If you need a palette-cleanser after the cringe-worthy disaster that was that Film Goblin article, our friends at the Wing Commander CIC point us toward an article at TechRaptor with a very attention-grabbing title (in the legitimate sense, rather than the clickbait-y sense): 35 Years Of Influence – A Look Back at Origin Systems, Creators of Ultima and More.

The article gives a bit of history about the founding of the company and its early growth, but the main thrust of it is that Origin Systems continues, to this day, to have a significant impact on the gaming industry…even though the studio itself was closed down almost 15 years ago:

Both Ultima Underworld and System Shock have had a legacy that is arguably greater than anything else Origin Systems had done before. As Sam Shahrani, writing for Gamasutra in 2006, put it, “All 3D RPG titles from Morrowind to World of Warcraft share Ultima Underworld as a common ancestor, both graphically and spiritually, though World of Warcraft utilizes a slightly different third person perspective. For better or for worse, Underworld moved the text-based RPG out of the realm of imagination and into the third dimension.”

The first game in The Elder Scrolls franchise, released in 1994, was strikingly similar to Ultima Underworld in both technology and gameplay. In many ways, The Elder Scrolls: Arena unraveled into what Underworld should have become: an increasingly complex and immersive open world RPG franchise with richly realized worldbuilding and lore. FromSoftware’s first game in 1994, King’s Field, was also directly influenced by Underworld and later became the spiritual predecessor of the Souls franchise.

Ultima as a whole had an enormous influence on the establishment of open world games. While initially limited by early technology, the design foundation was there from the very first Ultima. With Ultima VI, however, the consistency in perspectives and the notion of a persistent game world that could be influenced by the player was truly groundbreaking.

The article also notes Origin’s impact on that other arena of gaming, MMORPGs. And they note that many former Origin Systems employees remain key players in the gaming industry today:

Richard Garriott resigned following the cancellation of Origin’s projects and founded Destination Games, which had some moderate success as a developer of MMORPGs. Chris Roberts was flying under the radar for most of the late 1990s and early 2000s, with two credits as producer in Starlancer (2000) and Conquest: Frontier Wars (2001) and the original concept for Freelancer (2003), before he founded the crowdfunding giant Cloud Imperium Games and began developing the ambitious Star Citizen franchise, in many ways a spiritual successor of Wing Commander.

Warren Spector joined John Romero at Ion Storm in the late 1990s and produced the groundbreaking Deus Ex, a landmark of both cyberpunk and stealth games, also molded after the immersive sim school of game design. Paul Neurath founded and ran Floodgate Entertainment in 2000, where several employees came from Looking Glass Studios. They co-developed the expansion pack Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide alongside BioWare, and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic alongside Arkane Studios, as well as mobile versions of Civilization and Madden Football. Floodgate was sold to Zynga in 2010 and Neurath spent a few years as creative director of Zynga’s Mobile division, working on several of their big franchises before he founded OtherSide in 2013 to develop the crowdfunded Underworld Ascendant as a spiritual successor of Ultima Underworld, due for release in 2018.

I’ll suggest that you read the whole thing, of course; it’s quite a good article overall. And head on over to the Wing Commander CIC as well; they’ve got a few scans of documents and whatnot that you’ll no doubt want to take a look at.