Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness

Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness stood at the birth of one of the most influential computer RPG series ever, and on the Atari 800/XL players could experience the same unusual genre mix as Apple II owners. The game combines a bird's-eye view of the world, where the character moves across the vast map of the continent of Sosaria, with dungeons and space shootouts handled from a first-person perspective as in the maze simulators of the time. At the start, the player creates a character by choosing a race and class, distributes attributes, and then completes a series of tasks, collects stones of power, and searches for four princes before setting out to face the dark wizard Mondain. The world is divided into several continents, between which the player travels by ship and later also through teleportation gates, and a large part of the game consists of free wandering across the land without a fixed order of tasks.

The Atari version shows the typical limitations of early home computers: the graphics consist of simple colored tiles and symbols, combat plays out through text messages and numbers, music is almost absent, and the atmosphere is shaped more by silence than by a musical score. Controls work through single-letter commands chosen from a menu, monster combat is resolved by a bare-bones numeric attack and defense system with no character animation whatsoever, and loading individual screens from disk was noticeably slow. Even so, the game offered a sense of an open world, travel between towns and even off-planet, and freedom to wander the land, which was groundbreaking compared to the linear text adventures and arcade games of the time.

Today Ultima I mainly serves as a historical artifact, whose significance lies in the conventions it established and on which Richard Garriott built in later entries of the series — character creation, a moral dimension to the story, an open world to explore. The author himself later described his first attempt as a rough, imperfect foundation from which a more elaborate Ultima gradually developed. Anyone returning to it today will mainly appreciate its ambition, even though the controls and interface demand a considerable amount of patience.

Why play it: Anyone interested in the roots of the RPG genre and willing to accept raw, cumbersome controls will appreciate Ultima I mainly for its ambition and for the foundations on which Richard Garriott built later entries.