Ultima 9’s Tapestry of Ages…Seamless and Fold-Free
I promised Unseen Dragon that I wouldn’t release this publicly until after his Festival of the Silver Serpent had concluded. It’s the Tapestry of Ages from Ultima 9, based primarily on a scan of one of my copies thereof. As such, it’s a fairly large image; the full-size PNG download measures 7777×2700 pixels.
Unseen wanted to have a large banner of the Tapestry hanging overhead during the Festival, but he soon found that most versions of the Tapestry that can be found online have a very large and noticeable flaw: a fold or seam running right down the middle of the image. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: the Tapestry feely that was included with Ultima 9 was nearly twice the length of the game box, and thus had to be folded to fit into it. And those versions of the Tapestry that don’t have the seam running down them tend to be from game screenshots, and aren’t suitable for large-format printing.
Thus, Unseen went to Joe Garrity to see if a seamless Tapestry could be found. Joe, in turn, asked if it would be possible for me to piece one together based on scans of both one of my copies of the Tapestry and a scan of the version of it that appear in the Prima Strategy Guide for Ultima 9. Both versions still have folds in them, but the Prima version has the fold in a slightly different place. The offset was only a centimeter or so, but it was enough to work with to restore the detail in e.g. Jaana’s face and the Avatar’s shoulder.
And the result is what you see above…or what can be seen in the download below.
The Tapestry of Ages from Ultima 9, but one which does not have any folds or seams in it. This was prepared for Unseen Dragon’s Festival of the Silver Serpent by Withstand the Fury Dragon.
