Ultima I

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Ultima I

Developer(s)	Richard Garriott
Publisher(s)	California Pacific Computer Co., Origin Systems (re-release)
Designer(s)	Richard Garriott
Release date(s)	1980 and 1986 (re-release)
Genre(s)	RPG
Mode(s)	Single Player
Platform(s)	Apple II, Atari, Commodore 64, DOS, MSX
Media	Floppy disk

Ultima, later known as Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness or simply Ultima I, is the first game in the Ultima series of computer role-playing games and was published by California Pacific Computer Co. on September 2nd, 1980 (USCO# PA-317-501).

Ultima featured a storyline revolving around a quest to find and destroy a Gem of Power belonging to an evil wizard known as Mondain, who has enslaved the lands of Sosaria. Early on, the title Ultimatum was chosen, but the name was trademarked by a board game already, so the publisher suggested truncating it to Ultima, and Richard Garriott liked it much more than the original name. This game is unique among the Ultima series (and a rarity among computer RPGs in general) for containing an action element, as the player must find a spaceship and participate in first-person space combat. The first version of the game was coded in interpreted BASIC with a few auxiliary routines in assembly language, and was published only for the Apple II computer; two years later Sierra On-Line, Inc. released a port for the 8-bit Atari computers.

Ultima I (1986 re-release) on the Commodore 64

The game was one of the first commercial computer RPGs and the first commercial game to feature tile graphics to represent the environment. The tile graphics system was programmed in machine language by Ken W. Arnold, a friend of Richard Garriott. The game itself also owes much of its heritage (and, in the case of the dungeon exploration, the actual code itself) to Lord British's first commercial game, Akalabeth, which is unofficially referred to as Ultima 0 by Lord British himself. Unlike Akalabeth, the commercial sale of which was an afterthought to a hobbyist endeavor, Ultima was planned as a commercial game from the start.

This game was re-released on December 23rd, 1986 (USCO# PA-317-505) as Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, entirely re-coded in assembly language, with improved graphics, much faster action, and with slightly improved gameplay, by Origin Systems. This re-release was sold in much greater numbers than the original release (thanks to the much increased market for computer games in general; it was not a very big hit relative to its time) and was ported to numerous other systems.