Back in the early days of Ultima Forever’s development, Mythic Entertainment (which I think at the time was still called BioWare Mythic) invited a select group of people to participate in an early alpha test of the game, using what was at the time a Windows-based game client. Obviously, the game never released for PC; development shifted to target Apple iOS instead, and the game was only ever in full release for a few months. Most of the participants that I keep in contact with held on to a copy of the PC alpha’s installer. I certainly did, and while it has no update or authentication servers to connect to, I do occasionally reinstall it to see if I’ve missed posting any of the beautiful artwork that can be found within its data files. (For examples, see here, here, here, and here.)

Well…last week, Cear Dragon dropped something of a bombshell on the Ultima Dragons Discord server: he has been working on reverse-engineering the PC alpha client, with the goal of figuring out a way to make the game playable again.

Thus far, Cear has managed to locally emulate a patch server for the game, and has figured out some of the authentication issues too. In fact, the image above is taken from a video he uploaded which showcases him firing up the game client, starting the game, and proceeding as far as the gypsy questions that every new player would be asked on first launch. He can’t quite get into the game world proper, which is next goal. But it’s impressive, nevertheless, to see that opening sequence again after more than a decade.

Ultima Forever was certainly greeted with some measure of controversy by the Ultima fandom, but if you’ve been following the Codex since that time you’ll know I was a staunch defender of it, and that I quite enjoyed playing it for as long as it lasted. It would be nice to wander its version of Britannia again, and I do hope Cear is able to figure out a way to make that happen.