This article by Dan Schmidt was brought to my attention by the administrator of the Ultima Facebook Page, and man…it makes for one funny read. Mr. Schmidt was a programmer working for Blue Sky Studios/Looking Glass Productions at the time that Ultima Underworld was bring produced, and his post recounts some of the various bugs, and “bugs”, that were encountered during the game’s development.

I was particularly fond of this one:

We were working with a lot of pretty raw graphics technology, as you can imagine, and it created some unintended graphical results fairly often. The upside was that whenever we ran into some heinous graphics bug that resulted in crazy psychedelic effects, once we figured out what was causing it, after fixing it we kept the code that would make it happen and enabled it when you ate too many mushrooms.

…mostly because I remember subjecting the Avatar to mushroom abuse at least twice when I first played the game, and man did things start to look wild.

As they say on this here Internet: read the whole thing! Trust me, you won’t be sorry…it’s laugh-worthy to the very last sentence, and also a touching stroll into the history of what really should have been the defining 3D game of its era.