Richard Garriott received a lot of fan mail from his early Ultima games; a lot of them were from, in his words, “religious extremists protesting the very idea of role-playing games.” This was during the early 80’s, back when Dungeons & Dragons was being blamed for all sorts of societal ills, like Devil worship and teen suicide. Garriott didn’t dismiss these letters; instead they made him think about the content of his games, and more importantly, the context of his game world.

The result was Ultima IV: The Quest of the Avatar, a game that used a series of ethical questions to determine your character class, and then thrust you into a world that offered a great deal of freedom. There were monsters to slay, treasures to take, and quests to perform, but behind the scenes the game tracked you based on eight virtues. If you ran from a battle you would lose Valor, for example. Lie to characters and your Honesty would suffer. The result was a game that had no traditional villain. It had monsters and quests, but behind the scenes it had a code of ethics to live up to. The goal was perfection, to become the Avatar for Garriott’s imaginary world. This internal and highly moral quest for virtue and redemption became the theme of all the Ultima games that followed.