Ultima I

aka: Ultima I: The Beginning..., Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness
Moby ID: 12111
Apple II Specs

Description official description

Ultima I is a remake of the classic RPG Ultima from 1981. You must travel to another world and save the land Sosaria from the evil wizard Mondain. The game features tile based top-down overworld graphics and first person perspective pseudo-3D dungeons.

The original Ultima was re-programmed using assembly language, with updated graphics, minor changes in towns' and people's names, and some different puzzles.

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Brilliant Programming Efforts
Product Management
Eloquent Writings Herein
Magnificent Illustrations within This Book
Outstanding Graphic and Design Work
Ultima and Lord British are Registered Trademarks of

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 64% (based on 8 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 73 ratings with 5 reviews)

A great start to a great series.

The Good

Ultima 1 is a product of the stone age of computer gaming, back in the day when your typical game developer was usually some kid or early 20-something who was writing a game for the fun of it and maybe to share it with a few friends. The industry was so primitive that when Richard Garriott finished this game, he sold them in ziplock bags and with a cheaply printed manual, in a computer store where he worked and was reliant entirely on word-of-mouth to boost his sales.

I don't think he expected it to be nearly as successful as it was, hence explaining the somewhat bizaare setting. Anyways, enough of this meandering! On to the review!

Sosaria is under the evil control of the wizard Mondain, a man so evil that no one in Sosaria can beat him, so they call forth some dude from Austin, Texas known only as the Weirdo in an attempt that maybe he might go Cowboy on his heiny. OK, so it wasn't exactly established at that time, but it laid some great foundation work so that the 'Stranger from another world' became the Avatar from Earth in later games. I always found concepts like that intriguing because it easly allowed the player to 'become' the hero and envision themselves as the ones who were called to this world to save it.

The game itself, like many games from the 80's, required a lot of imagination from the player. The isn't particularly long or demanding on the player, especially if they know how to to raise their statistics and get the most powerful weapons in the game... all of which can be done almost at the beginning of the game, allowing for a super powered player to plow through the enemies. Performing quests for the kings in the game in hopes of getting the important items to finish the game can range from the fairly silly to the mundane, and doesn't do much in terms of advancing the plot, but it does allow for some excuse to explore the dungeons in the world, which would otherwise be fairly unnecessary.

There is something else about this game that sets it apart from most other RPG series (save for perhaps the Might and Magic series) was it's combination of pure sci-fi and fantasy. While the world appears to be your standard fantasy setting, there are actually space shuttles and flying cars available, and the most powerful weapons in the game are blasters and phaser pistols! Also there's a part of the game that involves you going into outspace to shoot down TIE-fighters from Star Wars (though later retcon made it clear that they're actually Kilrathi from the Wing Commander series). You need to do this because a princess tells you she won't help you unless you're a space ace!

Just imagine if Ultima was a movie, and up to that point, it had been a generic fantasy movie... until someone says that you need to suit up, fly a space fighter, and blow up star destroyers. The sheer awesomeness of that would explode the heads of anyone in the auidence! The best part of it is, there's no segue between the fantasy and sci-fi, they just exist side to side as if there's nothing wrong or off with that. This fact does set Ultima apart from any other game even today, which you'd think had been surpassed by now, but hasn't, save for the Might and Magic series.

The Bad
So what's wrong with this game? Well, there is one minorly wrong thing with it... you're supposed to be a hero, but at the same time, you're required to do things that are very decidedly unheroic things, like murdering jesters for keys to liberate princesses, and then killing the guards who come after you at that point. While almost every RPG game today has a morality system, it just seems off that this game requires you to be decidedly evil when you're supposed to be a good guy.

The towns and castles could have used more interactivity with the ordinary people, but other than that, the game really didn't have much flaws as compared to the following game in the series

The Bottom Line
The Ultima series, along with Origin systems games and Sierra Online games, basically represent the birth and evolution of PC games, and for anyone who wants to see that history in action should play this game the other games in the series.

DOS · by Salim Farhat (69) · 2013

A Confusing Journey Through Space and Time

The Good
Ultima was the first Ultima game I played, even though that was admittedly in early 2007, some 25 years after its initial release. Since then I've also tried some of the newer incarnations, but this is the only one I actually bothered to finish from start till end. That doesn't mean its the best one of the series however. Perhaps merely that it's the shortest? Or perhaps it felt like an achievement.

The whole game took me only about one and a half day to finish.

The game actually features three types of environments, an over-world, cities and castles, and Dungeons. The dungeons are some kind of 3D mazes displayed in vector graphics which is actually rather interesting to got through. even if all the random encounters are exactly the same. The rest is top down 2D goodness.

Quests come in two types, visiting a signpost or killing a certain monster. Neither are particularly challenging. Visiting a signpost actually means exploring the land and looking at a signpost when you see one, which lacks any skill whatsoever. Killing a monster requires more thought from the player as you have to go in a dungeon and actually find such a monster and kill it. The dungeons can be quite the mazes, so you best keep a map on paper. (real paper, not ingame) And buy enough level up spells to get out of the dungeon quickly. Interestingly you get HP when you kill a monster, so usually I had more hit-points when I left the dungeon than when I went in. Weird. There is also no HP ceiling so you can acquire quasi-infinite HP (until the game crashes because it runs out of memory probably).

The Bad
The interface of Ultima is absolutely horrendous. The field of interface design apparently wasn't in existence back in the early eighties, so each action in the game has its own button on the keyboard. Meaning that there are few buttons on your keyboard that you will not use during the course of the game. Each action in the game is bound to the first letter of the action on the keyboard (such as A for attack, C for cast spell and O for open), which is supposed to make memorizing them easier. But in reality this just makes the controls harder, because they are scattered randomly over the keyboard. And it also means that some actions had to be given arbitrary names so not to use the same letter twice (boarding a horse? klimbing a rope?), which makes it still just as difficult to remember. Usually your action will have to be followed with a direction key, so that the game knows in what direction you want to perform this action. Needless to say it is all more complex than it should be.

Like any self-respecting fantasy hero you can also rescue princesses, there's one in every castle. And the jester has the key. So you kill the jester, but unfortunately there's only 50% chance that it is the right key. Boring? Yes Futile? Definitely!

The Bottom Line
My game started rather awkwardly and left me rather confused for the duration of the game. I thought that the game would be a fantasy game, but the first thing my Dwarven Fighter did was steal from Lord British treasury. Which made him the proud owner of a blaster rifle, a light sword and vacuum suit. I then started grinding loot until I could buy an Aircar and fulfilled my Luke Skywalker fantasies. Later came the space shuttle and fighting sequences with TIE-Fighters, which added to the confusion.

All in all Ultima is quite fun to play, but don't expect anything from it story-wise. Don't expect any challenge either, the game is ridiculously easy, even the final boss is dead before you know it. Just make sure you visited all the signposts and did your share of grinding for all the sci-fi gear. Only play it if you're really interested in seeing the roots of this series. Or wonder what it would be like if Dungeons & Dragons, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars somehow collided to form some kind of Geek Super World.

DOS · by vedder (70685) · 2008

Playing it 28 years after release - a wonderful experience.

The Good
This is simple and cute RPG released in prehistoric era of computers. Ultima use all resources available at a time to its limits and wants even more. Unlike Wizardry, there are world that you can see (sketchy, but still) and travel in any direction. The world consists of four islands filled with castles, towns, dungeons and monuments that increase player's stats. There are lots of options you can do like buying a mount (flyer and space shuttle is available!), saving the princess, questing for kings and others. If you want, you can just drink in the bar. The game is not looped to stats, classes and dungeon crawling. Instead it's more adventurous game and fighting is easy and simple.
Also I find saving system is simple and very handy.

The Bad
Some design choices are very odd. Most of the castles and dungeons are useless. There is no point to visit them all.
Space section of the game is kind of ridiculous. It's doesn't fit into fantasy world and looks very starwarsy (it's 1980, I can understand that) Gameplay in space is more spacesim rather than RPG, you have to scan space sectors and fight enemies from first person view. Well, at least they dropped space after second Ultima.

The Bottom Line
Good casual RPG. Oblivion of 1981. (Although I played 1987 version, but they should be almost the same) Works perfectly with DosBox.

DOS · by Bruce Wayne (2) · 2008

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Apple IIgs Version. Edwin Drost (9295) Feb 11, 2017
Sharp X1 Edwin Drost (9295) Jan 30, 2017
Regaining your Health. Edwin Drost (9295) Jan 26, 2017
Health Donatello (466) Jan 28, 2013

Trivia

1001 Video Games

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

Extras

Origin, like they did with many of the Ultima games, included a "trinket" in the box. In this case the trinket consisted of a small cloth bag with five metal coins.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Unicorn Lynx.

Apple IIgs added by Edwin Drost. PC-88, Sharp X1, PC-98 added by Terok Nor. MSX added by koffiepad. Windows added by eWarrior.

Additional contributors: MAT, Iguana, jlebel, FatherJack.

Game added February 15, 2004. Last modified February 13, 2024.