Ultima 8 Animations

Courtesy of Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum, and to the hard work of both him and the team at the Wing Commander CIC, the Ultima Codex is pleased to present 10 animated sequences of Ultima 8 game assets and videos. These were originally taken from a CD of Origin website files, and many are probably the work of ‘Dicko’ Mather — an Origin artist — who painted (among other things) the ‘Silver Seed’ box cover. (Mather now owns his own studio, doing MTV ‘bumpers’ — the frenetic little animations that flash past just prior to a commercial break.)

The source CD was one of many discovered in the deep recesses of the Origin archives at Electronic Arts (BioWare Mythic), and was copied during the Origin Archive Project done in the summer of 2008.

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The images on display here are animated GIFs, but the files hosted for download are FLI or FLC files. Though the FLI/FLC format was originally unique to Autodesk applications, it is supported by a vanilla install of the QuickTime Player (and probably also by third-party players like VLC or Media Player Classic).

Although the images are quite small as resolution goes, and not overly large in terms of file size, they may take a while to load when you click on them due to their animated nature. Once you click on them, they will appear in a lightbox formatted to fit your monitor resolution; right-clicking on the lightbox and selecting “View Image” (a feature not available in all browsers) will take you to the image directly.

Finally, enjoy. Download up the images. Play them back in full-screen mode. They afford an interesting glimpse into the development history of the penultimate entry in the Ultima series. This is Ultima history at its finest, and the Ultima Codex is indebted to Joe Garrity, Electronic Arts, Mythic Entertainment/BioWare Mythic, BanditLOAF and the team at the Wing Commander CIC, and everyone who worked at Origin for it.