Ultima 7 Design Documents: Map Sketches

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 fifteen (15) images — which features sketches of the towns and cities of Britannia that were built for Ultima 7. What’s more, this document pertain to a very early version of the game, so the towns as detailed may be different in various ways from the towns and cities as as they appeared in Ultima 7.

Download the documents:

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This document contains quick block-and-line sketches of most of the towns and cities in the game, and most of them have a similar design and layout to the versions that appeared in the released game. A couple of towns, if my memory serves me well, have quite different layouts, however.

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.