Music #60

Ultima VII

Origin Systems

PC

1992

From the series that inspired Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, Ultima VII is the mother of the MMORPG and the closest you will ever see to a MMORPG experience in a single player game. The game world is that well fleshed out and is that interactive.

And the game box really was just ‘black’. Origin was a very unique company. The game’s development seems inspired by the conflicts of Origin and EA. While the motto of Origin was ‘We make worlds’, they gave the opposite to the villain in the game who is a destroyer of worlds. EA’s logo appears as the main game items, and E and A are also initials of the main villains of the game.

Regardless, Ultima VII isn’t so much a game but an ideal for RPGs to live up to (and they can’t do it. Many Ultima players have stopped playing RPGs because, from their perspective, they only see it as a decline from the Ultima heights).

Because of the extremely tricky hardware requirements to run the game (even back when it came out), it has been very difficult to record the music. Most of the music on Youtube is midi recompositions which isn’t accurate. But it is all we have.

Above: Game’s graphics have aged extremely well. Note the scroll in how you can read books and scrolls. Why don’t other games do this?

Ultima VII was the only game I can remember, at its time, that had a part 2 (which Final Fantasy would also copy). Ironically, Serpent Isle seems influenced from the plot twists from the Final Fantasy series and is similar to the epic scope of Final Fantasy VI in its ‘Armageddon’ occurring in the middle of the game. Also, curiously, Ultima VII and Serpent Isle each had their own expansion pack. Serpent Isle was designed and produced by Warren Specter.

Above: You have to love how effective the photo-realistic portraits were. Every RPG should do them instead of relying on poor 3d models. A picture of the face adds more characterization than a million words.

Alas, there are some great songs that are either butchered by midi remakes or are not on Youtube at all. I can find more Ultima VIII songs than VII and VIII is almost universally despised by UIltima fans. There is a remake of ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ that plays when you go into the Giant Bee Cave, for example.

To give a sense of the massive exploration the game has to offer, here is a video of some Serpent Isle secrets that I doubt even old school players may not even know.

And for fun, here are a couple of trailers Russians made for this game (was this game ever released in Russia?).