Ultima VII - The Black Gate
Back in 1992 very few people had a PC and the notion of gaming rigs was a pretty new concept. Computers were really expensive and unless I am mistaken laptops didn't exist. There weren't many games released for this very small market segment but I was one of the consumers because my father had a computer-oriented job.
We were only allowed to use the computer when he was not at home and while there were a lot of games that consumed a great deal of time Ultima 7 was the first one that I recall being as massive as it was.
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The box itself was ominous and art less and the game itself was just massive for the time-period. If you didn't have the chance to play any of the prior games The Black Gate was pretty revolutionary for its time. It was one of the first RPG's to be largely played with the mouse. Hotkeys could be assigned to the keyboard but this was unnecessary for overall play.
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While we were still a few years away from Diablo at this point in time, this Ultima release was actually pretty graphic in a way that wasn't often seen in home games. There was blood, gore, and demons the likes of which typically didn't appear in games in the early 90's.
Also, the world was just impressively massive (this would probably be the equivalent of a small village these days but at the time it was epic!)
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You had access to a massive amount of customization and the game was just loaded with hidden secrets. In a time when there was no internet, you had to find these things out on your own or splash out $20 for a physical guide book.
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It was also the first game i remember playing where you could murder almost anyone in the game. This would have long-standing ramifications of course but it did add an entirely new level to replay value. I think almost anyone that ever played the game decided at one point or another to go on a massive spree of killing indiscriminately but quickly found out the game was really difficult when every city had a price on your head.
The graphics appear primitive now but this was a different time and the graphics as well as the music was the greatest thing we had seen up to this point.
There was a SNES version of this game that was released but it had a game-killing bug that I can't believe made it to market. Chests and enemies would respawn if you left an area and this allowed the collection of vast amounts of sometimes unique items and this cheat was immediately exploited by everyone that ever played it thus enabling a 50 hour game to be completed in half an hour or so.
This game would bore people to tears in 2019 but if you want to have a go, the ROM is available here for free.
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I loved that game so much as a kid. It started with a murder mystery, which was a first for me. Also, the "twist" about the bad guys was pretty awesome for a teenager.
One of my favorite parts came from the very beginning of the game. If you went south from the first town, the VO would say "Avatar, you are going the wrong way!" Naturally, I continued forward and found some fights. They were way over my level, but I did the "inch forward, throw something, back away" for a half hour to defeat them.
We get to the end of that area and the NPCs start talking about some lady's baby, which we could pick up. We (my brother and I) had no idea what to do, so we went back to the plot and kept going. My brother found out that the baby did pretty sizable damage for a thrown weapon so he used it.
About a week later, I'm in the other room when he screams in rage. Apparently, he finally found the mother, but it had dropped the baby off in one of the dungeons when he ran out of space. So we spent three days regoing through every dungeon looking for the baby he had abandoned so we could finish the plot.
We had a lot of fun with this game and it's probably the the first we bought add-ons (Serpent Isle, Forge of Virtue) and finished each one.
what a great story you told there. Who would have thought to use the baby as weapon... haha. I love how you could interact with pretty much anything, anywhere in this game. It made it so much fun to explore. Of course it became evident pretty quickly if you were out of your element because unless you took the approach that you just described by spending a long time fighting one enemy, you didn't stand a chance.
I suppose we have games like this today still but most of them are 3-D open-word games, which i also love but wish there were groups instead of just one person.
I found out years later that they wanted to write a more generic system. So everything had a weight and toughness. They made the baby appropriate for a baby, but since it was a plot item, they gave it more toughness to make sure it wouldn't get destroyed and ruined the plot. At the time, it was just a "what would happen" that I love in gaming.
Apparently games like Divnity - Original Sin has a lot of emergent gameplay but the really big one was Nethack (and much later, Dwarf Fortress). They took a lot of effort to figure out how things interact with each other so I would occasionally stumble on unexpected behavior like when you use a charm wand on a nurse demon, you'd get something special.
I was recently playing Undermine and they had a couple emergent bits of code like if you drop a bomb near meat, it will cook it, or being able to turn on the torches if you are on fire. Those little things are my favorite part of gaming.
I got my first "PC" not long after this in 1993. I had a Commodore 64 before that. Laptops did exist and had for a number of years already at this point but they were very expensive (of course PCs were pretty expensive too...my 486 DX2/66 was around $3000 in 1993) and there was generally a bigger performance gap between full blown PCs and laptops than there is today.
the C-64 was a funny little machine. I loved some of the games on it but my goodness did some of them take ages to load. You bought a $3000 computer in "93.? Good grief. :)
Well, I was going off to college and majoring in Computer Science. I had a summer job and spent pretty much all of the money I made on it. I thought it would come in useful and it did...though I probably could have gotten by with a little less. Certainly not my Commodore 64 though. Computers, at least PCs, were pretty expensive in 1993.
The Commodore 64 did load slow but cartridge based fastloaders helped a lot and later on newer games came with built-in fastloaders that basically reprogrammed how the drive worked so that it was much, much faster. The slowness wasn't so much a physical limitation as it was the result of a hacked fix for a design flaw that others eventually figured out better ways of doing.
I loved this game and would play it for hours even though the computer we had at that point in my life was so shite that it could barely run it. To this day I appreciate a game that gives a ton of freedom.