Ultima I-VI Series

The Ultima I-VI Series is a game compilation that contains the first six Ultima games. It is essentially a combination of the first trilogy and the second trilogy into one package, with all the games on one CD. It was released by Origin in 1993.

The contents are:


 * "Ultima Trilogy Manual"
 * "Age of Virtue Manual"
 * Three cardboard maps for Ultima I-III.
 * The cardboard map of Ultima VI.

This collection is notorious as the point where the PC Ultima II became broken. Originally, the game came on three sides of two 5.25" floppy disks, during a time when MS-DOS didn't support sub-directories. Some files on different floppies, such as the planet maps on the "Galactic" disk side, had the same name as other files with different content on other floppies, such as the earth maps on the "Player" disk side. This wasn't a problem when people played the game from floppies, as the game knew which disk was in the drive at what time and could prompt the player to insert another when the files on that disk were needed.

However, when the CD-ROM collection was put together, Origin had to place all the Ultima II files into a single directory (as the game wouldn't know what to do with sub-directories, having predated them). As a result, the planet maps from the Galactic disk were inadvertently overwritten by files with the same name (but different contents) from the Program disk. While this did not make the game unwinnable (only one of the planets actually had to be visited to win the game, and that one was unaffected by the problem), it removed a lot of its content and introduced much oddness, as now most of the planets looked exactly like the different time periods of Earth, just minus the time doors. This error was never corrected by Origin, and as future re-releases of the series (most notably the Ultima Collection in 1998) derived its archival copies of Ultima II from this compilation, the bug carried over to those versions as well. (Thankfully, a fan patch corrects the error and restores the original map files.)

Trivia

 * As with the first Ultima Trilogy, Sierra refused to sell the rights to the real Ultima II cover art back to Origin. Thus, a placeholder (derived from the California Pacific cover art for Akalabeth) is once again used.


 * Ironically, Origin only released this collection after another contractor, Software Toolworks, had created the exactly same package, only with a different cover, a year earlier.