My favorite video game of all time!

I thought I'd write about something fun today. Video games were one of those defining factors of my childhood, as it was for many of my generation. We were part of the generation that first had video games in our homes. My first gaming platform was the Mattel Intellivision, a gaming console that had many advanced features for the time.

After whetting our appetite with the consoles, many of us moved on to home computers. Most everyone got an 8-bit Atari, VIC-20/Commodore 64, or an Apple II. My family was an Atari 8-bit house, with our first being the Atari 800 and then the even more powerful Atari 130XE. It was on this platform that I found the video game that captivated me so much that I still play it to this day.

The game: Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar from Lord British and Origin Systems, Inc. U4 would now by classified as an turn-based RPG (role playing game), as it used a lot of features that are key traits of modern RPGs. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the game, let's look at the story.

In the day of simple games with limited interactions, U4 really blew my mind with the expanse of its gaming world. On the Atari, the game came with four floppy discs, as each disc included a portion of the world. If you traveled to a certain portion of the map, you would be prompted to enter another disc. Nowadays that sounds annoying, but when you got a really expansive world compared to what most games gave you, it was an annoyance that you could live with.

The premise of the game? Well I don't want to give too much away and spoil it for someone who hasn't played yet (and I suggest you do it!), I will share GOG.com's description of the game.

The evil triad of Mondain, Minax, and the hellspawn Exodus have been vanquished and peace reigns throughout the land of Britannia. Evil yet abounds, but in isolated pockets and in the hearts of men. A new age awaits the coming of one who can conquer evil on all frontiers through mastery of both magic and the use of force. Daemons, dragons, and long-dead wizards still plague the countryside and must be destroyed. The seeker on the path of the Avatar will face hostile groups composed of mixed enemy types and will survive such encounters only by strategic use of weapons and terrain. Earthly victories over seemingly impossible odds lead to the final conflict, where the ultimate challenge - the self - awaits.

So you are the Avatar and your mission is to stop the mysterious evil power in the land. In order to be powerful enough to defeat the evil, you must elevate your standing in eight different virtues. The virtues include honesty, honor, valor, justice, humility, sacrifice, spirituality, and compassion. To gain a partial avatar-hood in a virtue, you must act in a manner that reflects the virtue. For instance, if you defeat evil creatures, you will get closer to being a partial avatar in Valor. If you go around killing innocent villagers and town people, you are not acting with honesty. If you meditate at an altar, you will become more spiritual. I think you get the idea, this isn't about just pillaging towns and becoming powerful. You have to act with virtue.

Screenshot from XU4, an update to U4 with better graphics and sound. 

Keeping that in mind, you set off to find items, talk to people, explore a massive continent (along with the surrounding islands), explore deep dungeons, and learn how to become a full Avatar and defeat the evil. Along the way, you could purchase better weapons and armor, invite seven additional adventurers to your party, and with each battle encounter you would received experience points (XP) that allowed you to level up and become stronger, quicker, and smarter.

The amazing part of this game was the fact that you had to talk to the village and town folk. In fact, many of the key facts of the game's story had be revealed by talking to people. Sometimes those people told you to talk to someone else, in another town that was far away. The best strategy in this game was to take detailed notes. About everything you learned, whether it seems valuable or not. Somewhere, down the road, someone will ask you for an answer to a question, and that answer was in a statement from another person in another town or castle.

Like I said, I'm not going to give any spoilers, but from a technical standpoint, the game was quite impressive. The graphics were inline with the other games of the time period, but what amazed me was the vastness of the game. You could spend so much time exploring the land, the towns, villages, castles, and dungeons. It was a game that I felt really set the bar high for RPGs in the future. No longer were games about just grinding away in a dungeon exploer type of game, or just killing people for their treasures. It was a HUGE puzzle that had to be solved and it was doing with a 1.79 MHz 8-bit CPU and 16K of RAM, using four 5¼ floppy diskettes.

If you want to see where the RPG genre really started, I recommend giving U4 a shot. You can download it from GOG.com and give it shot. GOG has packaged it with DOSBOX so it runs on modern computers quite well.

Well I hope you had a good time going down memory lane with me!