Ultima retrospective on YouTube
Over the last 2 weeks, I've been watching a youtuber's retrospective of the Ultima series that's been going for a year now (and it's still not finished). It's been an interesting watch not only because it becomes so clear how much the series influenced RPGs on PCs and consoles, but also because it's a complete unknown part of gaming history for me. I was born in the 80s, meaning that when Ultima was at its height, I didn't exist yet. I could've played it in the 90s, but my first contact with a PC was in 94, and the first home computer in our household came around in 98. They were damn expensive. Consoles weren't much different, so after gaining access to one, we played only the most popular thing. Also, I didn't know any English, so it would've been a moot point anyway.
My first contact with Ultima was through Ultima Online, in the early 2000s, playing on a pirate Brazilian server (or shard, as they used to call it). I wrote a bit about my experience here. Soon after, I became aware of the Ultima games, but never played them because, at that point, they were just too old (hey, some were older than me), emulation of old systems wasn't that good, and I had Fallouts and Arcanum and Planescape and Morrowind to content with. Over the years, I always read people talking about how influential Ultima was, and I know they really were, but didn't realize the extent until watching this retrospective. I mean, sure, I knew already that Ultima influenced Japanese games and the non-dungeon crawlers approach in the US. I knew that Ultima IV wasn't about defeating a big bad and that Ultima VI and VII had a lot of interactive subsystems that were there just because they could be implemented.
What I didn't know was the scope of the influence, and after realizing that, it's easy to see how much the series influenced the RPGs in the early 2000s, when there were still large companies around trying to make some weird stuff, and how the focus on narrative and consequence could've been seen as a breakthrough back then. It's interesting to note how Ultima Underworld was the "proto-game" and the original mold of all first-person RPGs we have nowadays. I never understood why "Deus Ex" was called an "immersive sim" — to me, it was just a first-person shooter with extra stuff — until realizing the "immersive" part wasn't, like, immersion in a suspension of disbelief kind of way, but more like "you can interact with objects freely and do random stuff with them". I just took the tech for granted.
Another interesting thing is how many big names had contact with Richard Garriott or passed through Origin and either informed or were informed by the company ethos (before it became a hollow husk of itself). People like Ken and Roberta Williams I kinda expected; John Romero got me by surprise; Chris Roberts should've been obvious, but I never played space-flight simulators and knew Wing Commander only by name; and I had no idea that Warren Spector was an employee at Origin.
Of course, I know Ultima and Origin weren't the sole influences in modern-day gaming market, Wizardry was also carving a path, and Interplay was already in the game too, but it feels like a lot of the "RPG with a living, breathing world" idea came from Ultima.
In any the case, the retrospective is pretty interesting, even with the guy presenting it having a tendency to ramble and repeat himself quite a bit. There are still some games left he haven't talked about yet, so I'm curious to see how it will go. At least the dude deserves props for playing the whole series and doing research about the development, then condensing it all in video format.