Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash



Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash is a computer game for the Commodore VIC-20 home computer. Although carrying the Ultima name with permission from series creator Richard Garriott, the game has little relation with the Origin titles.

Gameplay
In the game, creatures called "garrintrots" have imprisoned the player in Mt. Drash, and the player's task is to escape the dungeons.

The game itself is a series of three-dimensional randomly generated dungeons, and the goal is to destroy all monsters that stand in the way and exit to the next level. There is a time limit as well. The game doesn't employ custom graphics, but rather uses VIC-20's rather large range of built-in keyboard graphic characters to draw the game scene.

The only ties between this game and the Ultima series are the presence of the word "Ultima" in its name, and Mt. Drash being a location in Ultima I.

Development
The game was originally written by one of Richard Garriott's friends, Keith Zabalaoui, in Coarsegold, California, for Sierra On-Line, Inc in 1983. Sierra, who had just successfully published Ultima II, named the game an Ultima, in hopes that it would sell better. Despite contrary popular belief, Garriott was well aware of this release and consented to use of the Ultima brand.

Sierra originally intended to publish the game as part of the SierraVenture series of games. However, it seems that someone at Sierra had noticed that the game was not going to sell well. Only one advertisement was published in Compute! magazine, but aside from that, the game was never distributed very widely. Computer Gaming World reviewed the game in 1983, praising its unique graphics and musical score. Sierra even denied the game ever existed, until Zabalaoui confirmed it actually was finished and was actually shipped to retailers. Approximately 3000 units were made, although exact numbers are not available.

Rediscovery & Collectible Status
For a long time, a lot of the details surrounding the game were very vague. For example it was believed the game was a cartridge, while in fact it was released on cassette tape. One of the rumors about the game was that Sierra sold a very minimal number of the games, barely enough to get even, then buried the remaining stock at a foot of a mountain somewhere. This was actually based on the fact that some retailer had dumped unsold software over a cliff, and some copies of Mt. Drash were later found in the pile at the bottom.

In recent years, the game has been extremely sought after by collectors. First copies of the game were discovered and announced in 2000. The first online auction of a copy was in September 2003. Since then, there have been some very rare sightings, but due to high demand, there have been quite a few counterfeit games on the market.

Availability
The game has been ported to the PC by Kasper Fauerby using the SDL library, and it generally is that port which is known today, since images of the original tape are very rare. The port is faithful, since it used most of the source code of the original tape.

Images of the original tape can be found as well and used with the VICE-emulator to play the original.

More game related information

 * For how to defeat the verious monsters and how to beat the game, see Escape from Mt. Drash Hints

Trivia

 * It is possible that "Garrintrots" might have been derived from Richard Garriott's name, but this is uncertain.
 * The castle on the cover, presumably meant to represent Mt. Drash, is actually a detail from the lesser-known half of the Ultima II box art.
 * The "copy protection" of the game is somewhat unusual, in that the "Run/Stop" and "Restore" keys are disabled. This was done in order to prevent people from messing around with the BASIC-code of the game - which these keys allow entry to on the system when running a program.