After a long search I’m excited to finally fill a small gap in my Ultima collection.

I’m a big fan of the Ultima games, although my path through the series is maybe a bit different from most. The first game I played was Ultima Underworld and I was totally blown away by it. It was the first time that I was so totally immersed in a game world. Before that, I hadn’t played any grid based dungeon crawlers and after that I never could really get into those. Ultima Underworld was one of the few games that I bought the big box game for. Ever since my Amiga days, I had a steady stream of pirated games passing through, but Underworld wasn’t among those. I first encountered a demo version of the game. It was either on a magazine cover or I got it through the underground scene after all. And that demo was incredible. I distinctly remember opening a door and encountering a hostile goblin. It was truly scary! And finding out after that scary encounter that the next goblin actually was friendly was yet another eye-opening experience. There were whole non-hostile communities out there! But they would turn hostile once you stopped behaving nicely. Just wow!
I just had to have that game. So I bought a boxed copy. It came with an excellent manual and a real map. I remember sucking up every detail from that manual just like a had done with some of the few other games that I had bought a copy of before, like Dune II.
Ultima Underworld just had it all. You could swim, cast spells when you found runes, talk to people, learn new languages, jump, solve puzzles, and even fly! I still have so many memories of that game. Like the epic fight with the hostile knight: It took so much cunning, running and hiding that finally delivering the killing blow had my heart racing in my chest. I can still see my avatar going through that fight when I play through the game now, or when I think about it. And there was the time when I spotted a living livid tree with glowing red eyes in a corridor. He saw me and killed me in one blow. From afar! He threw a branch! I was so scared! It’s one of the few games in my collection that is permanently with it’s front cover facing forward.

Not long after I played Ultima Underworld, I played Ultima VII Part Two: The Serpent Isle. Again, I was blown away by the the game. The story and the world were so immersing. Having all that lore behind it that I hadn’t experienced from the previous games only made it more mysterious. This time I played a pirated copy though. So I hadn’t got a clue what I was doing. I was just roaming around and slowly making progress. But I don’t think that I finished it all on my own. I relied on walkthroughs and helpful hints in magazines.

After that I played Ultima Underworld II, Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Ultima VIII. All of which I loved, although VIII not as much as the others. I did appreciate the vibe from it though. Even Ultima IX I loved. I was just a sucker for 3D fantasy worlds. Maybe I enjoyed it more than other people who hád played the earlier Ultima games and who díd notice the many changes and its shortcomings.
It’s curious to think that the first two Ultima games that I played didn’t take place in Britannia at all. Technically the third game did take place there, but only marginally, because in Underworld II you can only wander through Castle Britannia, and the rest of the game takes place in other dimensions.
I’m probably in the minority who recognized the Mint in The Black Gate from The Serpent Isle and not the other way around.

It was only after I played Ultima IX, that I returned to Ultima VII from time to time. I got a boxed copy of the Ultima Collection and I think that was the first time that I played the expansions as well. I especially liked The Silver Seed, because it reminded me of Underworld I.

And that brings me to the subject at hand: Ultima VII Part Two: The Silver Seed. I finally have it in my collection! I have had The Complete Ultima VII in my collection for a long time, but I wanted to have the expansions separately as well. Last year I bought Forge of Virtue and now I also got The Silver Seed. It was not cheap, but not as expensive as some other copies from Ebay. It’s the European version which has a slightly smaller and thicker box compared to the US version of Forge of Virtue that I have.

There’s not much more Ultima for me to collect now. Next to the unobtainable I and II, I would like to have a copy of the Ultima Collection with the fold-out front cover once again, because I stupidly sold that after my first ‘retro revival’ some fifteen years ago. And a copy of the floppy version of VIII would also be nicer than the CD-ROM version I have. Also a copy of IX with the cutout in the front cover would be nice, but I have the Dragon Edition to keep me satisfied enough. So no active searching on the Ultima front anymore. Which is nice. Plenty of other stuff to collect.