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Ultima Revived
Sierpinski writes: "Wired.com has an article about a group of people who are trying to bring back some of the classic (older) games. I don't know what a lot of you gamers are into now... personally I'm into Max Payne and the like, but I still remember those old favorites. Thought some of you slashdotters would like to know." We've mentioned one of these games already, but I see The Bard's Tale is coming back from the dead too.
some are still on old BBSs waiting for players, and I still enjoy a fast game of DooM or Heretic over the network
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Damn, you beat me to the obligitory "Master of Magic Rules" post. Agreed, though, I would love to see MOM remade with updates graphics, engine and such. What would be even better, though, would be MOM2, but seeing how Microprose has been buried under about 3 buyouts since it's glory days, probably not going to happen.
All the Ultima crew did was talk to Richard Garriot (aka Lord British) and he OK'd it... as long as they don't profit from it.
Unfortunately, Origin holds the rights to the games, don't they? No clearance from EA for The Bard's Tale means that they'll at least have to change the names of the games, the people and places. Still, an interesting enough idea.
Oh well. As long as they're updating old games, howsabout Wasteland and the good ol' SSI RPGs?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
how about a niftier version of wasteland?
... the last one that i REALLY likes was Torment...
i wish we could get better thought out RPG's
... hi bingo
I brought back Ladder, a Donkey Kong like game that was played on old CPM machines. Graphics are way too new for my taste, let alone 3D graphics.
as most know they are updating wolfenstein... I like what I see, but it just isnt wolfenstein anymore
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
By far the most creative and original game I've ever played. I recently tried to ressurect my old Apple II just to play it, and even tried an Atari ST emulator to no avail. My hat is off to the remenants of FTL games and the original designers.
;)
If someone wants to ressurect Sundog, they've got my vote.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
I think what appeals to me about these updates is the reduction in associated stress. These chaps wouldn't be half as popular if they tried to recreate the 'fun' of loading from tape, LensLock security, broken keyboard membranes/joysticks, etc etc?
A disgruntled Spectrum user. Bring back YS. And Crash.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
"Old man yells at systemd"
I think we need to keep the "old" games going so our kids and their kids will have something to look back on and say "that's where games used to be." I'd personally like to see an open source version of Tank Wars, remember that old ATARI game? There were like 100 different possible games and I remember playing them for hours... of course that was back when video games were something the adults did after dinner, they wouldn't let the kids play because we beat them too badly. Anyway, kudos to whoever is doing this, and EA: kiss my ass! (referring to the following)
Trouble is, rights for the games are held by one of the biggest companies in the industry, Electronic Arts, which isn't too happy about grassroots revivals.
~ now you know
"EA owns the rights to Ultima and all of its characters, and in this case, no permission was requested or granted," said Jeff Brown, an Electronic Arts spokesman. "As for Richard Garriott's approval, that's like getting permission from Toto to remake The Wizard of Oz."
Richard Garriott was a minor character with no lines in Ultima? I think that L. Frank Baum (were he still alive) might be a better example. It would still not be legal, since MGM owns the movie rights, but comparing Garriott to Toto is bizarre...
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
"EA owns the rights to Ultima and all of its characters, and in this case, no permission was requested or granted," said Jeff Brown, an Electronic Arts spokesman. "As for Richard Garriott's approval, that's like getting permission from Toto to remake The Wizard of Oz."
Nice quote. What's the deal with publishers these days being hostile to everyone including developers? Look at Bioware and Interplay.
StarFlight contained a HUGE static universe (i.e., every time you play, all the systems are the same). While a lot of people like random maps nowadays, StarFlight worked really well because the universe was so large and rich that each game is almost guaranteed to be different. It had all the essential elements for a fun space strategy game: exploration, mining, colonization, alien interaction, intrigue. You can find artifacts with odd or incomplete messages, but sometimes would find some coordinates. It was fun jotting down all these coordinates and clues and exploring from there. Sometimes it would end up being a series of messages detailing the next location, sometimes they just ended (or so it seemed). And let's not forget the eerie feeling of finding a blue-green planet, slowly realizing that the shapes of the continents look familiar (it's Earth!).
I have a huge pile of notes saved up from my first StarFlight game. Only problem is that it's on 5.25" floppies. I found a copy of it online, but then I realized how archaic the savegame system is. It saves your game state into the game executable. If you don't exit the game properly, or get stuck between a rock and a hard place, your main game executable is history. This is the main reason why I haven't played StarFlight that much in the past couple of years. It's a major pain in the butt to contend with.
Now I'm eagerly awaiting StarFlight III. It's a "volunteer" project, and they've got two of the original StarFlight programmers consulting for the game.
I figured a free game based on Ultima I and given new 3d life.....then I saw what the sys recs were......DirectX 8!!! you would think that since it is a free game, they would want to use a platform independant set of Libs like Loki....then perhaps, they could port the game to many diffrent platforms since Ultima fans exist everywhere. I guess even non-comercial hobbiests can sell out ;-)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Oh, yes -- Pirates! God, for all the hours I spent on the Mac LC in school playing Pirates!
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
"EA owns the rights to Ultima and all of its characters, and in this case, no permission was requested or granted," said Jeff Brown, an Electronic Arts spokesman. "As for Richard Garriott's approval, that's like getting permission from Toto to remake The Wizard of Oz."
I don't recall Toto having been the creative force behind The Wizard of Oz, but perhaps I'm missing something. Or perhaps this guy is just using an obnoxious simile.
joedoe
Who's with me? I'd love to see M.U.L.E. brought back from the dead. What a great FUN game.
Unfortunately, I predict most of these attempts to re-create old games will be FOXed as soon as they get off the ground.
I grew up on ultima.. I actually one ultima I,2, and 3.. Loved exploring all the levels and caves and towns...
Its nice to have retro games redone when there redone right. Ambrosia software had a game calles
Because if MAME and hooking up my old intellivision has taught me anything the games of the past were great but the graphics stank..
(back in my day humans were shown on screen with 6 rectangles and one color, none of this namby pamby 3d vector shaded triangle stuff.. and We LIKED it...)
Old games can be found on abandonware sites and most still run on "modern" OSs(at least shufflepuck does
I agree .. I am thinking of starting a project to build an Ultima III style game, but I wasn't sure if there would be much interest in it.. Anybody wanna get involved in something like this? I'm thinking pluggable modules (each module is a complete adventure), a good module editor, network play, etc.
Agreed. I loved playing Ult. 2 on my C64, because I liked the tile movement, the colors (man, apple version was UGLY!) and it was a game I could play in a couple hours.
Favorite tactic to generate monsters was get a pirate ship, lure and kill pirates into a 3x3 grid, then sit in the center ship and jam a Pop-Sicle stick in the keyboard (holding down whatever key passed time) and then go find something to do for about 5 minutes. Come back and the sea and landmasses visible are covered with monsters. Kill em and collect gold, repeat until you have all the gold and levels you need. It was a fun time waster, and I'd only finish the game when I became bored.
FWIW, I'm working on M.U.L.E., but no dates yet. Too early for status updates.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The big reason a lot of these old, quality games are not being reproduced and retooled for newer platforms, (Win32, GTK, etc...) is because they are still under copyright. Many of them (Like the old Ultima games) are owned by companies who never sold them and never really plan to.
The answer to this is limiting duration of copyright on software. I mean, how much can you sell a game for even 3 years after its initial release? The last time I went to Walmart, they had a consolodated 'Starcraft' package for 19.95, but the Starcraft CD was in the bargin bin for 4.95. How about after five years? Seven? If software copyrights just simply expired after seven years with no chance of renewal, the companies who owned those games would have extracted all the revenue they could from them, and then the pulic would profit by getting older, quality games (and preferrable their source code) into the public domain.
Mind you, I think that copyright is wrong to begin with, but if there is a good compromise to be found, don't you think it would be something like this?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
First of all, before the inspiration leaves me, someone ought to make a 3-D version of Archon. Heck, if you wanted to really jazz it up, you could go to a semi-FPS mode (like Max Payne) when your pieces were fighting -- you could use terrain to hide from the opposition and even out some of those mismatches. Plus, it would be great to see your wizard missing a basilisk with a fireball and accidentally torching a tree... Of course, it's another Electronic Arts game, so I can imagine the enthusiastic support the project would get.
That temporary fantasy aside, though, I'm not sure how much I support remaking classic games. I will always remember playing Archon against my sister on the PCjr for hours -- she got the joystick, and I got the keyboard, in an attempt to level the playing field -- with the crappy chirpy sound and the ugly CGA graphics. That was the game, and it was great despite all of that. The same goes for Bard's Tale, Lode Runner, Thexder, King's Quest, and all the other games that I remember from my youth -- the games are fixed in a personal and technological context that I can't remove.
Classic games, like classic movies, books, music, or any other kind of art, have both a timeless relevance and a historical context. The former explains why they have earned the appellation of "classic" -- they continue to find an audience. However, the latter is just as important, and it's inseparable from the other half. Can you imagine someone trying to rewrite The Catcher In The Rye because the language is dated, and Holden Caulfield doesn't sound like the kids these days? Or remaking Romeo and Juliet with guns and rock music? (Oops -- too late on that last one.)
I would like my kids (someday, when I have kids) to play the games that I played as a kid, both because they were fun, and also to get a sense of history. I don't want them thinking that technology started at a 1.4 GHz Athlon and went up from there -- I wish I could start them off with a TRS-80 Model I. I think that emulation projects are wonderful work, and wish that game publishers would legitimize abandonware and old ROM sets for the standup arcade games. But remakes, as impressive as they may be, will always leave me a little cold.
"she says i'm lousy conversation. as if that's supposed to help."
Another group doing remakes which specialises in ZX Spectrum titles is Retrospec. Their website is www.retrospec.co.uk
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I'd love to be involve din someting like this, i love old style RPG's
Appearently, this is similar to a group of slashdot posters who are trying to bring back some of the classic (older) Slashdot Articles.
I guess if it's here twice, it's a really good thing...
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
After actually reading the article, I notice a few things in passing.
One of the companies demanded contact from the developers because, in some way, shape, or form the game resembled one of "theirs". A passing resemblance is enough to trigger a lawyer.
The companies seemed to think that a non-profit independent venture using some of "their" ideas is under their purvue -- ie, no Fair Use for anyone. No parody or tribute allowed.
These companies did not create these franchises (mostly) -- they didn't design them, or write the code, or even have the original developers on hand. They just bought the "property". Lord British was referred to as "Toto" to their lordly Frank Baum.
Kicker: they have refused to do anything with these "properties" for years. Even though fans begged them to. There was not enough profit, and they let them lie fallow.
That is an ample demostration of why current copyright and IP is a perversion of what Jefferson et al created copyright for -- to encourage the creation of new art for the good of all, not to only profit the holder of the mark. By converting "Bard's Tale" and other games to the status of paperclip inventory on a shelf, the art it engendered lies dead, hostage to greed for property.
As for my opinion, if the mark holders are letting it lie in an intellectual property grave, a non-profit knock-off is an expression of democratic disapproval. The PROPER course of action for these IP holders is to hire these people and release the new games, and sheepishly admit that they should have done it long ago.
check out my sig....
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Those old games were great, no question, at least for their time. I can certainly understand how some people are tired of where games have been headed (toward pseudo-realism), and want to play something else. But is remaking those old games really the direction to go in? It's like a director saying "I think movies have gotten too glitzy, so I'm only going to do remakes of great films from the 1950s." That's a cop out. Surely there is somewhere else to go to advance the creation of games? If you don't like modern-style games, then take things in your own direction.
The Bard's Legacy site has some neat screen shots & such, but at this time it isn't clear what platform it runs on. Details are a little sketchy, but it looks like a noble effort.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Hey, it's not only old video games that run into the ol' "this hasn't been sold by anyone for years, yet it's still illegal to distribute it yourself" problem. I frequent a (pencil, paper and dice) RPG board where someone was carrying on and threatening to call the FBI because some folks were distributing Star Frontiers in PDF form. Star Frontiers is an old RPG that hasn't been in print for over a decade, and the company that owns the rights to it is currently selling the Star Wars RPG, so it's unlikely they're going to decide to revive Star Frontiers anytime soon.
... that's just wrong.
Also, there's a certain cult classic series of sci-fi novels that I wanted to buy (I've forgotten the name now) but since they're long out of print, my only option is to buy them from some collectors for a few hundred dollars.
It's ridiculous. This isn't what copyrights were intended for. Protecting someone's right to make money off their own creative property is one thing. Locking something away because the owner is a corporation that has other intellectual property it wants to focus on exploiting
-- dR.fuZZo
Just my opinion, but I'd love to see remakes of Pirates! (Pirates Gold, which was a lovely pile of toss, doesn't count) and Stunts (pc racing game).
:)
Pirates! just had a fantastically simple interface for a game with as much open-ended play as it had. And Stunts had a great track editor (especially for the time, around '89 or '90 IIRC).
I know this is getting off-topic, but has anyone besides me ever imagined Pirates! in an online, persistant world (MMORPG, like Everquest)? Man, if you could just figure out a good time scaling for ocean travel, that game might just rock.
My sigs always suck.
EA's never been good to the fan community.
They release quite frankly the worst Ultima ever and feel their intellectual property is being compromised by people wanting to enjoy what Ultima was.
EA has taken over sooo many game companies it's stupid, something to watch out for.
But maybe I'm just bitter cause Ultima9 was such a crap game.
It's turtles all the way down.
Fortunately, since the copyright laws hadn't been extended to ridiculous lengths, you don't need Toto's, or anyone's, permission to distribute or rewrite L. F. Baum's Oz stories, as they started going into the public domain in the 1950's.
Go check out Nuklear Lord, a kick ass game of Legend of the Red Dragon running under Linux on DOSemu with a cool Perl BBS gateway. You can also telnet to port 31337 on that server to play.
Why bother.
Unfortunately it's saddled with such a linear storyline that once you're through it, it's not much fun anymore. This one's a definite renter if anything is; you can easily play it out in a weekend.
While IP laws are intended to protect the holder, there is a good arguement for changes to protect the consumers interests.
Wherever a significant consumer group is NOT being served by an IP holder there should be a legal process by which the IP defaults AWAY from the holder following a period of non-exploitation.
Scenario: Publisher X withdraws GameX from the market, and stops supporting players. A player registers this fact with a register for a small fee (call it $30, just to stop the jokers, to make sure it matters). Following a period, perhaps 2 years, if the company has made no significant moves to make the IP available to the paying public it defaults out to the public domain. Simple.
Company X will argue that it could be working on the new version during those 2 years and this sucks. But, any decent games company will continue to support its user base while the new game is coming along - drip feeding us patches, upgrade packs, new terrains.
Similarly, any other software that starts to die could be openned up after a couple of years of non-exploitation or when the company went bust. Doesn't mean they have to release the code - just that they cant sue your arse if you copy them / take inspiration.
YS! Hurrah! Quick google turned up the Your Sinclair Rock and Roll Years - great website!
You can go through all the back issues online!
Did anyone else not buy the issue of YS that had a semi naked chick on the front.
I've still got a stack of these in the loft! I should eBay them!
Ah the memories....
;-) I actually had pages of notes on the savegame files and could practically create a new character in a hex editor.
I have so many fond memories of The Bards Tale, the first game I learned to hack
I was also a huge fan of the Starcon and Starflight series, but have never been able to get ahold of a copy of Starcontrol 3. I've only seen it available on mac format, which is really frustrating.
As for the Ultima games, my favorite would be Ultima VI, the last of the pure tile games. It was the first, and still on of very few, games that I have played where you can interact with just about anything. I loved pushing cannons around and firing at whatever I could find. It was also fun carying around a few powder kegs and an invisibility ring for a good old fashioned dragon hunt... I had so many notes for that game, with maps of nearly every dungeon and town. Thank god for extra large graph paper...
One of my favorite games, though, I can't even remember the title of. I played that one so much that I didn't have to refer to the manual for the copy protection. It was a space exploration type game, where your homebase was a triangular formation of starbases. Outside this safe area you had pirate, insect, and robot ships that would attack as you went on misions. One of my favorite aspects is that you could board their ships and tow them back for salvage. I wish I could remember the name, I'd love a chance to play it again.
Looks like I've got some web searching to do...
-Space for rent
You want to play a game designed by someone who is showing off their "mad programming skills"?
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
... is that they either did something nobody else was doing at the time, or they did it better than everybody else. In other words, they were damn cool when they were current. The problem is, playing modernized versions of classic games often is about the same as hanging around your old high school at the age of 30 - you know you had good times there 14 years ago, but you can't for the life of you figure out WTF is going on now.
Every now and then a remake of a classic (be it a game, movie or TV show) does the legacy justice, but far too often the remake fails miserably because modernization destroys everything that made it a classic. Anybody remember Return to Zork? They decided to update the venerable series by making a graphical adventure that was fun for the 5 minutes it took to realize that whatever it said on the box, this most certainly was not Zork.
I'm not saying these projects are doomed to failure, I'm just saying that anybody modernizing a classic needs to be very careful about evaluating new features in the context of the original game. If the original had an isometric view, for God's sake don't remake it into a first person viewpoint just to demonstrate that you too can license a 3D engine. Keep the remakes true to the spirit of the original, and maybe we'll see something of note come of it.
I always hated it when that happens, or when, out of the corner of your eye, you see some shambling beast move and then disappear -- knowing that it would soon be ripping the squad apart.
XCom will always have a special little corner of my hard drive. Anybody know if it works well under emulation?
-schussat
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I finished all 3, I dimmly remember how the 2nd one ended, the 3rd took so long to finish that I'll probably never forget it.
I'm assuming you're refering to the 3rd one, as the others I found more or less easy, though not by today's game standards.
In the end, your party members become Gods. By the time you get to the final battle you've got so much power that's it's pretty trivial unless you're unlucky enough to get hit with attacks that kill instantly.
But damn. Some of those riddles were pretty tough.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
A similar project is Exult, which is a rewrite of the Ultima 7/Serpent Isle engine. EA may not mind this one su much, however, since it still requires the original U7/SI data files to run.
For Starcon 3 you might want to check the disco bins. I got mine from a disco bin at an Office Depot of all things for like $5.99. That said it was no where near the game Starcon 2 was. Although I did like the new ships in versus mode.
It's also worth checking out some abandonware sites, one of them may have it for download.
Best place to start looking for abandonware, that I've found, is the Abandonware ring. Maybe you'll find starcon 3. But I would say it is skipable.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Following a recent /. article, I've reinstalled and started playing FreeCiv.
-no broken link
The bottom line is that this wouldn't be happening if Electronic Arts hadn't run Ultima into the ground.
It's been nearly ten years since the last good Ultimas came out (U7, and Underworld 2). Since then we've gotten the half-hearted Ultima 8, an un-Ultima Ultima Online, a vastly flawed Ultima 9, and an ambitious but canned Ultima Online 2 (cancelled a week before beta testing was to begin).
The only current choice from EA for ultima right now is to play Ultima Online, which has traditionally been comepletely void of "Ultimaness". This could change, but it's still a four year old game on it's last legs.
Alternatively you could play Ultima 7 via Exult on Linux or Windows.
Or you could wait a bit for remakes like the article mentions, if EA ever lets them see the light of day.
But don't expect any new Ultima from EA. I hear things aren't going well for them as it is.
You should not always believe what you read in the press :)
Either Jeff Brown simply forgot or EA has some serious communication problems within their ranks.
When we started out on this project I contacted Richard Garriott which at that time was creative director for Origin and as such I would say it it safe to assume that he speaks the voice of the company as whole.
When Richard Garriott later left Origin I sent a letter to a Ms. Lisa Tensfeldt which works within EA's legal department. In that letter I expained what we was doing and our concern that we might now be violating EAs copyrights after Richard Garriott had left the company. As they never replied to that letter we felt it safe to assume that there was no problems.
- Kasper Fauerby aka. Telemachos
www.peroxide.dk
Star Control 2 is another all-time great computer game, and it too has a community trying to bring the game back (it never died in my opinion). These guys are making a sequal to the Star Control 2 universe... the game that Star Control should have been. There is also Freeciv, an open source Civilization clone. Anyway, the early Ultimas are classics, but I had to throw in a link about Star Con revival efforts. Its slightly on topic ;-)
Baum's books were written from ~1900 - 1917. As copywrite used to last only 56 years, they passed into the public domain starting in the 1950's.
But the movie will probably stay copywrited forever, since Congress keeps extending the term.
Several of us have been working on another Ultima remake, Exult, for nearly three years. But my ultimate goal is to end up with a game engine and tools for making new games in the same style.
Old-fashioned Ultima-style games with a more modern interface and look-&-feel are being produced right now! Check out Spiderweb Software. The games are all shareware -- crippleware, actually -- that let you get through about 1/3 of the way through play before you're forced to register to continue. But at $25, it's not all that painful to register.
And the brethren went away edified.
Thought that was Sting, not Toto. Toto did some tune about Africa in '83, I think. Um, on second thought, Sting just acted in Dune.