"Neat medieval fantasy feel to start the series, except for the space travel bit."

Well, having seen the series a bit backwards(Ultima IV, then V, then I) I had no reason to be shocked by the drop-off in quality when I reached for Ultima I, but I was. It certainly has its moments, but parts of the game border on wretchedly incomprehensible. In this one-player RPG, although you have a large surface map(156 by 156) and a lot of dungeons, shown in perspective, and towns(a bit of smoke and mirrors--forty towns share ten actual maps,) the overall story is slightly weak. Your mission is to go back in time to wrest the evil gem from Mondain before he can exert control over the world. There are missions along the way that can improve your attributes and experience, and eventually you will need to go into outer space(at which point the game switches distastefully to a knock-off of the all-time Atari 8-bit classic Star Raiders) to impress a princess enough to get yourself a time machine, which leads you to a battle with Mondain. The whole premise is Machiavellian as at some point it's very useful to kill a bunch of citizens, and in fact with this sort of story it's never clear why the bad guys don't go back further in time, but if Richard Garriott had waited for a perfect story before programming, we would not have had this series. Besides, his including new items for you to buy as you grew stronger gave the game a time of its own(scientific progress, etc.) forcing you into a slow buildup of better weapons.

Moving around on the grid-based world is quite satisfactory, and we see many of the common-sense keyboard commands that would serve Britannian adventurers so well later; E for enter, A for attack, the IJKM for movement, B for board. There's even talk and steal in the towns. The space episode with its two views and hyperspace and refueling takes more time to get the hang of, and just when you do, having bought and crashed several rockets, you've killed the number of enemy tie fighters you need, and it's over. Spell casting is also done decently; there are no reagents yet, but with twelve spells each cast by letter, you can go up and down in a dungeon or fry your enemy in various ways. Although your abilities are determined solely by statistics, there are no character classes, and races only serve to adjust statistics, there are enough things to do with your jack-of-all-trades you create.

I've mentioned about waiting for the perfect story, and it's probably good that Garriott didn't wait for perfect balance in the game. For the first while, you will flop around the countryside, running out of food(one movement=one food) and dying quite frequently. Now you always get resurrected, but you're dumped somewhere else random with not much food, and although it is a matter of time before you get enough gold(which means food and hit points) to survive, it can get tedious to wait around. Sometimes as there are mountain passes on each continent you will find yourself planted therewith no choice but to starve unless monsters attack--in which case, your hit points will be in trouble. The one factor that makes up for this, getting hit points when you leave a dungeon, seems a bit fake. Yes, there's a way to generate gold, which is a puzzle of sorts, but you'll definitely take more lumps than you feel you deserve. However, once you get a boat or figure out a way to generate other advantages for yourself(there are several simple ways) the tables are turned. You'll be smoking monsters left and right, especially with transportation that can fire shots. This makes getting right to your missions much easier--on each of the four continents, one castle has you kill a monster in a dungeon(also rather easy if you know the right spells,) and another has you find a landmark, for which you are rewarded--although there are still challenges like killing all the guards or even Lord British, who is just one of the four continents' leaders, as is Shamino. As best I know, Lord British didn't get invincible 'til Ultima IV, so...carpe diem. Hey, the game's simple enough that he resurrects, forgives and forgets when you visit again anyway.

Some of the graphics from Ultima I were such good ideas, Origin kept them through Ultima V. If you played in backwards order like me, you'll recognize the grassland, forest, mountain, town, dungeon and castle icons. Many of the monsters, like orcs, are also here. The dungeons are probably the first of their kind; with line drawings for dungeon monsters, walls, pits and treasure troves, the game, originally prototyped in BASIC, could show the graphics without slowdown. The pictures are rather amusing, and although it's tough to see a monster through a dungeon door, it's still quite good. The graphics are also the best part of the arcade game; you can flip between modes, and when you are in a populated sector the pictures are rather nice. The towns have much smaller icons than the outside, with the result that you don't have to scroll when you're indoors. All the human icons are delightfully chubby, and the rivers and bushes and letters for advertising shops make the towns and castles look rather so nice that you don't mind seeing virtually the same one four times on different continents(which are themselves close to rotations of each other.)

The space arcade sub-game, a failed experiment, tipped the scales enough to make me loathe Ultima I when I first played it, but once I realized the limitations it was under and remembered it was not written after some games I'd played first, I could not deny its many good points. It's an adequate shell of IV and V, and it's funny to see where some of the great characters and towns began. Although modern technology really intrudes too much into it, and it wasn't until Ultima IV that anachronisms vanished, Ultima I certainly has that medieval adventure feel and will probably grow on you if you replay it. If no sequels had been made, it would have been an very nice forgotten oldie. As it is, it's fascinating to see the beginnings of some great ideas and even the ideas that didn't quite make it.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 03/21/00, Updated 09/28/01