Ultima VII: The Black Gate

Ultima VII: The Black Gate is the seventh main installment of the Ultima series of fantasy role-playing video games, developed and published by Origin Systems? for IBM PC? compatibles and released on 16 April 1992.¹⁴²¹ It was the tenth Ultima game to be released when spin-offs are included, and a port for the Super NES followed in 1994.¹²²¹ The player again assumes the role of the Avatar, who is drawn from Earth back into the land of Britannia to investigate a series of ritualistic murders and uncover the purpose of a religious sect called the Fellowship.¹¹¹² The game is regarded by its designer Richard “Lord British” Garriott as the pinnacle of the series’ virtual-world simulation and interactive storytelling.⁹

Setting and story

The game opens with a sinister red face appearing on the Avatar’s computer screen, declaring its impending rule over Britannia; a moongate then materializes and transports the hero to the city of Trinsic.¹¹¹² There the Avatar learns from his old friend Iolo that two hundred years have passed in Britannia since his last visit, that magic is failing and mages going mad, and that a horrific murder—the body of the town blacksmith, Christopher, found in the stables—has just occurred.¹¹¹²¹⁶ The opening murder investigation in Trinsic functions as a tutorial woven into the storyline, with the city under lockdown until the mystery is solved.⁷

The new sect known as the Fellowship has been recruiting heavily among the lower classes and securing influential positions in society.¹² The Avatar’s investigation, pursued alongside the periodic warnings of the mysterious voice, eventually reveals through the Time Lord that the Fellowship is the puppet of the red-faced being, the Guardian, who intends to enter Britannia through a Black Gate using three blackrock Generators to spread his influence.¹² The Avatar destroys the Generators and hurries to the Isle of the Avatar to intercept the completion of the gate, destroying it just before the Guardian can pass through.¹² The events begin the “Age of Armageddon,” continued in Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds and Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle.¹²

The game’s presentation was markedly more mature than its predecessors, confronting the player with graphic crime scenes, drug use, racism and political corruption, and a villain who works through subtle manipulation rather than open menace.¹²⁷ The world had degraded since Ultima VI: The False Prophet: the union of human and Gargoyle races had decayed into racism, a potent drug with an accompanying fatal disease was sweeping the land, and the Avatar himself had come to be regarded as a children’s story.⁷

Gameplay and design

Ultima VII presented a single, seamless world rendered in 256-color VGA that filled the entire screen, with informational windows overlaid only when needed.¹¹¹² World interaction and dialogue were fully mouse-controlled: objects could be physically dragged, stacked on one another to form puzzles, and arranged within bags and containers, and equipment was shown on a “paper doll” inventory screen displaying worn items on the character.¹¹⁴ Dialogue was no longer entered by typing keywords but selected from a list, with more extensive conversation trees than earlier installments.¹¹¹²

The tactical, turn-based combat of earlier Ultima games was replaced with a real-time system in which the player set only general strategies and party members fought automatically, the player directly controlling the Avatar alone; combat paused when the inventory was accessed.¹¹ Leveling continued the earlier games’ automatic increase of parameters once enough experience accumulated, and the Avatar and his companions had to eat regularly to stay alive.¹¹ The world was populated by non-player characters following daily schedules—rising at dawn, going to work, eating out, and retiring at night—so that finding a particular person required knowing their habits.¹¹¹³ As in earlier games the player was free to explore Britannia from the outset, though certain tasks had to be completed in order to conclude the story.¹¹ Copy protection took the form of an in-game geography quiz before leaving Trinsic and questions about the Book of Fellowship during the Fellowship induction.¹⁶

Development

Origin Systems had been founded in 1983 by Richard Garriott and his brother Robert with $70,000 in family money, building a culture that prized creative vision and elaborate game settings under the later slogan “We create worlds”.⁸ Garriott made it a point of pride to begin each new Ultima from scratch, with not a line of code, nor even the map editors and other tools, carried over from earlier games.⁸ To load the game’s large quantity of graphics into memory, Origin in 1992 wrote a custom memory manager known as the “Voodoo memory manager,” which exploited the undocumented unreal mode of 32-bit x86 processors.⁸¹⁰ The scheme made the game notoriously difficult to configure with sound, a problem players continued to encounter for years and which Origin acknowledged with a gag in the game’s credits.¹¹¹³¹⁰

Garriott worked a reference to Origin’s troubled relationship with publisher Electronic Arts into the game: two helpful-seeming non-player characters, Elizabeth and Abraham, turn out to be murderers in league with the Guardian, and the three items powering the Guardian’s generators—a cube, a sphere and a tetrahedron—were the former EA logo.⁸ The reference proved prophetic, as in 1992 Origin entered dire financial straits and sold itself to Electronic Arts.⁸

The development team numbered some eighty people, with lead programming by Ken Demarest III and design contributions from John Watson, Michelle Caddel and others.¹¹ Origin released soundtrack recordings of the game’s Roland MT-32 music as part of the Origin Soundtrack Series, Volume 2, prompted in part by a credits gag falsely claiming “Soundtrack available from Origin!” that drew a flood of genuine requests.⁶

Reception and legacy

Contemporary critics rated the game highly, with an average of around 85 percent across sixteen reviews aggregated by MobyGames.¹¹ The GameSpy retrospective characterized it as introducing “a new breed of Americanized role-playing” that influenced later developers including Black Isle, BioWare and Obsidian.⁴ Garriott named Ultima VII among the three games of which he was most proud, alongside Ultima IV and Ultima Online, calling it the most masterfully executed entry in the series and “the pinnacle of virtual world simulation”.⁹

The game is frequently cited as one of the earliest sandbox role-playing games and a foundation for the open-world genre, with reviewers arguing that games such as Skyrim would not exist without it.¹³ One GOG reviewer called it “the grandparent to all modern Western computer role-playing games,” noting its huge, freely explorable world and the near-total interactivity of its objects—chairs that could be sat in, beds slept in, lampposts switched on and off.²⁰ The Divinity series is among the works explicitly cited as drawing on Ultima VII, particularly its interface and the ability to manipulate items throughout the game world.¹⁷

The original release was expanded by The Forge of Virtue, an add-on integrated so thoroughly into the main game that it became inseparable from it.⁴¹³ Ultima VII and its directly numbered second part, Serpent Isle, were later bundled with their expansions as The Complete Ultima VII and remain in distribution through digital re-releases configured to run under DOSBox.⁴¹³²⁰