New Gallery: Ultima 8 Animations
The Pagan symbol
Courtesy of Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum, and to the hard work of both him and the team at the Wing Commander CIC, Ultima Aiera is pleased to present 10 animated sequences of Ultima 8 game assets and videos.
These were originally taken from a CD of Origin website files, and many are probably the work of ‘Dicko’ Mather, an Origin artist, who painted (among other things) The Silver Seed‘s box cover. (Mather now owns his own studio, doing MTV ‘bumpers’ — the frenetic little animations that flash past just prior to a commercial break.)
And speaking of Ultima 8…don’t forget to check out Sergorn Dragon’s Ultima Adventures; he’s just started playing through Pagan.
bah, no one cares! We need the LOST VALE!!!!! 😉
Seriously, very nice to see that slowly Ultima stuff from that trip arrives. Thanks for posting this.
Just a warning Pentagram team, if something interesting appears here, I AM going to harass you to put it in the game. 😛
be assured that we would be all over it ourselves 🙂
(and what a great opportunity it would be for Pentagram…)
Sorry guys–no Lost Vale–yet.
I’m almost completely confident that it’s not in the EA/Mythic archive. But not to worry–I’m always on the scent of new stuff.
Me and my buddy Ben of WCNEWS.com go on what we call ‘grail hunts’–we do research on rare artifacts from Origin. He specializes in Wing Commander, and I in Ultima, but the paths cross often.
Together and separately, we’ve re-discovered so many rare and unique items:
The hi-res videos from Privateer 2
The Ultima V prototype coin
The Ultima crossbow
Hobbes-the animatronic character from Wing Commander 3
Artwork and scripts from unreleased Origin games
Developer’s T-shirts
Limited edition posters
etc., etc.
Our current ‘grails’ are
Wing Commander 2 for Super NES
Lost Vale (of course)
Hi res video footage from Wing Commander 3
Bioforge Plus
Keep your fingers crossed–if anyone can recover these rare artifacts–it’s US!
Joe
Heh we’re definitly keeping our of finger crossed!
I gotta wonder though, assuming any of these Holy Grail are found – would they be released to the community?
For instance I didn’t heard the about the Hi-Res video of Privateer 2 being, but I’m sure this is something people would love, especially if someone somehow fin a way to make them work with the game like the Prophechy DVD rips videos.
I’ve always wondered about WC2 SNES too – it’d be great to be unearthed.
(Note that I’m almost as much a WC nut as I’m an Ultima nut – the one thing I dream after an Ultima return, is a return of Wing Commander :O)
Finding Lost Vale would be one thing…releasing it quite another. Technically, making copies for distribution or download would be piracy, since even a canceled release would still be protected by copyright (or, at least, I assume it would be). Making a copy for permanent archival would probably be legitimate, but that would just sit on a hard drive in a server farm somewhere if so.
Now, leaning on Mythic to figure out a way to integrate Lost Vale into a DOSboxed re-release of Ultima 8 might be possible. Of course, all this is academic until a copy of Lost Vale is actually found.
Awesome (both these animations and the other two artworks).
As a big fan of Ultima VIII, I’m more than happy when something surfaces from the ashes.
Moreover, I’m not sure where I’ve put my original CD, but, just in case, I still keep an unpatched version of Ultima VIII installed in my computer, should The Lost Vale ever see the light of day on Earth.
Thank you very much, WTF, Joe and all Ultima fans.
@Sergorn–
Most of the Privateer 2 videos were recovered by me, and donated to WCNews. I think we found a few more in the EA/Archive, and it’s complete, except for the introduction sequence. They were made available to the fans–you can find them all here:
http://www.wcnews.com/holovids/cinematics_privateer2.shtml
WtFD is correct–it’s a fine balance to recovering these artifacts, while still maintaining or reputations–we need to respect copyright at every opportunity, and show EA that we’ll always be the good guys.
We work hard to get permission to release this stuff, but actual code is still a ‘sticky wickett’, unless you get thru EA Legal–it’s their property, after all.
The Wing Commander fan base is a fantastic community, and I’m sure that someone is working on the videos right now–if they haven’t already done so! Check out wcnews.com, and do some searches. With the large scope of my hobby, I don’t know if this has already been accomplished! 🙂
..and trust me–if I find The Lost Vale, know that I will make it my personal mission to acquire *all* of the permissions from EA, and share it with the world!
Joe Garrity
Origin Museum
@Kobra Kai Dragon
I’d assume that Lost Vale would run on the patched version. I do believe the cancellation came AFTER the patch.
@Joe
D’oh! How come I’ve missed these videos of Privateer 2? That’s really neat 😀 A shame there is no way to make them work with the game but then the DOS status of Privateer 2 probably would makes such work much harder than with Prophecy.
I certainly hope that should Lost Vale be recovered, it will eventually find his way down the fans. At the very least I’m sure there would be a strong supporter for this in Mr. Paul Barnett. (Hell if Lost Vale is miraculously recovered someday, I’d happily pay for a DOSBox downloadable legal copy of U8+LV and I’m sure a lot of fans would) 😛
@ Joe, thanks for your efforts. Even if you find something related to The Lost Vale that EA doesn’t let you redistribute, please, post a review of the game and lots of videos… I suppose this is entirely legal, isn’t it.
@ Sergorn, The Lost Vale was to be released in 1994 (Fall) and the patch was released in January 2nd, 1995, some months after the add-on was cancelled (September, 1994). The patch was made as a response to the negative feedback of the fans and to fill in the hole caused by the cancellation of TLV. If you see the released screenshots, you will see that in many of them the Avatar is knocked-down in battle. This was a feature from the unpatched version. Of course these are in-development screenshots, and that it contains many “unreal” things not truly present in the actual game. However, this is the only visual feature of the unpatched version I could glimpse from the pictures.
Oh, I’ve always thought the patch came much earlier than that. I thought by the time the Lost Vale was shelved they had stopped working on anything related to Ultima VIII.
I figure the Lost Vale was also cancelled because of the fan backclash. Meh. Well, to be fair the add-on would probably have been hated by most had it been released back then since in any case it would have been the same design philosophy, but that still sucks.