Savage Empire & Martian Dreams Released on GOG.com (Updated!)
Akalaupdate: It would seem that GOG’s initial DOSBox/installation builds for the games had some issues. They have updated their builds, and the games should be free from issues now. Please uninstall any prior GOG-obtained installations of the games before attempting to install the new versions.
Original Post: Ultima Franchise Producer Jeff Skalski told us something would happen today that “hardcore Ultima fans” would appreciate…and his words proved true: GOG.com has today released the two Worlds of Ultima games, Savage Empire and Martian Dreams…for free! That’s right, Dragons and Dragonettes: every GOG.com member can download and play these two rare, offbeat Ultima games at no cost, now and forever.
There’s been a lot of clamour to see these games added to the GOG.com lineup, and I’m pleased to say that several members of the Ultima fan community came together to make it a possibility. The game data that was submitted to BioWare Mythic, and to GOG.com by them, was generously supplied by Pix and Sergorn Dragon, who between them made sure that the most recent releases of each game were handed over. Pix, Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum, and Steven “Xe Dragon” Dengler supplied maps, game documents, and bonus content that will be included in the GOG.com package. And over the course of a week or so back in May, I put all these disparate components together and handed it all off to BioWare Mythic.
Mythic then added their own little piece of awesome to the mix, requesting that GOG.com that release the games for free, alongside Ultima 4…as a gift to the Ultima fandom and a “thank you” to all of the series’ many devoted fans.
So, get yourself over to GOG.com and grab your free copies of the games today. And then click on over to the Savage Empire and Martian Dreams subdomains! There isn’t much at each, but a few interesting things do exist concerning both games.
The First Age of Update: There may be some issues, it seems, with character creation in one or both games. The exact source of the error is, as yet, unknown, and is being looked into. For Martian Dreams, at least, manually running game.exe seems to fix things, albeit at the cost of disabling the game’s soundtrack.
Great news and good on them for making them free.
You guys all got a shout out in GOG’s release thread too. You’re famous now!
Massive incline!
That was pretty cool of them!
This is awesome! I’ve never actually gotten to play either of these before! 😀
Me neither. I once had a CD with Savage Empire (and other games), but I lost it long ago (before having a chance to play it).
Hm. So, once you have the characters created, can you save and restart normally? I’ll test and let you know.
Well… I didn’t have any problems creating characters just running it normally so I can’t test it. Sorry.
Great news! I didn’t really expect them to release these two great games for free. Kudos to Bioware and to all of you guys who helped putting this together!
Ohh… nice scans of the manuals and hintbooks too! Pix, was that your doing? Now I never have to get my physical copies dirty again, and that Martian Dreams hint book was not cheap.
I believe this move by Mythic is universally agreed upon to be awesome.
Wow. Free. That was not expected. The amount of awesomeness they (Bioware Mythic… with the help of some others of course 😉 ) keep giving to the community gives me high hopes for the future of Ultima. Resurrecting the old games is amazing on its own, but resurrecting the series?
Yeah, it surprised that they were going to be released for free as well, and then as standalone games. I figured GOG would put them together in one package and push it out for $5.99.
But Mythic wanted this to be special…a goodwill gesture and a note of thanks.
They’ve fixed it? w00t, something to test when I get home 🙂
Nice work, Dragons and ye Ultima fans of no scales! I was excited to see the cluebooks and design docs. Never played SE and only have MD on floppy disks, so having digital versions of both is awesome. Was not expecting they would be free, which is even better!
Thanks to all involved!
Yeah, from what I’ve been able to gather from Twitter and the GOG forums, it’s been fixed now.
Drop back if you find it doesn’t work as advertised.
Wow, That is awesome news!
Hopefully this might inspire people to help out with Nuvie support for these games. 😉
Yeah, that’d be nice!
Want me to put up a thing about that?
Maybe hold off on that for a bit. I’ve got quite a few balls in the air at the moment with the new interface and heavy bug U6 testing. But in the not too distant future that would be great.
Just remind me at an appropriate time.