By the time I had discovered that Ultima existed, I think I had all of the sprite based Final Fantasy games under my belt already, so I understand and appreciate its historical importance. The problem here, just like with so many of these early progenitors of entire genres, is that the ideas which would go on to be refined over years and decades are still raw, unpolished and severely restricted by the computing power of the time. Couple that with an extremely sophomoric attempt at world building that amounts to basically a teenager throwing EVERYTHING he thought was cool into a single universe and you get a mess of a world.

Ultima really pushes and occasionally breaks the limits of how much an infectious and rowdy energy can offset a core sense of tedium that otherwise defines an experience. The map feels pretty big, the dungeons limitless in scope, the objectives grand in scale, but it’s expressed in a way that makes the game kind of LESS fun to play the deeper you get into it?

Early on there’s a real sense of danger as things like HP and Food management are real active concerns, and overworld enemies or an unlucky dungeon encounter can end you in an instant. Even towns offer some hostility, with thieving NPCs and guards who can wreck your shit easily for the first half of the game if you toe out of line. Very quickly though this switch just flips and you’re an unstoppable juggernaut with infinite resources and mondo huge stats just trampling on dragon turtles and black knights with every heavy footstep, and it really doesn’t matter much because you still have to kill those guys and you still have to make your rounds across the entire map and you still have to do that extremely long extremely repetitive extremely finnicky extremely BORING space shuttle section.

That’s the flip side of Ultima, though, isn’t it, and it’s a hard one to explain. I dunno if it’s the first game to blend sci-fi and fantasy so explicitly (my knowledge of pre-NES-era gaming is sorely limited) but it’s certainly an early one, and a stylish one. First a hovercar equipped with lasers to blow up those pesky pirate ships that swarm the bay between early continents, eventually a laser gun that serves as the best weapon for most of the game, then a space ship, then a time machine, this shit is just out there, shamelessly. Shameless is the only word for it really. Ultima is a pet project by one very young dweeb in 1981 and it shows, a borderline random mishmash of references, direct quotes, copyright infringement (you’ve got tie fighters and mind flayers I mean uh sorry mind “whippers” present and accounted for), British mythology but like puddle deep aesthetic versions of that stuff, the aforementioned sci-fi shit – everything a teenaged Richard Garriot was into and could cram into this thing, he did, and that youthful energy comes through every corner of the game.

It’s not graceful and it’s not particularly fun in aggregate, but there’s meat on this bone for sure. There’s a modicum of mechanical depth and even a minor amount of room for creative expression of play in the way you apply spells and stats, rudimentary as it is. It’s hard to imagine a more exciting start to something as storied as Ultima will become.