Just How Awesome Was Looking Glass Studios?
Feed the Gamer looks at this very question and comes away with the conclusion that Looking Glass — the studio that developed both Ultima Underworld games — was very, very awesome indeed.
Founded in 1990, Looking Glass was not only responsible for some of that decade’s most innovative and memorable games, but was also a place where people like Ken Levine (BioShock), Warren Spector (Deus Ex) and Seamus Blackley (Xbox) all worked under the one roof.
The product of a merger between two companies, Blue Sky Productions and Lerner Research, Looking Glass Studios was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Developing mostly for the PC, Looking Glass’ first few games were published by PC gaming giant Origin (Wing Commander, Ultima), but by 1995 the studio was developing and publishing its own titles.
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Looking Glass’ first game (well, while its development side was still known as Blue Sky) was 1992’s Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, a first-person role-playing game that not only broke from the traditions of conventional Ultima games, but in many ways blew right past them, its immersive setting and (for the time) amazing 3D graphics making it a critical success.
The games which came next read like a “greatest hits collection” of PC gaming in the 1990s…
Eidos — massively in debt at the time — shut Looking Glass down in the year 2000, a rather ignoble end for such a talented development house. One could almost argue that such was the curse that afflicted all developers who published Ultima titles, I suppose. But in their short span, the did produce some genre-defining — and genre-shattering — games, which frankly still hold up very well today.
Ah yes, Old Looking Glass… long gone but certainly not forgotten. The Thief series (bolstered by the sizable and amazingly talented fan community) has been the my bane of any project I work on. I’ll be programming one week and the next 3 I’m playing Thief fan missions. 😀
Usually I don’t play it for several months, then wham…I’m gone for a few weeks.
Seriously, if I had the stamina to build in Dromed (the editor for the first two games), I might develop a few missions in the Ultima Universe.
I’ve actually played a fan mission recently which really reminded me of the Lycaeum in the library section. For those interested it is an old T1 FM called the Library by Kung Fu Gecko.
As someone who disdains newer Ultimas, loves the middle-aged ones and gives the earlier a free pass, I did spend some time with the shareware demo of Ultima Underworld. I never played the second one, or the full version of the first.
The first one, after playing Ultima V, was amazing. Because it was the demo you had an unlimited time to play the first level and dying sent you to the beginning. So I’ve only played UU with permadeath, and it was horribly exciting in part due to that.
I don’t know about their other games, but UU was outstanding. OUT-*******-STANDING!
One of LGS’s strength is that despite being a “techie” company that was interested in experimentation, they always grounded their games in a strong mythos. Be it the Ultima setting for UU, or the atmospheric steampunk world they invented for Thief.