Ultima 3 was the ultimate hacker's game. You could crack it open with a Hex Editor and mess with anything you wanted. Your characters were all stored in one place, with every attribute easy to find (and change to FF). Towns and the world map were all sitting there in memory waiting for you to change whatever you want.
I made my own town at one point.
Better still, you'd inevitably screw something up and suddenly find yourself being chased across the map by a giant letter M, which you couldn't defeat because your armed weapon was "Paladin". Too much fun.
You could tell that these guys were having a blast making the games, and the games showed it. That, in my opinion, tends to highlight the big problem with a lot of sterile games nowadays: designed by committee and handed off to underpaid developers in a cubicle.
Thank goodness for indie games, they seem to retain that spark.
No other game makes me so nostalgic. Though I've been bitten by the Judy bug, not knowing what it was at the time, I was more than happy to start over. I figured I just missed something critical and would have to immerse myself even deeper into the game.
Another heartbreaking (but no less attempt-discouraging) bug that would occasionally happen would be that after loading a saved game you'd discover that the contents of your bags had all turned into UW's ubiquitous piles debris (or pools of blood, I can't remember anymore), and that your saved game had been saved in a corrupted state.
Underworld wasn't the only Ultima that had a hit-it-with-a-stick-till-it-does-something-funny-or-undefined quality to it. You could do some fairly unsanctioned things (climing on top of stuff, going where you weren't supposed to go) in 7, and in Ultima 9 (Ascension) you could visit places long before you were "meant" by mountain climbing with stairways constructed from objects out of your inventory (my favourite was using books and loaves of bread).
Origin games always had such a rough-but-polished quality to them. Whenever I broke an Ultima in this manner it never quite shattered my suspension of disbelief (like, for example falling out of a Quake level into empty space) but instead gave me the impression that wow, they had a fairly open environment here where you could expect the unexpected.
With a lot of modern games that seems to have been lost, where typical map design is simply a straight march through a series of set pieces, with invisible walls blocking off any chance of looking behind or underneath something or coaxing some kind of unsanctioned behaviour out of the game. Not to mention the flood of quality control these games enjoy..
Too bad! On the other hand, one of the most popular games out right now, Minecraft, seems to have brought back a little bit of this spirit.
[EDIT: did any other UW players here hoard objects in that room near the dwarves on level 2? Good times.. ]
Oh, the goddamn container bug. OK, that one was probably even worse than Judy.
We finally found the problem while developing Ultima Underworld II. You will think we were complete idiots for not using this process (described below) to find it earlier, but it was 1992, we were straight out of school, and we basically discovered all our debugging techniques ourselves.
We knew (even during UW development, I think) that it was possible for your inventory to get corrupted. We even wrote debugging code that would trawl the entire object system ensuring its validity; the problem was that, especially on PCs at the time, running it all the time slowed down the system too much, even just for local testing. Our eventual bright idea (duh) was to run it just once every few seconds, assuming that whatever corrupted the object system was likely to be due, however indirectly, to player input. The hope was that when the assert fired the player would have just done something noticeable, and we could then look into the code that followed from that behavior.
Sure enough, a few days later, the assert fired right after a tester threw a bag into the water. And it turned out that's where the bug was.
Dude... seems like literally Everybody is on HN :)
You guys (Looking Glass) were THE heroes. You got me into computing for real. Massive kudos to you sir.
My first PC gaming experience (aged round 7-8) was UW2 - and I remember how I managed to get into sewers, wandering in the dark (who would know to use a torch) and then ran into a headless. God did that first sewers level freak me out. I couldn't bring myself to return to playing for a month I guess.
I'm still waiting for that UW series remake. Gothic came pretty close, so did Oblivion in a way, KOTOR and Mass Effect got a lot of magic - but I'm still holding out for the real thing (shame on EA!).
>you could visit places long before you were "meant" by mountain climbing with stairways constructed from objects out of your inventory (my favourite was using books and loaves of bread).
This was significantly more meaningful in Ultima Online - finding new and exciting ways to break into houses was probably the most popular pastime. One such method was to make fairly particular stacks of objects (IIRC it involved books, tables, and assorted food items) into stairs and walk up onto people's enclosed balconies. I heard that, in some cases, people even walked up over the roof and drop right on through.
I would hex edit my saved games to play around with what you could get in your inventory. You could get all kinds of game items to show up in your inventory that you couldn't normally pick up. For example, I had a bag of fireballs. You could drag a fireball from your inventory into the world view (as you would normally do to discard an item) and it would instead become a projectile fireball in the world. I loved that game.
Even though back in the day Origin Systems were known to have stiff hardware requirements, these games programmers were real hackers in bringing entire worlds to life. Kudos!
The "nice" thing about writing for PCs was that even if our game was slow, if we took long enough to release it, the hardware out there in the real world would catch up a bit. (Of course, taking a long time to release the game creates other problems...) It still amazes me in retrospect that people were willing to play Ultima Underworld at single-digit frame rates, though. It wasn't really an action game, but still. I think our target "that looks pretty smooth" frame rate was 12 Hz, and if a super-powerful PC could get up to 20, that was insane. It was a different age...
Do you know which developer in UW2 was responsible for the Servant Strike bug? That glitch wasted 6 weeks of my life! I recently started playing UW2 again through Dosbox, using a character editor written in 1994 to change save files is humbling.
I would read a book or 10 full of these old-school game developing anecdotes.
Ultima was so easy to patch that I wrote my own character editor in basic that worked on II, III, and IV (Apple II versions). You'd insert a disk at the programs's request, load a character and could edit virtually any property or inventory item. The Binhex style single byte encoding really did make it a "pleasure" to hack.
Anyone remember the boat duplication bug in Ultima II? I had hundred of ships that I made to make bridges all across the world and would retreat to the ships when fighting as well.
I cant recall though, how I made the dupe ships....
I made my own town at one point.
Better still, you'd inevitably screw something up and suddenly find yourself being chased across the map by a giant letter M, which you couldn't defeat because your armed weapon was "Paladin". Too much fun.