10 years have passed now, since Ultima 7 - The Black Gate has been released. It was 1992, I was at college and was very proud of my new PC with a 80386 CPU with, I believe 20MHz and 2 MB Ram - don't you laugh now, in those days, that was a high end system! The Black Gate was delayed since spring 1991, but the time until its release could very well be bypassed with Ultima Underworld, another revolutionary product by Origin.

Black Gate - Black Box

And when Ultima 7 finally hit shelves in April 1992, it proved to be a milestone in the Computer RPG genre, even better than the highly acclaimed Ultima 6 two years before.

Its box was merely black, with only the letters ‘Ultima 7 - The Black Gate' on it and a small sticker saying: ‘386 Power - Designed for today's 386 computers with 2MB Ram' - lucky, I just got par with the game's system recommendations. The game itself shipped on eight 5.25" Floppy Disks, covering almost 25 MB on the hard disk, for that time a terribly large amout of hard disk space.

Also in the box were a color cloth map of Britannia, a fellowship medal and of course the manuals - a usual content for that time, and once there was no gimmick in an Origin product, we were disappointed! But nowadays we are happy, if we get a printed manual at all!

Installation was quite difficult, because in the good old days of MS DOS, you could namely configure all your interrupts and adresses manually, so there was no plug'n'pray as in the Windows 9x era. But on the downside, you also had to configure the memory of your system manually and since MS DOS itself could only access 640 kb, the rest of the memory was usually used as EMS memory - but not for Ultima 7. Its own memory manager VooDoo got along with XMS memory only, but at the same time also needed a large amount of free Dos memory below 640 kb - a tricky installation and configuration, but when the game was finally running, it was ten times worth any trouble getting it to run!

Britannia - There and back again

You start the game on earth again, just starting Ultima 7, when suddenly you see a red, demon-like face on your screen adressing you as the Avatar and talking about his new role as the leader of Britannia! Since the Moongate behind your house is also already glowing, you take another trip to Britania!

There, you find yourself in Trinsic first, where you meet Iolo, your old friend and companion. He has aged, a lot more than you, since 200 years have passed in Britain since you left it in Ultima 6! In Trinsic you have to unravel the mysteries of a horrible ritual murder.
This is how Ultima 7 starts, and you are put in the middle of the action in Trinsic already, which you can leave only after solving this first quest.

Do it with Exult!

I just replayed this first few moments using Exult, the fan project, that let's the Ultima 7 games run under Windows 32bit systems and you can even raise the graphics resolution to 800x600, which gives you a lot more overview in the gaming window. The atmosphere of both Ultima 7 and Serpent Isle is simply great, the stories are great, the immersiveness is unlevelled until today. You can manipulate almost every single object, use it, take it, sell it. You can bake your bread or forge your sword. You can turn on and off lanterns, there's a sign in almost every road of a city with its location name on it! You can attend a theatre performance. You can eat, drink, smoke, play instruments and so on! In short: you can do almost everything. A lot of modern games can do some of these things too, but no other game, not even any other Ultima offered a such complete world with all these features.

In both games you can control a party with up to 8 players, also umcompared today. You can journey by feet, by horse and carriage, by ship and, in ‘The Black Gate' even fly with a Magic Carpet! Magic is done by using reagents, which can be found or bought at dealers, who also offer new spells. You can train at trainers to improve your skills. You also have to eat and rest and if you don't sleep or eat for a long time, the characters tell you, what they need and get angry!

Serpent Isle...and beyond

In Serpent Isle you are placed on the title-giving island, the gaming world is maybe even more accurate than Britain in part 1. The story is interesting, the take-off of the Guardian trilogy, in which you are always hunting down the Guardian, who, in Black Gate has Batlin found the Fellowship to praise him, and after we destroyed the Black Gate in part1, we follow Batlin to the Serpent Isle. The graphics were revolutionary in 1992, offering a Windows system, where every inventory and bag, backpack, chest, crate or content of a body was shown in its own window and could be moved among the screen, while adventuring on! The only bad thing was, there weren't any slots, so items could lie over another, making them hard to find; this goes for keys especially, until in Serpent Isle a key rings was introduced!

Ahhh...Stones!

A lot of the great atmosphere was done with the fantastic tunes, which brings memories back, even if listened to without playing the game. Remember the Fellowship Theme? Stones? The Wanderer? Passion Play? The Love Theme?

In Ultima 7, combat was quite simple, just changing into combat mode by typing ‘C' and clicking on the opponents, but combat is not what Ultima games are about. Ultima 7 and Serpent Isle are more about story, the immersiveness, the detailed world and the true RPG feeling.

I guess a lot of young RPGamers, who know RPG since Diablo or Baldur's Gate only, will not even know, what really is possible, when doing an RPG. Baldur's Gate 2 for example may be one of the most complex RPG of the modern era of RPGs, but compared to Ultima 7 or Serpent Isle its world seems quite easy, very uncomplex and static presented.

But don't get me wrong now. I am not one of those oldtimers, who say that everything was better in the past. But the gaming experience which Ultima 7 (and also Ultima Underworld) gave you, was a fantastic one! Baldur's Gate 2 or Wizardry 8 are great games, which are as much fun as Ultima 7 for example, but they simply don't offer the above discussed details!

They really created worlds

In the 2 years of 1992 and 1993 Origin was on the peak of its performance, and really lived up to the slogan ‘We create worlds'!

Of course, if you haven't played the games yet, I doubt that by playing them now anyone will understand, what the older players are talking about, because both graphics and sound are far below par now. No 3D grpahics, no EAX, also controls are quite uncomfortable compared to toady's games; but the RPG veterans will always remember Ultima 7, Serpent Isle and the expansion disks Forge of Virtue & Silver Seed as among those greates RPGames ever created!

The following rating is seen from 1992/93's point of view, no point in rating them with today's standard. The rating goes for both The Black Gate and Serpent Isle!