of entertainment and animation software. The engineer we met proudly proclaimed their goal that 100% of DOS games would run under Windows 95 by the time it shipped - "DOS Mode" would not be necessary. I sadly had to burst her bubble by explaining the "voodoo memory manager". She had a hard time believing it - I guess she just hadn't realized just how hard game programmers worked to squeeze performance out of machines in the bad old days.

Awards

• Computer Gaming World
  • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #3 Hardest Computer Game
• GameStar (Germany)
  • Issue 12/1999 - #21 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
• PC Games (Germany)
  • Issue 01/1993– #2 Best RPG in 1992

Information also contributed by Chris Martin, Fafnir, Indra was here, Itay Shahar, Ray Soderlund, Sciere, Terok Nor; weregamer, WWWWolf and Zovni