Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness

Publisher: Origin Systems

Designer: Richard Garriot

Type: Roleplaying

Platform: Various

Release Date: 1981

Rating:

As you can probably discern from the title, this was the very first of the Ultimas, a game that ended up not only spawning eight sequels, several offshoots, and one of the first MMORPGs. So, this one takes up right back to the beginning where we can experience what it was like to actually play a computer roleplaying game back in the early eighties, and it certainly does have quite a lot of charm about it, even if it might not be on the scale of Skyrim.

Well, considering that it was originally released on an 8-bit machine, we certainly can’t expect Skyrim, but then again, for its time, it certainly did break a lot of boundaries. In fact, you had a quest, which differs from a lot of the other games at the time, which just involved you descending into dungeons and killing as many monsters as possible until you died. No, this one you had to go on a quest to kill a powerful mage.

The game involved you travelling over multiple continents, visiting multiple towns, and descending into multiple dungeons, mostly to build up your power so that you could then go and deal with that really nasty mage that you are supposed to kill. It was fun when I played it, and it certainly did steal hours of my life back when I was a teenager.

I guess, as I mentioned, it is certainly not something that you could hold up to modern games, but it is great to see what it was like back in the day. Oh, and the game was initially a top-down view, but that changed when you entered the dungeons. This was a format that the game used for most of its sequels, at least until Ultima 6 (as far as I’m aware).

Anyway, not surprisingly, this game appears on Wikipedia (something a a number of other games haven’t managed to do, which probably says a lot about that particular game). Also, I have discovered two wikias from Ultima – the Codex of Editable Wisdom, and the Ultima Codex. Of course, there are plenty of walkthroughs as well, of which this is one.