Ever Wondered What “Ultima 7: The Black Gate” Would Look Like As a 1980s Dark Fantasy Film?

AI art generation technologies — DALL-E, Midjourney, and others — have been growing in popularity and capability, especially over the last year or so. What is more, whereas early iterations of these technologies required considerable amounts of GPU and computing power, their modern incarnations can run on more modest hardware; browser-based solutions are also readily available.

So it should come as no surprise that someone has taken it upon themselves to put together a series of still images imagining what different scenes and characters from Ultima 7: The Black Gate would look like had the game been brought to life as a dark fantasy film in the mid-1980s. This, granted, was years prior to the game itself being released, but fantasy films from that era did have a certain aesthetic to them.

The results are pretty impressive. Most of the characters and scenes are instantly recognizable (though if you’re at all confused, you can find a complete, timestamped index on the video’s YouTube page), and some of the renderings are particularly spot-on.

2 Responses

  1. Enlightenment Dragon says:

    That was awesome, thanks for sharing.

  2. Zeph Grey says:

    That was bloody excellent, and somehow found its way into my news feed. So that’s interesting!