Ultima Featured in PC Games Hardware Wissen

Dominus, from the Exult team, sent along these images, which are scans of the cover of — and an article from — the year-end issue of PC Games Hardware Wissen (“PC Games Hardware Knowledge”), a German computing and gaming magazine. It should be noted that the date on the magazine cover seems to be March of 2014, so I suppose this issue may have been a round-up of 2013-related news.

According to Dominus, the introductory article in the RPG section of the issue is this article about Ultima, which bears the heading “The first successful RPG: Ultima”. The article opens thusly:

“The Ultima RPGs are said to be leading and classics of the RPG history, and thus the three trilogies have left their mark on many of today’s RPG mechanics.”

The article goes on to describe Ultima 1, primarily, and in the end briefly sums up how many parts of the series were published, including the Underworlds and World of Ultimas. Ultima Online also merits a mention.

Curiously, Dominus noted, the description of the screenshots states that the first one is of Rogue, supposedly also from 1980 and featuring ASCII graphics. He feels that it looks very much like Ultima 1 to me, however. He also noted that in the following pages in the magazine, Lucas Arts received a two-page article, followed by a three-page write-up about Gothic 2…and then a jump forward in time to World of Warcraft (as hinted by the top pf the Ultima page), which also receives a three-page treatment.

Evidently, there were few other noteworthy RPGs produced between Ultima 1 and Gothic 2.

At any rate, for those of you who can read German, please enjoy. It’s always nice to see Ultima get some coverage in the modern gaming press, and it’s always welcome to see its legacy and impact on the development of those RPGs that followed it acknowledged and called out. We here at the Ultima Codex are grateful to Dominus for taking the time to scan these images in, and for sharing them.