Ultima

Ultima is a series of fantasy role-playing video games developed by Origin Systems and created by Richard Garriott, the man widely credited with helping jumpstart the PC role-playing game genre.⁴ The series unfolds principally in the land of Britannia, a realm of magic and adventure presided over by Lord British, the in-game persona of Garriott himself.⁴⁸ Electronic Arts has held the rights to the franchise since the 1990s, and Garriott announced in 2026 that he was reclaiming the rights to Ultima.¹⁵⁶ It is one of the oldest commercial computer role-playing series, with its games described as products of the very beginning of commercial computer gaming.¹⁶

The series grew directly out of Akalabeth: World of Doom, a text-based dungeon-crawling game that Garriott developed in the late 1970s and that is described as the first game he designed.²²¹ Akalabeth was originally hand-assembled, and surviving original copies are prized by collectors as a Holy Grail of the hobby.²⁶ Its commercial success led Garriott to begin work on Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, which blended top-down exploration with first-person dungeon crawling, elements that would come to define the series.²² The series is the work of a programmer whose creative authority over Dungeons & Dragons-derived computer role-playing is one source of its enduring reputation; one contemporary description called the early titles a “computer dungeons and dragons type role-playing game” developed for the Commodore 64, IBM PC and Apple computers.²³

Main series

The mainline Ultima games span nearly two decades. Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness was released on 9 July 1981, followed by Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress (1982) and Ultima III: Exodus (1983).¹⁹¹⁷ The first three games established Ultima as a leader in the role-playing genre.²² Origin Systems was known for pushing computer systems to their limits, and even with their basic graphics the early games demanded a great deal of imagination from the player; the version of Ultima I later distributed in collections was an EGA remake, while Ultima II was never remade and is often considered the weakest of the trilogy.¹⁶ Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985) introduced the figure of the Avatar and the framework of virtue quests that became central to the series’ identity.¹⁹³ Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny arrived in 1988, Ultima VI: The False Prophet in 1990, Ultima VII: The Black Gate in 1992, and Ultima VIII: Pagan in 1994.¹⁹¹

Ultima VII: The Black Gate, released the same year as the Ultima Underworld spin-off, retained the familiar top-down perspective rather than adopting the 3-D engine of Underworld, but introduced real-time gameplay and was the first game in the series that could be controlled entirely by the mouse, a control scheme the manual noted was “highly recommended by Lord British”.⁸ At a time when many PC owners did not even own a mouse, much less regard it as a gaming device, this was a notable interface change.⁸ The game is frequently cited as among the best in the series and one of the most fully interactive gameworlds presented in a video game of its era, rivaled in popularity only by Ultima III, with players able to perform incidental actions such as milking cows; completing it required upwards of sixty hours.⁸ Its plot turns on the investigation of a ritualistic murder and a cult called “The Fellowship,” which some critics read as a satire of the Church of Scientology, set in Britannia some two hundred years after the Avatar’s previous visit and framed by taunts from a recurring villain, the Guardian.⁸ The final mainline installment, Ultima IX: Ascension, was released on 24 November 1999.¹⁹

The series also produced spin-offs, including the Ultima Underworld dungeon games (1992 and 1993), Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire (1990), and Ultima Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams (1991), bringing the franchise to fourteen games in all by 2026 along with some twenty-nine pieces of downloadable content.¹⁹ Ultima Online, a persistent online world set in Britannia, has continued to receive regular updates into the 2020s, with publishes deployed across regional shards and a “New Legacy” shard announced in 2020.²¹

Britannia and its setting

The fictional world of Britannia is presented with considerable internal detail, including its own runic alphabet and a magic system in which novice magicians of numbered “Circles” cast spells using rune-words such as “In Lor” for light.⁷ Master magicians such as Annon of Britain and Felespar of Yew earn a living fabricating magic scrolls for ordinary people to buy and use, and the craft of transmuting spells into glyphs is reserved for those who have advanced beyond the Second Circle.⁷ The world’s moral framework, organized around virtues and embodied in the Avatar’s quests, is a defining feature of the post-Ultima IV games.³⁷

The setting was extended into print through a pair of tie-in novels by Lynn Abbey, who came to know Garriott through science-fiction and gaming conventions where both were guests and where the two, both inclined to shyness, spent hours discussing the differences between writing a novel and designing a computer game.³ With Garriott’s permission, Abbey set the novels off the beaten track of the games, between the events of the third and fourth installments of the Apple version, and approached the game’s elements as they might appear to people actually living in Britannia rather than retelling a virtue quest the reader already knew the ending of.³ The two books, The Forge of Virtue and The Temper of Wisdom, were published by Warner; the second was among the last books Warner issued before a new editor, envisioning a line that did not stoop to media or gaming tie-ins, declined to continue the series, bringing the stories of Jordan, Balthan, Althea and their companions to an abrupt end.³⁷

Merchandise and licensing oddities

Ultima was extremely popular in Japan, where it spawned a great deal of tie-in merchandise ranging from CD soundtracks and manga adaptations of the game stories to a customizable card game and frisbees.⁵ To promote the release of Ultima V and its Nintendo version, a series of prime-time television commercials starred Garriott as Lord British.⁵ A long-circulated claim that an Ultima animated series was produced in Japan in 1989 as a television pilot or straight-to-video release, and rediscovered in a warehouse after the devastating 1995 earthquake, has been shown to originate as a joke article posted to a now-defunct Finnish anime fan site, with a disclaimer hidden in invisible text at its foot.⁵ The often-quoted line from Shay Adams’ 1990 Official Book of Ultima that “animated cartoons soon brought the Ultima story to television audiences” almost certainly refers to the cartoon made for Ultima‘s first television commercial rather than to any lost series.⁵ A genuine but unrealized attempt to develop an Ultima animated show took place in Los Angeles in 1995, when Origin, drawing on Hollywood connections made through Wing Commander III and IV, pitched series bibles and concept art—the latter by Will Meugniot of ExoSquad fame at Film Roman—to studios; no pilot was purchased.⁵

An obscure curiosity in the franchise is Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash, a maze-running action game for the Commodore VIC-20 written by Garriott’s friend Keith Zabalaoui, who had helped with his projects, and released by Sierra in the spring of 1983.² Zabalaoui had visited Sierra in Garriott’s company and was inspired there to begin the simple action game; when Sierra suggested marketing it under the Ultima name to aid its prospects, Garriott agreed largely as a personal favor.² The game required not only a VIC-20 but its 8K memory expansion and a cassette drive, equipment most owners of the machine lacked, and it appeared just as the VIC-20 software market was collapsing under the cheaper, more capable Commodore 64.² It achieved minuscule distribution and sales before vanishing, most of the production run written off and trashed; only in 2000 did a working copy surface on the Internet, from an Indiana garage sale, making it a rival to Akalabeth as the rarest object of Ultima collecting.²

Legacy and preservation

Origin Systems was known for pushing computer hardware to its limits, and the series is regularly cited as one of the most influential in the history of role-playing games.¹⁶²² By 1997 the franchise had sold over two million copies, and in 1998 Origin released the Ultima Collection, gathering eleven games from Ultima I through Ultima VIII plus Akalabeth, with video interviews with Garriott, for about US$44.95.¹

Because the original games exploited memory routines that render them incompatible with modern Windows systems, fan-made preservation efforts have kept them playable.⁸ Among these is Exult, a GPL-licensed replacement engine begun by Jeff S. Freedman, known as “DrCode,” to recreate Ultima VII on modern operating systems while preserving the original top-down experience; it continued to receive updates including a 2025 release improving Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle with MIDI audio fixes and crash repairs ahead of a move to SDL3.⁶⁸ A separate project, Ultima VII: Revisited, instead aims to render the same game in isometric 3-D.⁶ The earliest games remain commercially available as digital re-releases, with the first trilogy sold as Ultima 1+2+3 and maintained under the GOG Preservation Program.¹⁶