Despite a tragic poll plugin error that shut off voting prematurely, I’m going to go ahead and call the “2012 Fan Project of the Year” contest in favour of Nuvie, the open-source, cross-platform Ultima 6 engine. The final poll results were:

Eric Fry’s project began as a very humble attempt to create a simple engine for Ultima 6 that would run natively on Windows, OS X, and other operating systems, without the need to use DOSBox. It was, in essence, intended as a light version of Exult for the sixth entry in the Ultima series. It has since grown rather more ambitious than that, adding features like roofs, inventory gumps, and a fullscreen view to the game, and in the last couple of years has gone from an essentially dormant project to one of the most exciting ones currently still in progress.

In other words, Nuvie is indeed a worthy project to capture the title of 2012’s Fan Project of the Year. Congratulations, Eric, and keep up the grand work in 2013!