Raving Rants From A Nintendo Madman: Ultima One And The Age Of Darkness

Last night I completed the first quest. One of the oldest quests known to electronic quest-dom. Ultima One: The First Age Of Darkness. Mother of god. The version I was playing was a prettied-up 1986 DOS port of some type. Close enough to be within the realm of our Nintendo Project wheelhouse. The original release? 1981. I mean, my god. That is a time before I existed as a sentient human. My birth roughly coincides with the birth of the NES in America, so in a mad sense I have existed along with video games. This is from before that, from the Ago. When floppies were floppies and kilobytes ruled the world and internal speaker sound was an honest to goodness thing. Did Richard Garriott watch Raiders Of The Lost Ark as he coded away at this Great Old One? He knows. I don't know. What I do know is that Ultima One was kind of fun to break over my knee.

Of course, I had resources. Internet look-ups and maps and guides and things like that. I in no way played this pure. That might discount my victory, but what the hell. I experienced part of the Ultima One experience, and that will be enough for me. Most folk in the year 2014 just can't replicate that experience. In the year 1986, with no Internet or other cheap pennywhistle distractions? The PC gaming folk could get lost in the thing, delving across the world and taking notes of what was where. Making maps of the earth and the labyrinth dungeons within its crust. Powering themselves up level by level to become the slayer of worlds. It's great that you can do that. The means to do that in about 30 minutes of gameplay also exist. Dart back and forth between signposts to raise your stats to 99. The magic incantation upon the sign's words shall grant you infinite weaponry, each stronger than the last until you find... a blaster. That's not the only hodgepodge element here. Sure, this looks like some sort of fantasy Dungeons and Dragons-esque romp at first. Gradually, the walls between worlds grow thin as your power increases. Smite the evil ranger and wandering warlock with precise laser fire. Things only get more interesting once you go on quests for the kings. They demand you delve into dungeons to find specific creatures deep inside and slay them. This would normally mean mapping out the first-person maze on graph paper or something... or you could do what I did. Buy a shitload of spells that create magical ladders up or down to the next floor. Cast Ladder Down. Find monster. Kill monster. Cast Ladder Up. Voila, you've done it!

Once you descend into the very depths of the earth and rule over them... why, the heavens must be conquered. More than the heavens, even. The vastness of uncharted space. My hero, Gom the dwarven fighter, put on a vaccuum suit and launched his shuttle into the airless void of space. This place was hostile. Enemy fighters come at you frequently, and to progress you must become an ace of space. We're not even playing a swords and sorcery game any more. We have fallen out of the world. Not hard to do, really, when you become so powerful that the world ceases to be a constant thing. Still, space is a harsh mistress. It will not be conquered easily. One must be careful to manage their fuel, lest they be left forever adrift in a dead spacecraft, awaiting the inevitable death by starvation. Or burning up on re-entry because you weren't in a ship with heat shielding. Or being shot down by enemy fighters. Eventually, though... space becomes your domain. Now for the final challenge. The mastery of time. Enter your time machine, powered by the gems you have collected. Cast yourself back to the Ago of the Ago, when the evil wizard is vulnerable. Take his Gem of Immortality and crush it inside your armored glove before blasting his batlike form into cinders. Thou art victorious. Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to restart.

So that's Ultima One. It's kind of dated and janky but by god is it fun to bust in half in 2014. The Nintendo Project proper will look at Ultima, one day. One day when it shakes off the mishmash of ideas it dances with and seeks out true enlightenment. I look forward to it. So should you.