Yes, your eyes do not deceive you; that’s a photograph of a 3.5″ diskette with Lost Vale written on it; it’s one of the more recent additions to Joe Garrity’s horde of treasures, otherwise known as the Origin Museum. And the good Mr. Garrity was quite giddy to share this find with the folks in the Big Box PC Game Collectors Facebook group:

ULTIMA 8-THE LOST VALE

Is this for real?!–YES! (almost)

This is an actual disk, donated by Origin developer Sheri Graner Ray, which contains data from the legendary unreleased game. Unfortunately, it is not all of the game, just some of the UNK files used to create the character scripts. I’ve shown these files to a few experts (some EXULT members), in the hopes that I may have struck gold–alas, it was not meant to be, and there is not enough data to rebuild this lost treasure.

What it contains, however, is the only data ever recovered of The Lost Vale. It’s quite interesting, and one can examine the basic functions and actual dialog of characters who made up some of the plot of the game. I am planning on releasing the data in the near future, in hopes that people will be able to see what might have been. Special thanks to Sheri Graner Ray for donating the disk, and to Dino for the pics of the box.

As it happens, I’ve been talking with Joe about this; the material found on the diskette — which, I hasten to disclaim, is not the full Lost Vale expansion, and is not in any way, shape, or form a complete executable — will be released via the Ultima Codex in the near future.

But first, I have some Arthurian Legends-related findings to share with you all, which I really need to get around to publishing.