Browncoat Jayson, you may all recall, started his “Reconciling the Past” series at The Digital Lycaeum a while ago, examining the idea of canon and its application to the Ultima series. He has resumed the article series now with an in-depth look at Ultima 1:

Like the other Age of Darkness trilogy titles, Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (or, as it was released, just Ultima) is in its simplest form a simple quest to beat the big boss. In the first Ultima, the big bad is Mondain the Wizard, who cannot be killed thanks to the Gem of Immortality. Your quest, of course, is to kill him anyway.

He evaluates the game according to several criteria, such as its world and continents, dialogue and interactivity, anachronism, temporal reality, races and professions, and so forth. Here’s an excerpt from his look at said temporal reality, a taste of the sort of thought he applies to the remainder of his article:

In Ultima I, Mondain had been made immortal by the power of his fell artifact and ruled for a thousand years. The Stranger has to use the four gems to activate a machine to travel back in time to prevent the creation of the gem, and slay the wizard. In the end game, 1,000 years pass in the blink of an eye as the hero falls into a magical slumber, to be awoken by Lord British. So the time travel seems to have worked, but didn’t change the past; instead, Mondain’s death occurred outside of the standard timestream and his body, the shards of the gem, and the Stranger reappeared at the moment the machine was activated.

Maybe not the strangest way to handle time travel, but it is hard to reconcile. Personally, I dislike mixing high fantasy and high technology so frivolously; I would keep many of the elements, such as the Starwalker threat (an invasion force, Mondain’s elite). I would re-envision the time machine as a great stone archway that requires the gems in order to form a silver Moongate, and the Stranger would awaken in the new timestream after slaying Mondain. This still has the side effect that much of Ultima I takes place in an alternate future that will never occur… but I’m strangely ok with it.

Click on through and read the whole thing!