Origin historian Pix has started a playthrough of…well, it’s not quite Ultima 3, although it does use the original game diskette. The Ultimore series of games were created by, in essence, hacking the game data on the Ultima 3 diskette to create new maps and scenarios.

Pix explains it with more detail:

Ask most Ultima fans what the first expansion pack sold for an Ultima game was and they would probably answer Forge Of Virtue. 8 years earlier (1984/1985) however there were a series of unofficial expansions for Ultima 3 created by the enterprising Joel Fenton of Backstreet Software. He had realised that since Ultima 3 on the Apple II loaded itself into memory from side one of a floppy disc and then loaded the locations from the other side, it was possible to create a new scenario by using a modified side two which had new versions of all the town and dungeon files. Having reverse engineered the file formats, he created his own expansions and put them up for sale. All of this was of course highly unofficial and presumably breached copyright but they did still require the original disk so it would be debatable. As far as I know the expansions where only ever sold directly via magazine adverts for $10 each.

Not content with just creating one alternative scenario, there were 5 of these in all (A Divided World, Pirate World, Spaceship Crash, Egypt and Rule Of The Slave Lords). Unfortunately I only have the first to try out but that’s still one new Ultima 3 to have a go at.

The scenario for A World Divided is a bit…different from that of Ultima 3, as is the cast of characters:

The evil legacy of Exodus has been revived by Maxman, a Priest of the Snake described as a shape-shifted balron. Maxman has built a castle stronghold and erected a force field of fire that separates the northern and southern hemispheres of Sosaria. Civil war looms between the north and south as Maxman attempts to wrest the throne from its rightful heir, the Viceroy Faerdin.

And yes, Faerdin seems to be the Lord British stand-in. It is a wonder that Joel Fenton never got sued (that we know) over these mods, especially since he sold them rather than distributed them for free. Maybe Origin was amused by/impressed with his results?

Anyhow, Pix is basically playing this scenario blind, having no documentation for the mod to refer to. (There’s also precious little information to be found online.) As such, this playthrough series could take him several entries. Then too, it’s also possible — likely — that the Ultimore scenarios aren’t as long as Ultima 3 proper, so perhaps he won’t have too long a go of it.

’ve only had something of a scouting exercise so far to get an idea of what I’m up against. I’ll need to do much the same in the dungeon and intend to map it out in true olde-worlde style on graph paper. I’m hoping for some easily accessible chests/fountains on the first level which I can use for some quick levelling up/gold gathering. With only the one dungeon in site and all the shrines immediately accessible, I’m getting the impression that this scenario is going to be substantially cut down in size on the original game but it’s still great fun to be able to take on an alternative Ultima 3 and I’m more than curious to see what it has in store.

At any rate, he seems to be enjoying Ultimore.