Jimmy “The Digital Antiquarian” Maher has continued his retrospective look at the Ultima games and the history of Origin Systems with a pictoral feature about Ultima 3.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff to talk about in Ultima III, to the extent that I wasn’t quite sure how to wedge it all into a conventional review. So I decided to try this approach, to balance my usual telling with quite a bit of showing. Or something like that. Anyway, I found it fun to do.

In it, he steps through most of the major features and plot points of the game, offering up screenshots of each in turn and commenting — often at length — on what is being depicted in the images.

In Ultima III I get to create and control a full party of four adventurers rather than a single avatar. This is actually the only Ultima that works quite this way. Later games would use the code Garriott first developed here to allow players to have more than one person in their parties, but would start them off with a single avatar. Finding other adventurers in the game world itself and convincing them to join would become part of the experience of play and an important component of those games’ much richer plots.

It’s a lengthy piece, going into great visual and anecdotal detail about virtually every aspect of Ultima 3 (as well as some of Richard Garriott’s personal history). I can only suggest — in the strongest possible way — that you click on through and read the whole thing.