Ultima II

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Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress
Developer(s)	Richard Garriott
Publisher(s)	Sierra On-Line, Origin Systems (re-release)
Designer(s)	Richard Garriott
Release date(s)	1982
Genre(s)	RPG
Mode(s)	Single Player
Platform(s)	Apple II, Atari, Commodore 64, DOS, MSX
Media	Floppy disk

Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress, released on August 24, 1982 (USCO# PA-317-502), is the second computer role-playing game in the Ultima series. It was also the last Ultima game published by Sierra On-Line before series creator Richard Garriott founded Origin Systems.

From the game's story, we learn that Mondain's lover, Minax, is threatening our Earth through disturbances in the space-time continuum, and the player must guide a hero through time to destroy her. Also, the player must travel to other planets in the solar system in order to gain a critical item.

Fans have speculated that Garriott was somehow disgruntled at the prospect of working with Sierra On-Line and intended this game to be partially an exercise in learning to code in assembly language and partly just a joke, inspired by the movie Time Bandits: the game contains a number of bizarre and decidedly inappropriate anachronisms when examined in context with similar fantasy games, such as: the game's world map is identical to real-life Earth, and the player must visit such mundane locations as San Antonio, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, modern-day and futuristic weaponry is used, and completely incongruous pop-culture references and in-jokes abound. However, futuristic weaponry and technology featured in the first game as well, and the incongruous nature can be easily explained by Ultima II's early date, before the computer role-playing genre had clearly developed its later standard conventions.

Ultima II on the Commodore 64

In addition, this game is known to contain numerous design flaws and bugs and shows general signs of being hurried onto the market before being properly finished and tested (for example, large map areas with nothing interesting happening in them could be found in the game). For these reasons, Revenge of the Enchantress is considered to be the weakest Ultima game by some fans. Regardless, Ultima II still sold very well for its time.

The game was re-released with updated graphics and improved screen layout for the Apple II only in 1989, but this re-release version was only sold as part of the Ultima Trilogy collection of the first three games, and Origin discontinued its Apple II product line soon afterwards; thus the re-release is relatively rare.

Except for the ubiquitous, text-based Infocom games, Ultima II was one of the first commercially available games ported to the Atari ST computer, and in fact was one of the few software titles available on the platform for several months after its release

Controversy with Sierra over royalties for the IBM PC port of this game led Richard Garriott to start his own company, Origin Systems.