The Digital Antiquarian has once again returned his attentions to the history of Origin Systems and the Ultima series, this time with the first of a series of articles examining Ultima 4. As is his wont, the Antiquarian has begun by taking a look at the historical context of Ultima 4’s creation, beginning with Origin Systems’ move to New England:

Late in the fall of 1983, when it was clear that Ultima III was turning into a huge success and thus that their new company Origin Systems was going to be a viable operation, Robert Garriott came to his little brother Richard with a forlorn plea. Robert, you may remember, had for months been commuting via his private Cessna between the Garriotts’ family home in Houston, whose garage served as Origin’s development studio and assembly line, and North Andover, Massachusetts, where his wife Marcy worked for Bell Labs. It wasn’t, to say the least, an ideal way to run a marriage. Would Richard and the rest of the fledgling company agree to move to North Andover for three years? After that Marcy expected a promotion that should make it much easier for she and Robert to move, and, assuming the company was still alive, they’d then move wherever Richard and the rest liked. Young, unattached, and ready for adventure as they were, just about everyone agreed. They packed their cars with their personal possessions and rented two trucks to fill with supplies, computers, and other equipment — most notably the precious shrink-wrap machine — and headed northeast just weeks later.

After an amusing look at the…difficulties that Richard Garriott and other members of the Origin team had when attempting to adjust to life outside of Texas, the Antiquarian moves on to look at some of the early partnerships that Origin struck up post-move, and briefly mentions some of the other games they released around that time:

With Chuck Bueche’s action game Caverns of Callisto having failed to set the industry on fire, Origin now concentrated on, as their tagline would eventually have it, “creating worlds” in the form of big, ambitious games. Soon after the move to New England, they hired Dave Albert away from Penguin Software. Albert, who had majored in journalism at university and served as editor and writer for SoftSide magazine before coming to Penguin, would help Robert Garriott to put a professional face to this collection of young hackers. Albert also brought with him Greg Malone and his game in progress, the very original if polarizing oriental CRPG Moebius. Before releasing their next slate of games after Ultima III and Caverns of Callisto, Origin signed a distribution deal with Electronic Arts, becoming one of the first of what would eventually be quite a number of EA “Affiliated Labels.” This gave the still tiny Origin a badly needed presence in mass-market chains like Toys “R” Us and Sears.

Origin stretched out its tendrils in many intriguing directions during these early days. They entered into a contract with Steve Jackson Games — Steve Jackson was a friend of Richard’s from his Austin SCA troupe — to adapt that company’s popular board game Car Wars for the computer. They also agreed to make a computer game to accompany a planned film version of Morgan Llywelyn’s novel Lion of Ireland; Richard would get to spend two weeks on the set in southern Ireland soaking up the ambiance in the name of research. Richard also made tentative plans with none other than Andrew Greenberg of Wizardry fame to collaborate on “the ultimate fantasy role-playing game.”

You read that right: at one point, the possibility of a fantasy RPG developed by the minds behind both Ultima and Wizardry was being discussed. What’s also interesting is that we see here the first glimpse of a goal that Richard Garriott has continued to pursue to this day: the creation of the “ultimate” RPG.

Of course, this is an article about Ultima 4 and the physical and mental environments in which it was created, and after the above setup, the Antiquarian quickly launches into an extended look at just what led to Ultima 4 being a very different game than its predecessors:

Richard Garriott has told many times the story of how Ultima IV came to be. Akalabeth, Ultima I, and Ultima II had, he says, existed for him in a vacuum — or, maybe better said, an echo chamber. Any fan mail or other feedback from players of those games had never reached him because neither California Pacific nor Sierra had bothered to forward it to him. Once Ultima III came out under his own company’s aegis, however, he started getting a flood of letters telling him how fans really played his games. This generally entailed lots of murdering, stealing, and all-around reprehensible behavior. Now, it’s perhaps a bit surprising that this should come as such a shock to Richard, since those early games essentially forced this behavior on the player if she wished to succeed. Still, the letters set it out all out in unmistakeable black and white, as it were. And then there were the truly crazy letters from religious fundamentalists and anti-Dungeons and Dragons activists, which included such lovely epithets as “Satanic perverter of America’s youth.”

The first few of those letters that I got at the age of 22 really bothered me. You sit back and go, “Gosh, I know I’m not a wicked individual, I know I’m not teaching Satan worship, I know I’m not doing any of these things.” But the fact that someone would think so bothered me. It made me want to call the person up and say, “Look, you’re wrong, you just misinterpreted it.” But of course it would do no good to do so.

We then get some details on the earliest design ideas that Richard Garriott had for Ultima 4, which would have seen players leveling up not less than sixteen different attributes in order to become an Avatar. For a time, Dante’s Inferno contributed rather pointedly to Richard Garriott’s designs, and the sixteenth attribute would have required players to delve into the ninth circle of Hell (which pertains to treachery) in order to complete the game. Elements of these early plans survived into the final game, of course; the sixteen attributes became the Eight Virtues, and the multi-leveled (and multi-faceted) Hell of the Inferno morphed into what we now know as the Stygian Abyss (although it can probably be argued that Ultima Underworld best represents the Inferno inspiration for how varied its eight levels are).

That all being said, the Antiquarian presents his own hypothesis as to the actual origin of the main concept behind Ultima 4:

It seems likely that the real point of genesis of Ultima IV was not a fan letter but rather a television documentary about the Dead Sea Scrolls. This program, mentioned by Richard in interviews but which I unfortunately haven’t been able to identify more specifically, apparently mentioned in passing the belief held by some Christians and Hindus that Jesus Christ visited India during the so-called “unknown years” of his life, that period between about age twelve and thirty which is not described in the New Testament or any other accepted record. Some such folks believe that Jesus was a Hindu “avatar,” a god descended to earth in human form. Richard was captivated by the concept.

…

Garriott’s conception of Hinduism and Yoga is, shall we say, a somewhat idiosyncratic and confused one, steeped at least as much in Dungeons and Dragons and his work-hard-and-achieve upbringing as Hindu or Biblical scripture; this was after all still the kid who had named the villain in Ultima III “Exodus” just because it sounded cool. Thus we have Christ “leveling up” until he becomes an avatar — a word which itself means something different in Hinduism from what Richard seems to think it means — at level 16. Still, what Richard learned or thought he learned about Hinduism and Yoga would remain a critical piece of Ultima IV.

And based thereupon, Garriott set out to create what would become the effective religion of Britannia. It would also come to be, in essence, his own personal belief set, formed in kind as he formed its implementation in code. And it’s a belief set that is both directly followed by many Ultima fans to this day, and also recognized as being not-incompatible with the more mainstream beliefs held by other Ultima fans. And really, why should it not complement these, given its basis in a syncretism between Eastern and Western religious philosophies?

As is always the case with the Digital Antiquarian, there’s a lot more to read, and a lot of additional detail, so do click on through and read the entire piece.