Aside from a bit of interaction at school I never really fooled around with the Apple II hardware much. I’m a PC gamer, I was lucky enough to have an IBM PC XT in the house in 1983. I immediately downloaded the “A World Divided” scenario from Pix’s page and the Egypt scenario that Tobias linked. Likewise a review I discovered in an old copy of “Quest Busters – The Adventurer’s Newsletter” dated September 1985 discusses “Ultimore: A World Divided” but that they only played the scenario for “four to five hours”.įast forward to July of 2021 and I discovered the existence of the Ultimore scenarios. Pix’s playthrough of ‘A World Divided’ doesn’t appear to have a ‘Part 2’, their adventure ending after a bit of a poke around. Then, in early 2014 an avid Ultima fan by the name of ‘Pix’ posted an article on their site detailing “A World Divided” and also included a link to download the Apple II disk image. I have read though that these scenario disks didn’t feature any copy protection and were widely distributed on bulletin board systems. Being that they were only sold in North America this is especially true for those of us not in that region of the world. Through limited distribution, and time, these expansions became ‘lost’, and that is why people like me never even heard of Ultimore. Ironic perhaps that he’d go on to become a lawyer, perhaps he was worried that Electronic Arts would come after him one day. That’d get you in a bit of legal trouble today, but surprisingly Joel (apparently) got away with it back in the day. Joel advertised and sold these unofficial expansions via computer magazines in North America. Incidentally Joel also performed a similar feat with Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord and created two ‘Wizimore’ adventures – “O’Connor’s Mine” and “Scarlet Brotherhood of Hsi Ho”. Joel created a total five custom scenarios for Ultima III – “A World Divided”, “Spaceship Crash”, “Egypt”, “Pirate World”, and “Rule of the Slave Lords”. After a clever bit of reverse engineering he was able to create his own maps for the game. Joel Fenton of ‘Backstreet Software’ had figured out that Ultima III loaded all of the game mechanics off the ‘Master Disk’ and then was only pulling map data from the ‘Scenario Disk’. Those who were enjoying the game on the original Apple II format were given another option sometime in early 1985. Now, for many people casually flicking through the history books you’d think that the gamers simply had a two year wait, but… that’s not entirely true. Ultima III was a huge success for creator Richard Garriott and his team at Origin Systems, and many fans were eager for more after the release of Ultima III. It wasn’t until November of ’85 that Ultima IV would be released. Ultima III: Exodus was released by Origin software in August 1983, initially for the Apple II and then later for a number of platforms including Commodore 64, and IBM PC.
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