While Garriott was completing Ultima II On-Line Systems was becoming Sierra On-Line, after Jacky Morby of TA Associates had acquired 20 percent of the company. Ken struck a deal with Garriott, agreeing to produce the cloth map, and otherwise not interfere with Garriott’s game design. Most potential publishers backed away, only one could agree to Garriott’s “demands”, Ken and Roberta Williams’ On-Line Systems (soon to be Sierra On-Line). Interested publishers soon learned that Garriott demanded not only a quite high royalty rate but also wanted a detailed high-quality and expensive-to-produce cloth map to be included with Ultima II. Garriott’s success with Akalabeth and Ultima hadn’t gone unnoticed and swiftly the word spread that he was without a publisher.
In late 1981, Remmers’ company went out of business. Regardless California Pacific was in dire financial straits and failed to pay Garriott what was contractually owed. Although highly unlikely, rumors had it that Remmers had been using Garriott’s royalties to finance his drug habit. Around the same time, financial issues started to surface at California Pacific, resulting in not fully paid royalties, which led to a fallout between Garriott and Remmers. In the fall Garriott returned to college where he would spend most of his time working on what would become Ultima II. Garriott knew that he had pushed BASIC to its limit with Ultima and decided to use his summer break in 1981 to study assembly language before starting the development of his next Ultima. Ultima was re-released later in 1981 under California Pacific’s Progame label
Ultima would eventually go on to sell around 50,000 copies. Ultima debuted on the Apple II in the early summer of 1981 and sold around 20,000 copies within its first year. Michael Hemphill’s 1979 board game Ultimatum: A Game of Nuclear Confrontation, the title was changed to Ultima by the suggestion of Remmers. However, to avoid any confusion or even legal disputes with J. Garriott completed Ultima in under a year, intending to release it under the title Ultimatum. Much of the inner workings of Akalabeth were reused and towns, quests, and a user interface alongside sci-fi-inspired elements were added. A game that eventually would become Ultima.
Apple ii ultima iii maps professional#
While a sophomore at the University of Texas, Garriott started working on a much more ambitious and professional game than Akalabeth. The Space Gamer number 28 from May/June 1980 featuring Denis Loubet’s demon cover art The demon artwork by Denis Loubet was initially made as a cover for The Space Gamer Magazine Regardless, the fact that Garriott’s game, which was essentially created for his own enjoyment, was able to achieve such success raised the question of how much a professionally-made game could accomplish.Ĭalifornia Pacific’s re-release of Akalabeth: World of Doom from 1981. While there seems to be a bit of discrepancy around the actual number of sold copies by California Pacific, different sources suggest a number anywhere between 10.000 and 30.000. Remmers, impressed by the high schoolers’ hobbyist project offered Garriott a distribution deal with a $5 royalty for every sold copy. In 1980 Al Remmers, the founder of California Pacific Computer Company received a copy of Richard Garriott’s Akalabeth. There’s an abundance of information on Ultima available on the internet and also in physical form by much more knowledgeable people than myself, like Stephen Emond’s Ultima: the Ultimate Companion Guide and Ultima: the Ultimate Collector’s Guide alongside Andrea Contato’s recent book Through the Moongate, so I have decided not to write a whole bunch, it’s more of an overview of the Ultima (I) titles in my collection.
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