halfway through the project, and then in the final quarter he started coming up to
Boston a lot.
Origin wasn’t overly protective of theUltimafranchise?
Well, the first story that was written, that I didn’t write but one of the other guys wrote,
was a little too traditional fantasy and not enoughUltimaelements, and they said,
“Well, this doesn’t feel veryUltima. Try again.” I was a hugeUltimafan, and Dan
Schmidt, who was the other guy who wrote the story toUnderworld, was maybe not as
big anUltimafan as I was, but still a pretty big fan. So we didn’t approach it as what
story did we want to write but instead what was a coolUltimastory we could tell. We
certainly thought it was fun and interesting, but we were very conscious of how do we
write anUltimastory here. We certainly didn’t write the best or most amazingUltima
story ever written — we wrote it in about two days or whatever — but we were defi-
nitely thinking “There should be the eight virtues, and it’s anUltimastory.” And they
were basically “Well, seems prettyUltima, go for it.”
Ultima Underworldseems to have been pretty ambitious in how it blended gen-
res, combining simulation-style technology with an RPG. How did that come
about?
You’ve got to give Paul a lot of credit there first off, simply because he had the initial
idea. And if you look back atSpace Rogue, that was a 2D tile mapUltima-style RPG, but
then you’d get in your ship and fly around in 3D and shoot pirates or not and shoot cops
or not. It was a very early, fairly open-ended story RPG with a space flight 3D element.
Which was definitely a very hybrid genre, because the space stuff was pretty glitzy,
where there were wormholes where you had to follow these 3D rings through space,
and there were battles and trading, and yet there was also this little story-based
walk-around the tile map, talk to people, and so on game. So I think it came pretty natu-
rally to Paul.
Of the original guys
that were hired, there
were a couple of people
who had a tiny bit of game
experience. One of them
we got rid of fairly early
because he wasn’t appro-
priate for what we were
doing, and then the other
two guys we got were
friends of mine from
school who I recruited. So
three of the four of us
building the tech and all of
us doing the design, none of us had any game experience and we were all twenty. In col-
lege in the late ’80s the consoles weren’t nearly as big a deal. I had actually playedSpace
Roguebecause one of my friends had a Mac, but the clusters were all Unix boxes so I ran
502 Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church
Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds