Calling Ultima the single most consistently groundbreaking, pioneering, influential series of videogames in the history of the medium would be kind of an understatement (Akalabeth and Ultima I pioneering the idea of adapting tabletop RPGs to the medium of videogames in a way that established so many elements that would become intrinsic to the identity of the genre for decades, like the concept of grid-based first person dungeon crawling and tile-based overworld travel, later games establishing the mold for isometric top-down RPGs, Ultima Online being a critical tipping point in cementing the popularity of the MMORPG), but even among a series that consistently pumped groundbreaking videogame after groundbreaking videogame it's just completely impossible to overstate how massive Ultima Underworld's legacy stands over a huge chunk of the gaming medium, even if its effects manifest in subtle ways nowadays like I legitimately believe no individual videogame in the history of the medium has been as influential as it.
It's legitimately insane how many seemingly unrelated videogames can be directly traced back to Underworld in some form or another. Like, to get the obvious out of the way first, it established the DNA of the immersive sim genre, so if you like games like System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, Bioshock, Dishonored, Prey, all of those games were either made by people who worked on Ultima Underworld (sometimes by the same studio even), or otherwise directly influenced by games that were.
But also, if you like any first person shooters influenced by Doom and other ID Software games? John Carmack was there when the demo of Underworld was first shown and decided he could create a faster texture-mapped first-person 3D engine. Which he did, at the cost of sacrificing true polygonal 3D environments in favor of the pseudo-3D that he would use for Catacombs 3D and Wolfenstein 3D, eventually resulting in the creation of Doom. RPGs like the Elder Scrolls or Gothic? It would take all day to list off how much they directly owe to Ultima Underworld. That videogame trope of finding out what happened to the occupants of a place through finding in-game logs and documents? It was established by Ultima Underworld and popularized by one of its successors.
That's without mentioning how many games directly cite it as an influence. Some already mentioned like Bioshock, Deus Ex, and Elder Scrolls, but also like. Half-life 2? Tomb Raider? Gears of War? Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines? All cite it as a direct influence in their game design.
Like of course a lot of these things are by virtue of being one of the earliest free-moving 3D first person videogames, when you're that early in the history of the medium you'll inevitably end up being the first to do *something* that otherwise someone else would eventually have ended up doing anyway, but no other game has a "first videogame to do [thing]" list anywhere as long and important as Ultima Underworld's.
Also it's legitimately unbelievable how technically advanced it was for its time. Watching a stone thrown at you by a goblin sail through the air in a realistic arc and bounce off the walls and floor is nothing short of surreal to see in a game that looks like this and came out a couple months before Wolfesntein 3D
Ultima Underworld. I and II. By the way.
Apparently a unity engine port of Ultima Underworld 1 came out earlier this year, and was recently updated to add mouse + keyboard controls (it originally only supported gamepad controls). So it completely solves one of the biggest obstacles to experiencing Ultima Underworld from a modern audience perspective, which is the archaic controls (there's a mouselook patch for the original game that makes it slightly better but even with it the controls are kind of awkward).
I personally am not interested in this unity remake because I think it's kind of visually ugly (the modernized UI font and new 3D models clash with the original visuals in a pretty awkward way that loses a lot of the original's charm)
But it's still a remarkable effort, and for anyone who sttruggles with the original's controls it might not be a bad way to experience an extremely influential game that still holds up as one of the best dungeon crawlers of all time.
An engine recreation of the 1992 immersive sim classic.
Also apparently the old japanese-exclusive PS1 port got an english fan translation a couple years ago! I still think the 3D models on that version look ugly but at least they look ugly in a charmingly old-school way, and the UI looks kind of cramped, but I'm considering putting it on a PS1 emulator in my 3DS
After almost 27 years of being inaccessible to the west, the PSX port of Ultima Underworld has now
