As an overly keen Origin fan and collector, something that has bugged me for years is not having any of the completion certificates for the Ultima games. I’m not even sure if Mindscape sent them out over here in the UK but I was definitely on the wrong side of the world to reach the authors if I had wrote in and I’m not really the sort of person who writes fan letters in the first place. Besides which, I played most of these games years after release and assumed that no one would have been interested.

The certificates do occasionally come up for sale of course but would I really want one with someone else’s name on it? I’ve got pictures of them on the site which kind of suffices and I’ve never actively tried to get hold of the real artifact.

After posting those pictures on here, I found out that the Serpent Isle certificate was actually made and sent in by a fan as no official certificate was ever created for that title. This gave me the inkling of an idea to do the same thing myself, except for the whole Origin catalog.

This thought sat around for a while until a certain ex-Origin and currently Portalarium employee got in touch and I slightly cheekily took the chance to ask if he would be able to get a certificate signed by Lord British himself. I didn’t expect him to actually say yes but after a round trip to the States this arrived in the post today:-

I attempted to make the certificate as authentic by “borrowing” artwork and phrases and filled in the rest by mentioning as many Origin games as would fit on there (which wasn’t all that many in the end). It’s even printed on parchment. Now I get it back again I notice a slight clipping issue on the giant L which wasn’t on my test prints. This is what happens when you use Microsoft Word for more than letter writing. It’s also somewhat worse for wear after the 10,000 mile round trip but it all adds character and I think I might just have a new favourite item in the collection.

Safe to say this is going to be framed and hung up on a wall somewhere. I’d like to give a big, big public thank you to David and Richard.