Ultima 7 Design Documents: Items

Courtesy of former Origin programmer Bill Randolph, and thanks to the tireless efforts of Joe Garrity of the Origin Muesum, the Ultima Codex is pleased to present this document — which has been broken out into five (5) images — which lists items planned for inclusion in Ultima 7. What’s more, this document pertain to a very early version of the game, so the list of items may be somewhat different from what was finally shipped.

Download the documents:

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Of particular note, I think, is the listing of the Blackrock Sword, with a one-word note alongside it: “new”. I’m not sure whether this allows us to date the idea for Forge of Virtue back as far as June of 1991, or whether it indicates that at one point, the Blackrock Sword (and — who knows? — maybe the Isle of Fire) was intended to be part of the initial release of Ultima 7.

Now, the images here, in JPEG format, are lower-resolution extracts from PDF scans of the original documents. They are legible, but not of particularly high quality, and thus are not recommended for printing; download the PDF files for that purpose.

Most importantly, though: enjoy! Pull up the images, download the PDFs, and pore over them. Search out every little detail, and enjoy a fascinating glimpse into the nuts and bolts of how Origin crafted a truly ground-breaking RPG. The Ultima Codex is indebted to Joe Garrity for providing these documents, to Bill Randolph for releasing them and making them available for us to see, to John Watson, and to everyone who worked at Origin Systems.