Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness - Development and Release

Development and Release

Richard Garriott started development on Ultima after the unexpected success of his previous game, Akalabeth. Large sections of Akalabeth were used as subroutines within Ultima, to create the isometric dungeon sections of the game. Towns, quests, a plot and a user interface were all added to the original Akalabeth code before Ultima was completed. Development of Ultima was done during Garriott's freshman year at the University of Texas, with the help of a friend, Ken W. Arnold, he finishing it in less than a year. Ultima was coded in Applesoft BASIC on an Apple II computer, and used a tile-based graphics system, the first game in the genre to do so.

Unlike Akalabeth, with the commercial sale of which was an afterthought to a hobbyist endeavor, Ultima was approached with a much more professional attitude right from the start of the project. The game was first planned to be called Ultimatum, but it was discovered that the name was already in use by a board game company, and so it was shortened to Ultima. The California Pacific Computer Company published Ultima in 1981 for the Apple II only. By June 1982 it sold 20,000 copies, and went on to sell 50,000 copies.

Sierra Online re-released Ultima for the Atari 8-bit computers. In 1986 Origin Systems completely re-coded the game in Assembly and re-released it.

Because the 1986 remake was re-coded entirely in Assembly, it had significantly improved running speed and was able to handle superior graphics. Some small cosmetic changes to the content were also made, such as the addition of another castle map variant and three new city maps, the introduction of traveling monsters in the outdoors section, and the division of the money the player has into separate "copper", "silver" and "gold" coins. It was first released for the Apple II on December 23, 1986 as Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness. Ports for the Commodore 64 and DOS/EGA were also released. Many subsequent releases were made in later years, including the 1989 version for the MSX2, published only in Japan by Pony Canyon, as well as an Apple II specific port in late 1994 by Vitesse. In 1997, the DOS/EGA version of Ultima was released by Electronic Arts as part of the Ultima Collection.