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. It was first published in the United States by California Pacific Computer Co., on September 2, 1980. ^[1]

Ultima revolved around a quest to find and destroy the Gem of Immortality, which was being used by the evil wizard Mondain to enslave the lands of Sosaria. With the gem, he could not be killed, and his minions roam and terrorize the countryside. Early on, the title Ultimatum was chosen, but the name was already trademarked by a board game company, and so the California Pacific suggested truncating it to Ultima. Richard Garriott agreed, preferring it to the original name.^{[citation needed]} This game is unique among the Ultima series (and a rarity among computer RPGs in general) for containing a real-time action element, as the player must 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. Due to its use of illegal opcodes, it is unwinnable on an enhanced Apple IIe, IIc, or II_GS system; a II, II+ or unenhanced IIe is required. 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.^{[citation needed]} 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 Garriott's first commercial game, Akalabeth, which is unofficially referred to as Ultima 0 by Garriott 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 ^[2] 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.