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NotM: Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss–Introduction
By Corvus | January 14, 2008
Welcome to the second Narrative of the Moment feature here at Man Bytes Blog. I’m starting the year by taking a look at some older games that are often, I feel, overlooked by the narratology crowd and exploring their narrative components.
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (UW) is one of the first games I played on a x86 computer. The other was Ultima VII: The Black Gate. To this day, I consider UW to be one of the best DRPGs I’ve ever played. Normally when I replay it (which I do often), I take shortcuts–I take advantage of things learned later in the game to level up in a more focused fashion, I skip dialogs I I don’t need, etc. This time through I’m not doing that. Of course, I’ve got the maps memorized and I know the easiest path through the levels, but I’ll try and compensate for some of that as well while I write about this play through.
The Storytellers
UW was developed by Blue Sky Productions, which would become Looking Glass Studios and go on to produce some of the most critically acclaimed games–the System Shock series and the Thief series. Unfortunately, they met with the same fate many quality television shows suffer from and closed their doors in 2000 (due, in no small part, to the fact that their publisher was too busy paying for boat parties and boob jobs to spend any more money on quality videogames).*
The Presentational Components
Let’s start our discussion with the box art. A well muscled human male, dressed in conventional barbarian style, descends a staircase, sword at the ready and shield held high. The area immediately behind him is well lit, but the rest of the image is shadowy blues and grays. There are no fewer than five monsters lurking in those shadows and another two sets of stairs ascends into the background. Everything about this box shouts, “Caution! Take it slowly!” Once you’re actually into the game narrative, you find that this is excellent advice. UW is not a game to be played quickly or rashly.
Inside the box, we are greeted with a budget-minded version of what you’d expect to find in an Ultima game box. There’s a paper map and a paper-bound guide titled ‘Memoirs of Sir Cabirus’ in the game’s runic script. This guide is written from within the perspective of the game and contains world history, a bestiary and a class guide. It also contains strong warnings about the inadvisability of descending into the Stygian Abyss. The remaining texts are standard videogame fair–an in depth player guide and reference card and an install guide.
The final presentational component I want to discuss is actually hinted at in the Install Guide–UW’s system requirements were a bit higher than the popular games of the time. While many point to Wolfenstein 3D as the first 3D game, UW was actually released first and unlike Wolfenstein, featured truly 3D environments with sloping floors and stairs. Additionally, your avatar could jump as well as look up and down. Because of this, I had to write custom autoexec.bat and config.sys files to ensure I had enough free RAM to play the game. If I recall correctly, I also went out and bought my first Sound Blaster card (and quite possibly a RAM upgrade) to get the most from this game as well. I’d like to think we’ve come a long way in the world of PC videogaming, but based upon my experiences with a recent game, as well as numerous reports of issues with Crysis, I don’t think we have. Regardless, UW’s steep system requirements (256k of video RAM, 640K of low RAM (522k minimum of which must be available to play) and 1024k of EMS (expanded memory) made the game one everybody couldn’t just pick up and play. Even if your system met the minimum specs, tinkering likely had to be done to get the game to play well.** For me, this gave a deeper sense of accomplishment and commitment to the game once I had it running. For others it was a turn off, if not an outright show stopper. That being said, it runs quite nicely now in a DOSbox, even on the EEE PC.
Tune in later this week as I move on to the Visual, Auditory and Musical components of January’s Narrative of the Moment, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss!
*I don’t like Romero’s public personae. Never did. So, it’s easy to point fingers. But for an in depth look at the realities surrounding the closing of Looking Glass Studios, be sure to read James Sterrett’s Looking Glass Studios post mortem on TTLG.
**And it was still easier than getting Ultima VII to run with it’s proprietary Voodoo Memory Manager.
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