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.
Gameplay[edit]
This collection is notorious for breaking Ultima II in the PC version. Originally, the game came on three sides of two 5.25" floppy disks, during a time when MS-DOS did not have a directory structure. 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 was not a problem when the game was run on 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, since the game did not support multiple directories. 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.)
Included in the Compilation[edit]
The following things got included with the compilation:
- All six games on one CD-ROM.
- Trilogy Manual manual
- The Age of Virtue manual
- Three cardboard maps: Ultima I map, Ultima II map, Ultima III map
- The cardboard map of Ultima VI
Trivia[edit]
- 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.
Gallery[edit]
Back cover
Toolworks cover
