This blog started out as an attempt to play every Ultima game starting at Akalabeth but quickly changed into a more ambitious (or foolish) attempt to play every game ever developed or published by Origin Systems. Origin have been my favourite developer for years and I’d been collecting all their games but still hadn’t finished half of them and this seemed like a good excuse to start.
With the Origin games more or less out of the way, I started branching out into playing fan games, games made by Origin’s more famous ex-employees, ports for other computers/consoles and looking at and scanning any relevant books I could find.
Nearly 10 years after starting, I’ve still not entirely run out of potential Origin material but most of the obvious candidates are out of the way and I can only take playing ports of the same game so many times. So as of 2016 I’m branching out to cover whatever old games I happen to want to play and will throw a bit of Origin into the mix as and when. The general idea is to make use of some of the sizable collection of games I’ve amassed over the years instead of having them just sit on shelves. The games covered could be any format but my platform of choice is most definitely DOS and I’ll be concentrating heavily on oldschool PC gaming.
Pix-
Please send me your personal info (Name, email, Skype, phone number, etc.) I’m quite sure that we have much to discuss. 🙂
treefortjoe@hotmail.com
Man, I have only just discovered this blog, and I am PUMPED.
Wow, what a great site. Thanks alot for making this. I just stumbled upon this when looking for some manuals for old Origin games. Those games were some of the first I played on the Apple back in the late 80’s and I love them all. I’m not sure what happened to all my old manuals, but I think I’ll try to find them online again to buy. If anyone knows where to find them without paying an arm and a leg please e-mail me. Great site, thanks again, I’m going to enjoy reading all the posts and looking at the pics. -Vec
Most of these games might not be as expensive as you think, provided you don’t go and get them off the first Ebay seller you run into. If you are patient you should be able to get them on Ebay without spending a fortune. If someone has a stupid buy it now price don’t be afraid to haggle. I’ve got people down to 1/3 of the asking price before now. I’d highly recommend Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe at http://yois.if-legends.org which usually has a few Origin games at very reasonable prices. I used to use http://gametz.com/ a lot, although I’ve not tried it in years. Also http://www.gamegavel.com/ is a much cheaper alternative to Ebay although you will be lucky to find what you want as they don’t have a whole lot on there and it tends to concentrate on consoles.
Sry forgot to post my mail addres – Vector@cinci.rr.com
I just now found your site — I’m now going to subscribe and hit your downloads area, since I’ve been trying to get my hands on some of those books for a long time!
I noticed that you have the 1990 version of the Official Book of Ultima (same one I have) up… I just found a PDF someone kindly scanned of the 1992 edition, thought I’d share the link with you in case you wanted to grab it for your site:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/48188850/The-Official-Book-of-Ultima
Thanks for the the sub and the link. I’ve been looking for this book for a while but never seen it at a price I liked. I’ll add the pdf in with the others later today.
Hi there, this site rocks. I thought I’d mention that I am one of the writers of two RPGs heavily inspired by class early Ultimas called Excelsior I and Excelsior II. A friend and I wrote them years ago and sold them as shareware. Partly out of nostalgia we still distribute them through our website and in fact just did a few updates so that they now run well on modern Windows versions. If you are interested in playing an old school RPG, you can check them out at http://www.excelsior-rpg.com.
Thanks, those RPG’s look like just my sort of games. With the Ultima inspiration, you can expect to see playthroughs of them on here eventually. They are on a lengthy list so it could be a while though.
Hey Pix, I got some Crusader stuff you might be interested in. E-mail me at keenanweaver AT gmail.
Your blog is treasure! Thank you SO much!
Great site! I just discovered it and now I look forward to reading all your articles.
What a great theme for a blog… Your cause is just, noble adventurer!
Great Idea Thank you
Still here 🙂 I’m glad! What a treasure
Yes, just starting the 12th year believe it or not. Not many updates these days but I’m still plugging away on PC Zone scans.
Your PC Zone scans are an absolute blessing. Thank you so much for being a force of good in the universe. Would you consider uploading them onto archive.org? If it takes too much time out of your life, would you mind it if I do it for you?
Most of them are already there as Jason Scott uploaded them all earlier this year. It’s a bit out of date but the plan is to get him to grab the lot again when I finally have them all ready but that is probably going to be another 6 months at least. Apart from the issues I’ve still not got around to, I’ll be redoing a handful, filling in missing disks/supplements and the like before I hand them over. Long term I don’t want to store them all myself – I’ll probably keep all the pdf’s on my site but cover DVD’s take up way too much room.
Thanks for archiving so much Origin material!
If you haven’t played it, I recommend The Magic Candle from Minecraft. Tech wise it reminds me of Ultima V.