This is an interview with Richard Garriott taken from the March 1986 Computer Gaming World magazine. As you may be expecting, it does start with the seemingly contractual questions that are in every one of his interviews. RG was clearly already telling the tale of how he got into the industry 25 years ago. I’m not sure how he has managed to keep his patience repeating the same story over the years.
Thankfully, it’s not all unoriginal. I’d never heard that an Ultima 4 Part 2 was planned as well as Ultima 5. I presume this never got too far but I’d be curious to know what the planned storyline would have been. We did eventually get a fan-made Ultima 4 Part 2 of course, although I can’t imagine the official version would have been all that similar.
I suspect that Ultima 4 part 2 finally became Ultima 5. Before U5, all Ultimas presented a different world (like Final Fantasy does today), remember?
Please excuse my poor English :S
You could well be right, although it would need to have been simplified a good deal if it were to work in the Ultima 4 engine if that is the case.
It’s not entirely true about the early Ultima’s all having different worlds. I read an interview somewhere in which Garriott said that both Ultima 1 and 3 use the same Sosaria that he created for his pre-Akalabeth games. It was apparently split into the 4 continents for Ultima 1 and if you shove these together you should get roughly the same land mass as Ultima 3. I can’t say I’ve ever tried it though.