The Official Book of Ultima - Shay Addams/Compute! Books
   (Available on import, priced at $14.95 in the States)

Even someone who hasn't the faintest interest in role-playing
games must have heard of the Ultima series of RPGs, their
creator, Richard Garriott aka Lord British and his company,
Origin. The Ultima series, now on Ultima VI with VII being worked
on at this moment, is 10 years old and this book written by Shay
Addams, editor of the American adventure journal QuestBusters and
Ultima addict, is a homage to them.

The preface by Addams tells of his first introduction to the
series, when he played Ultima III on a Commodore back in 1984. The
exhilaration and involvement he felt then have stayed with him
through the years as he has been drawn into each subsequent game,
noticing the development of themes and images from one game to
another, spotting the small details and references to "real" life
that appear in each. Richard Garriott's (or should that be Lord
British's?) introduction, in semi-medieval style, further sets the
scene and then we can enter the book proper.

The first 9 chapters, subtitled "A Decade in the Dungeons", look
at Ultima's ten years of existence, starting with Garriott's first
forays into programming back in high school when he chose to put a
D&D game onto computer as his programming project. From this
simple game, he progressed into graphics when he was first
introduced to an Apple computer and discovered 3D graphics,
finally producing an RPG called Akalabeth. Marketing it himself in
zip-loc bags, he sold less than a dozen copies, but one got to a
firm in California who asked to publish it and it went on to sell
30,000 copies - a huge number back in the late 70s. Garriott
realised that if a game written for fun could make that much money
(it made enough to pay for his college education, though he
actually spent it before he got there!) it was logical to write a
game intended for publication. Ultima was born!

Each game is looked at in detail, how it was planned, where the
ideas came from and how they developed from one game to
the next, and where the various themes and symbols originated.
Who, or what, are Shamino, Chuckles the clown and many of the

other characters in real life? Where did the idea for the
cloth maps come from? Why did Sierra publish one, and only one, of
the series? What are the origins of the Silver Serpent and the
symbol on the coin in the packaging? How did Paul and Linda
McCartney get into Ultima III? And where did the Lamborghini on
the loading screen of the revamped Ultima I come from? All these
questions and more are answered. It's fascinating stuff.

Chapters 10-13 cover the development of Ultima VI in great detail.
As the series has progressed, Garriott has aimed for more
realism in his games. The number of tiles, the basic building
blocks of each game, has grown from game to game. Each object can
now be manipulated in ways never imagined in the first Ultima. He
has weighed examples of each object, from butter churn to genuine
medieval shield, to retain accuracy and even, at one point,
considered classifying all the foods in the game according to food
group, so that the way a character's hit points were restored
would depend on what he ate as well as how much.

Finally the book contains the solutions to all six games. These
are seen through the eyes of Alfred from Sheboygan, a travel agent
on Earth but, once summoned by Lord British, the meanest fighter
to wield a broadsword this side of the Bay of Britannia. The
solutions are in story form but they also contain tables of words
of power, object locations, moongate destinations and some maps.

It's only through reading such a book that you discover how much
time and thought goes into a series like this. As I closed the
book, I rang a mail order firm and ordered the Ultima I-III
trilogy as I'd now like to play the complete series from start to
finish so I can see its development for myself - heaven only knows
how long THAT will take!
                                             Sue