Self-styled “code whisperer” Steve Taylor decided to kick off the new year by diving into the game files for Ultima 9, with an eye toward finding remnants of the original, isometric version of the game therein.

I found myself looking at screenshots of the early development of Ultima IX. This one in particular caught my eye – seeing these dev tools from the 90s got me wondering if there was any trace of this editor, or this original isometric version of Ultima 9, in the very different game that eventually shipped in 1999.

I couldn’t find any modern-Windows-compatible tools for viewing the U9 asset files, but I found some pretty extensive documentation, so I figured I’d just roll my own. You can now find it on Github.

The good Mr. Taylor did go on to find several assets that probably do stem from this version of the game and its editor, including various menu buttons and textures. And, as noted, he built his own file-viewer to enable all of this discovery, which you can obtain via its GitHub project page (a link to which is mirrored at the brand new project entry here at the Codex).

As for the image that’s at the top of this post…well, that also came out of the Ultima 9 game data. It’s unclear exactly what the image is of, or where it would have been used in the game. If anyone knows, please do let us know!