I don’t check Reddit much, but this intriguing post on /r/Ultima was brought to my attention recently. In it, a user who goes by the handle shiftpgdn describes a new project that aims to re-create Trinsic, as it appears in Ultima 7: The Black Gate, as a 3D, roughly Skyrim-like, browser-based game using the three.js engine. From there, the intent is to tell a prequel story to Ultima 7.

I’ve decompiled Ultima 7 and have been rebuilding it with Skyrim level graphics using three.js as the game engine to tell a new story where you play as Spark.

Ultima 7 has always been my favorite video game, and I’ve always wanted to expand the world by telling stories from new perspectives. My current project is to build an Agatha Christie style mystery where you play as Spark when Inamo has newly arrived into town.

I’ve been working on this for the last month or so in my free time. I have absolutely zero video game experience, so it’s in quite a rough state, but I wanted to share and hear your feedback. A lot of the assets were generated by Meshy as placeholders while I work with an artist. There are around 50 placeholder “crowd” unnamed NPCs wandering around which may hold treasure.

https://trinsic.mcqinteractive.com

You can press the ` key and type debug to access more details. P will unpause time (it’s currently paused until I get night lighting figured out) and let the characters follow their schedules. See if you can find the mouse wearing armor (no, it’s not Sherry!)

You can check out the playable version of Trinsic at the link in the quote above. I’ve got to build a project entry for this at some point, but for now you’d do well to follow both the Reddit thread and the web-based demo. It isn’t entirely clear to me whether shiftpgdn also intends to build the rest of Britannia, but I suppose we’ll know soon enough.