Over at Zero1Gaming, Paul Izod has continued his retrospective of the Ultima series with a look at Ultima 3: Exodus. He begins, however, by looking not at the game proper, but at the creation of Origin Systems…which happened around the same time:

Origin Systems was the company founded by Garriott, his brother Robert, his father Owen and his friend Chuck Bueche. The company was founded mainly as a response to the fact that Garriott had faced a lot of difficulty recovering royalties for his previous game from distribution companies. In the early days of the industry it was often hard to track down which companies were issuing a specific game, let alone calculate sales numbers and the like. The fact was, more or less, that companies could release whatever IP they liked with very little comeback for the small-time creators. Origin Systems was Garriott’s solution to this issue, allowing him to more closely monitor and regulate distribution and rights.

The significance of Exodus, the game, doesn’t go understated:

…Ultima III was an important watershed in the series. Make or break is a term often thrown around loosely, but it applies to Ultima III particularly aptly. Following the inspired but supremely flawed Ultima II, Exodus needed to reaffirm faith in the series. More troubled game quality or a failure to address fractured quest structure could potentially alienate a gaming public who were already proving relatively fickle, even in the industry’s infancy.

Put simply, Ultima III: Exodus had to deliver.

And boy, oh boy, did it.

The odd twist at the end of the game also merits mention:

…the ending of the game is about as untraditional and atypical as can be, with no real end boss encounter. What it actually requires is for the player to have done extensive detective work throughout the game, acting upon clues and leads to track down the right cards so that when the endgame is reached they can be used…. Are you ready for it?…. to feed them into a computer to overload Exodus, who appears to be a computer system akin to a low tech Skynet.

It’s easy to write off Ultima 3 as just another hack-and-slash RPG, although this wouldn’t entirely be unfair to do so either as it is, largely, a hack-and-slash “kill the Foozle” game. It was with Ultima 4, really, that Richard Garriott set the Ultima series on a different path, away from the action-RPG template and toward something new and different in RPG gaming.

But even in Ultima 3, that tendency to subvert narrative conventions can be seen, in the way that the final battle against Exodus is anything but an epic “boss fight”. A similarly subversive tendency would rear its head in Ultima 6, in the way that Garriott turned a “save us from the monsters!” game into a game in which the monsters turned out to have a legitimate grievance against the kingdom they were savaging.