Gamespot’s Jonathan Toyad is either very brave, or very foolish, for attempting to answer the question “What makes an Ultima game?” in under seven minutes. But try he does, and in the process he re-caps the Ultima series quite handily:

He also attempts to tie many of the innovations of the Ultima series — open world gameplay, the exploration of social issues in narrative, moral decision-making, and of course MMORPGs — to their modern incarnations. No doubt these asides will provoke both disagreement and agreement from different people. He also omits mention of Ultima 9 for some reason, which is strange. Still, his final conclusion shouldn’t be controversial to anyone well-versed in the history of RPG gaming: the Ultima series was something different, and almost every modern RPG and MMORPG draws inspiration from it in some way.