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This week, I thought I’d resurrect — and bring to the podcast audience — an interview that I did with Mike McShaffry (who worked as the project director on Ultima 8) several years ago.

Mr. Mike, for his part, has had a varied and interesting career in game development; he has worked for Origin Systems, Activision, Microsoft, RedFly Studio, and (most recently) ArtCraft Entertainment, developers of Crowfall. He is also the author of Game Coding Complete, a comprehensive guide to game programming and development. This book, published for the first time in 2003, has been re-published several times since; McShaffry has added to it and expanded it with each new edition.

The questions for this interview were crowdsourced from the Ultima fandom, and cover just about every imaginable aspect of Ultima 8 and its development (especially the technology behind it!), as well as the internal goings-on at Origin during the mid-1990s; Mike graciously gave an answer to just about all of them, and you’ll hopefully enjoy his blend of humorous good cheer and wistful recollection throughout the discussion.

The full transcript of the interview can be found at the Ultima Codex.