Obviously inspired by Ultima
After finding Sierra On-Line to be a less than friendly publisher while creating Ultima II, Richard Garriott eventually decided to move on and form his own company, Origin Systems. The success of the Ultima games during the 80s led to a number of clones being produced.
One of the more interesting was The Wrath of Denethenor by Sierra On-Line. While few people will remember this game for the Apple II and Commodore 64, this advertisement from Sierra in 1988 makes it pretty clear which game inspired it.
Denethenor Advertisement - Sierra, 1988
See if you can find the Ultima in this picture. Look closely at the screenshot in the lower left.
Here is a YouTube video showing just how similar this game and Ultima II truly were.
Ha! Watching the video makes me wonder why they didn’t get sued.
Well that’s an obvious Ultima clones, but as pointed a while back there were quite a few of them back in the day.
Thanks god there were no suing for using similar gameplay, because I think ahd this happened this would have been very bad for videogames.
If I recall correctly Sierra still owned the rights to Ultima II at that time. They could have easily argued they held sufficient rights to create similar works (if it ever came to that). I’d have to verify but I believe Richard only acquired the rights (for Origin) when they released the original Ultima Trilogy in 1989. Ultima I and Akalabeth were much easier I assume since California Pacific went belly up around the time Richard left them.
You folks need to look closely at that picture again. REALLY closely at the screenshot in the bottom left corner. Not only was this a clone of Ultima II, they used a screenshot from Ultima II in the advertisement.
The second from the left looks like one of the words says, “Pizza”. Hard to tell at that shitty of a resolution. I tried to find the ad at any resolution but couldn’t, but here’s a review if you’re interested:
http://www.wap.org/journal/showcase/washingtonapplepijournal198704.pdf
It’s at page 24 in the mag and 26 in the PDF. It mentions Ultima in the first sentence.
Just read it and it sounds like a good game, at least on par technologically with Ultima V in many respects. Offensive and exciting at the same time. The reviewer crying about the day/night cycles is priceless, as apparently there was no hole up and camp option and he had to sit it out in real time while reading a book.
I’ll make the picture a bit bigger.
Specifically, it’s the Swashbuckler’s Pub and Pizza from New San Antonio http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/wiki/File:Newsanantonio-NEW.gif in Ultima II. It’s always a good idea to make sure when you’re creating an advertisement for your Ultima II clone, to use screenshots from the correct game. 😛
“While few people will remember this game for the Apple II and Commander 64”
A statement made by someone that didn’t play 8bit CRPGs? I was just playing this game two months ago and remember when it was first released.
and
“Commander 64” … o_O
I fixed that, thanks Renaak. That’s what happens when you rely on spellcheck too much. 🙁
Good find Dungy. I didn’t pay much attention to the pics – at that resolution on my phone it might as well have been a pic of Ultima VII :p
I also agree that aside from hardcore Sierra fans and AII/C64 aficionados there really aren’t many people who have ever heard of Wrath of Denethenor (let alone played it).