Memories of Ultima

After chatting with EA Mythic's Paul Barnett about their fond memories of the Ultima series, Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Kieron Gillen takes us back to the first time he stumbled upon the highly regarded RPG series. An advertisement of Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny in an old gaming magazine did the trick:
I remember dwelling lengthily on the Ultima one mainly because it was such a striking image, in a retro fantasy way. What nags after me all these years is. well, linking back to that (presumably). It must have been in a multi-format mag. If it wasn't a multi-format mag, why would they be advertising a non-Spectrum game in a Spectrum mag? But, thinking harder, I don't think there were multiformats. I think they just put it in. They put it in to tease us.

Really, there was nothing in the advert. This was pre-Bard's Tale for me, so it just promised some engimatic fantasy world, which I'd never play. The thing with being a Spec-chum was that, in terms of actual mainstream RPGs as we'd understand them, there really was very little there. In other words, while I played lots of pen and paper RPGs, I had no idea what Ultima would actually play with. It was just this promise of another world another world it was unlikely I'd ever visit.
Maybe if we keep bringing up Ultima, EA will finally green light a reboot of the series. Just maybe.