Mathias Worch is a lead designer at LucasArts; he has posted a list of things he has worked on on his website if you’re at all curious about his career. Back in the mid-1990s, he decided to address what he felt was a lingering problem with Ultima 6:

There never was a German version of Ultima VI, and in my humble opinion it never really needed one. But sometime in the mid-90s, I felt compelled to create one anyway – probably because I liked computers (and Ultima!) a lot and had too much time on my hands I The result isn’t Earth-shattering prose, but I remember the effort fondly: German is famously longer than English (supposedly by approximately 30%), yet I couldn’t exceed the predefined character limit. And I was still in high school, and this translation actually applied some of the knowledge I had gained in class.

I had thought the translation long lost, rotting on a trashed hard drive somewhere in a German landfill – but as I was digging through my classic games folder today, I noticed two Ultima VI executables in the same directory and got curious. After some more digging, one .EXE turns out to be the one I hacked all those years ago.

You can check out a complete gallery of images at the good Mr. Worch’s website!