The History of Ultima: Quest of the Avatar

Garriott has explained the origin directly: for his first three games he received almost no customer feedback, because his publishers never forwarded the mail. After Ultima III, published by his own company, the letters arrived, including furious ones from parents, and he realized that in the earlier games immoral actions, stealing, and murdering peaceful citizens had been necessary or at least very useful for winning. He decided the next game's story would have content worth thinking about. In Shay Addams's biography the reasoning is preserved: if people were going to look for hidden meaning in his work where none existed, he would introduce ideas and symbols with meaning he deemed worthwhile.

The concept crystallized from a television documentary about religion, covering the Dead Sea Scrolls and a Hindu temple in India; the avatars of Hindu mythology, described as having to master sixteen virtues, gave Garriott his structure, which he distilled to eight virtues: honesty, compassion, valor, justice, sacrifice, honor, spirituality, and humility. One famous sequence survived his own playtester's objection: players appear to be required to murder children, who are revealed as monsters in disguise. The playtester threatened to quit. Garriott refused to cut it, reasoning it had served its purpose, provoking an emotional response.

The game begins with a gypsy fortune teller dealing cards of the eight virtues and posing ethical dilemmas with no correct answer. The player ranks the virtues, and whichever stands highest chooses the character's profession: compassion makes a bard, honor a paladin, sacrifice a tinker. Avatarhood then has to be earned in conduct. The game watches: pay a blind merchant less than she asks and honesty falls; flee a fight out of turn and valor falls; give alms, donate blood while healthy, meditate at shrines with the right rune and mantra, and the virtues rise. The seer Hawkwind, in Lord British's castle, grades your soul when asked.

There is no tangible ultimate evil to overcome, a structure almost unique in the genre, and perhaps the first of its kind. The world of Britannia is at peace. The quest is self improvement, ending in the Stygian Abyss and the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom. The NES remake keeps the system and rebuilds the presentation around it: fully redrawn graphics, a new score by Seiji Toda replacing the sparse original, and streamlined play. One cast change is documented: in the NES version, Julia the tinker, embodiment of sacrifice, was replaced by a male character named Julius.

1UP, looking back, called the original a direct barb at the self appointed moral crusaders who sought to demonize RPGs, and noted the irony that an allegedly evil genre produced the game that best dramatized backing faith with works, in quiet modesty.

Ultima IV shifted its series from the Age of Darkness to the Age of Enlightenment, and the genre with it: ethical systems, virtue as a statistic, and conversation driven questing all trace lines through this game, and Dragon Quest III's remake borrowed its personality determining opening questions from it. Its Japanese remake is the gallery's reminder that in 1989 the traffic of ideas ran both ways: America had invented the console RPG's teachers, and Japan was already remaking them.