No, really: Origin couldn’t have shot Ultima in the head more efficiently if they’d tried. Had they bought the wrong game entirely? No, it said “Ultima” right there on the box!įor the past quarter century, Ultima fans have continued to ask themselves that same question: what the hell happened with Ultima VIII? It stands today as one of the most bizarre would-be series continuations in gaming history, such a colossal failure to meet its players’ expectations that, alone and unaided, it killed dead at a stroke the most venerable franchise in computer gaming. An hour later, they were one and all sitting there scratching their heads and asking themselves what the hell had happened. Tens of thousands of eager Ultima fans, some of whom had been buying every installment of the series for ten years or more, rushed home from their local software stores with Ultima VIII: Pagan in their hot little hands. They made a game in which you played a thoughtless jerk moving on rails through a linear series of events in which you never went to Britannia at all, but stayed instead on a miserable hellhole of a world called Pagan in which you spent the whole game adventuring alone (after all, who would want to adventure with a jerk like you?) in which the core mechanics were jumping between pedestals like Super Mario and pounding your enemies over the head with your big old hammer. Over the course of seven mainline games and five spinoffs and side stories, the Ultima brand had consistently stood for elaborate but doggedly nonlinear plots which seriously engaged with questions of ethics for the familiar but ever-evolving and ever-welcoming world of Britannia in which most of the games took place for a merry group of recurring boon companions with whom the Avatar, the player-defined protagonist of the games, adventured each time for complex rules systems and knotty central mysteries that required brainpower and lots of notepaper rather than reflexes to work through.īut then, for the eighth game in the mainline Ultima series, Origin decided to try something just a little bit different.
In 1994, Origin Systems’s Ultima series was the most universally lauded franchise in computer gaming.
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