Helen Garriott’s Ultima 3 Box Art
In November of 2015, Richard Garriott shared with us the original cover art concept for Ultima 3 that his mother, Helen Garriott (who has been a source of significant artistic inspiration and guidance for her son Richard over the years), drew. Ultimately, Origin Systems didn’t use her artwork for the game; they went with a Denis Loubet piece that iterated upon her original design.
Behold! Original Ultima III cover, created by my mother/art director. I opted to have @Denis_Loubet rework as seen. pic.twitter.com/7jPVf2amI0
— Richard Garriott (@RichardGarriott) November 20, 2015
As you can see, the final Denis Loubet-created box art draws on a number of elements from Mrs. Garriott’s original work, though the Loubet piece obviously has a darker tone to it overall.
A little while after the above tweet went out, Richard Garriott sent along (via email) this high-resolution version of the image:
Yes, that’s the player in the daemon’s hands.
The image above links to a 3600×4698 pixel image. Two larger versions of the image are available below.
A very large scan of Helen Garriott’s original Ultima 3 box art concept.
A very large scan of Helen Garriott’s original Ultima 3 box art concept. This version has been subjected to additional compression, in order to bring the file size down.
As always, the Ultima Codex is grateful to Richard Garriott for sharing this piece of Ultima development history.
