Ultima 7 Design Documents: Destroying the Black Gate

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 two (2) images — which contains hastily-scribbled notes about how to destroy the Black Gate in Ultima 7.

Download the documents:

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Though short, this document is interesting because it may well be the initial design of the sequence of puzzles that the Avatar would have to solve in order to destroy the Black Gate. I can’t say that for certain, but it certainly has the appearance of something which was scribbled down in a notebook and subsequently revised; the ink markings on the page suggest that other pages surrounding these were also filled with all manner of interesting things.

Now, the images here, in JPEG format, are lower-resolution extracts from a PDF scan of the original document. 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 image, 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.