Ultima 1: A Legend is Reborn Tech Demo

Role-playing games really do have a long history on the PC, given the fact that they have been around for more than three decades now. Although they featured nothing but ASCII characters in order to depict the environment and your characters, such games managed to keep players glued to the screen for many straight hours.

Ultima 1: A Legend is Reborn is not an original game, nor is it an official attempt to unearth an old franchise. As it happens, this is actually an indie production from a group of developers that wanted to see their favorite game come back to life once more, this time in a slightly more modern change of clothes. However, this is merely an unfinished tech demo, so don’t get your hopes up just yet.

In case you are not familiar with the Ultima series, the first episode was released somewhere around 1981, although the version everyone remembers is the 1986 remake for Apple II. The story takes place in a realm called Sosaria, which is plagued by a conflict between eight lords. Your role is to kill the wizard by the name of Mondain, a task that requires an assortment of powerful items, which can be collected as you advance through the game.

The developers managed to create a very good-looking graphics engine to transpose the original adventure into, even if it still might look a tad crude nowadays. When compared to the official release from three decades ago, on the other hand, the improvement is definitely something. You now get to play most of the game from a first-person perspective, which makes exploration that much more enjoyable.

Unfortunately, the entire thing has been left unfinished for quite a while now, even if the tech demo at hand actually got turned into another game at some point. The developers seems to have abandoned the project, whatever their reasons might have have been. Hence, unless you just want to see what it could have been and admire the beautiful engine created for the game, there’s not much point in hoping for something after all this time.

All things considered, Ultima 1: A Legend is Reborn truly had potential, especially if it followed the same path as the original when it came to story and gameplay. However, you are left to wonder about what might have been, with no possibility to see the final product.