It is, as they say, nice to want things.

Twenty-five years ago as of tomorrow, Origin Systems and Electronic Arts released Ultima 9, after an often-fraught development process that programmer Bill Randolph chronicled both in a lengthy post-mortem report written soon after the game’s release, and then again in an interview I did with him some years later.

Soon after Ultima 9 was first released, designer Bob White famously posted his plot summary online, cementing the “Bob White Plot” into the mind of the Ultima fan community as an idealistic “what could have been”. As was the case with all prior Ultima games, Ultima 9 had engendered some negative commentary at the time of its release, and the summary of the Bob White Plot certainly gave more ammunition to those detractors. Not that Ultima 9 was universally hated, mind you; as is often the case, the loudest vitriol poured forth from a relatively small segment of the fandom.

And some of us did what we could do build up Ultima 9’s reputation in later years. A certain YouTuber’s series of Ultima reviews was a notable setback in this effort, though I think we are making ground again. Not that one can yet avoid having someone mindlessly parrot “what’s a paladin?” when the topic of Ultima 9 comes up, but such interjections are becoming fewer and farther between. And the game’s rating on both GOG and Metacritic has been slowly creeping back up; one notes that recent reviews on GOG have tended to be quite favorable.

In the last decade or so, we’ve learned a great deal more about the development of Ultima 9, partly thanks to Bill Randolph, partly thanks to the efforts of Joe Garrity to unearth all manner of documents from during the game’s development, and partly thanks to others who worked on or were involved with the game in some capacity. It’s well worth taking a stroll through all of these pieces of history to mark Ultima 9’s 25th year, including:

• “Nookie” Cutscene Storyboards
• “Betrayal” Cutscene Storyboards
• Character Sketches
• Dungeons From the Bob White Plot
• Manual Images
• Original Isometric 3D Screenshots
• Installation Guide Proof Copy
• Packaging Design and Patch Notes
• Box Art Source Images

And, of course, the two plot summaries that have since come to light are worth re-reading:

• The Bob White Plot
• The Ed del Castillo Plot Summary

The way in which Joe Garrity ultimately obtained the full Bob White Plot document was, I think, one of the more instructive and enlightening moments in my changing understanding of Ultima 9 and its history. Joe found what ultimately proved to be Ed del Castillo’s plot treatment for the game, which we thought might be Bob White’s plot treatment at first (there was no name indicated in the document). When Joe reached out to Bob, the latter dismissed it as not his own work and suggested it might be Ed’s plot. He then sent Joe the last version of his plot document that he had on hand.

Why this episode proved instructive was twofold. Firstly, it was clear afterwards that Bob (at least at the time) had no great love of Ed, an animosity that Ed alluded to when I connected with him some time later. (I didn’t use the exact wording above, but suffice it to say that my recollection of Bob’s rejection of Ed’s plot document as his handiwork was…far from charitable.) And second, the Bob White Plot proved to contain many of the same plot beats in it that Ultima 9’s most vocal detractors had singled out for particular criticism in the release version of the game (e.g. the Avatar-Guardian duality, the romantic subplot with Raven, and other elements besides).

And it served to shed some light on the internal turmoil at Origin Systems, which is chronicled to no small degree in Andrea Contato’s excellent Through the Moongate books. Conversations I’ve had with other ex-Origin staff on my own have confirmed as much, and Bill Randolph’s concise documentation of the issues with Ultima 9’s development offer further corroboration. The game had immense shoes to fill and “an inertia of legend” to live up to. As an early foray into 3D open-world RPG development, it was likely never going to completely match the visions of its designers; I’m told, for example, that the Cathedral of Love in Britain looks comparatively barren and lifeless compared to what it looked like earlier on in development…though at the time, the engine could barely manage 2 frames per second when rendering it. Such tradeoffs are commonplace even today in game development, but these sorts of struggles were new back in the late 1990s.

As noted at the start of this article, it’s nice to want things. For myself, I wish I could have seen the game as some of these developers saw it, full of beauty before compromises had to be made to ensure its performance was something approaching “playable”. And while I’m dreaming, I’ll also say that if I could have it any other way, I’d want Ultima 9 as Ed del Castillo envisioned it; I do think he had the right idea about how to rework the game and its story.

And hey…if anyone from an EA development studio is reading this, I do have the source code for the game archived, and there’s really not that many great offerings these days in the 3D open-world RPG space on mobile. Just saying.

Ultima 9 is still a masterpiece. Not without its flaws, mind you, but still a masterfully-crafted game even so. A quarter-century on from its release, I can finally point to some more modern 3D RPGs that offer feature-parity with it…something I couldn’t necessarily say a decade ago. If you, reading this today, haven’t yet checked out Ultima 9 for whatever reason, I’d encourage you to do so. If you’ve heard that it’s a terrible game, rest assured that it is not. If you’ve heard that it’s a disappointment, rest assured that it is a triumph. If you’ve heard that it’s buggy…well, okay, that one is true, although less so if you install some of the fan-made patches. Really, it’s just the Moonglow section of the game that still causes problems; get through that area quickly, and the rest should be smooth sailing.

And in the end, Ultima 9 remains a fitting conclusion to the Ultima series, delivering on Richard Garriott’s main theme for its story, and wrapping up the tales of the Avatar and of Britannia in a satisfying way.

The First Age of Update: If you’re curious about the aforementioned fan-made patches, Iceblade has posted an update to the Forgotten World subdomain that, in addition to celebrating Ultima 9’s anniversary as well, discusses the current state of his ongoing efforts to patch lingering issues in the game.