Rustic Dragon posed an intriguing question in the Ultima Dragons Facebook group yesterday, concerning the image (from the Ultima 6 introductory sequence) above…or, rather, the curious poster in the background thereof:

Has anyone else ever wondered about the unusual image hanging in your living room in the intro to U6?

To me, it looks like a pole-dancing zebra centaur with unicorn hair, jean jacket, and a saddle (or is that a whip?). Does anyone know the story behind this?

The discussion was initially pretty speculative, until former Origin Systems artist Manda offered up the following bit of information:

That is a print by Houston airbrush artist Keith Berdak.

What Manda didn’t mention is that Berdak was also an artist at Origin Systems; he has numerous art-related credits on several games in the Ultima and Wing Commander series (among others).

Armed with the name, I did a Google Images search…from which I learned that searching for Berdak’s work isn’t the wisest decision one could make at one’s workplace, even with Safe Search turned on. That being said, after paging past a few dozen results, I ended up at this blog post, which features scans of the program from SoonerCon 2 (which Berdak also did the cover art for, it should be noted). And there, on about the 18th page of the program, was this sketch:

Hobbit Dragon then chimed in with some history about the inclusion of the Berdak piece in the intro:

I seem to recall a story regarding that picture.

I believe originally (in the demo) it was a Nagel painting, but before the game was released, Origin could not get legal rights so the picture had to be changed to what you see above.

And Eric Fry, of the Nuvie team, then pointed out that the Nagel print is still visible in a screenshot on the Ultima 6 box:

So there, apparently, is the history behind why the Avatar in Ultima 6 has a poster of what appears to be a pole-dancing centaur stripper in his living room: it was originally supposed to be Patrick Nagel’s Woman in Jacket (I think), but after Origin couldn’t secure the rights to the piece, they swapped it out for an adaptation of a 1986 sketch by one of their own in-house artists.

The First Age of Update: And it turns out that Berdak uploaded a coloured version of the image to his Facebook profile a while back:

So I guess the name of the piece is…Zebra, Too?