#the name six shooter sounding like its cowboy inspired

[nenoname]

the duality between six shooter and lil stanley still makes me lose it

even stan's drawings of himself being badass are adorable which contrasts with ford's dramatic as hell ones

[snowbellewells]

The Lawman, the Thief, and the Outlaw

by: @snowbellewells

(Here we are, at long last!! I am so excited to present the Rio Bravo AU I have been thinking about and wanting to write for so long.  As we are now just a little under three weeks away from Netflix’s “Heartstrings” and seeing Colin as a cowboy, I had to get going on this and channel that excitement.  If you have ever seen the old John Wayne/Dean Martin/Ricky Nelson/Walter Brennan Western “Rio Bravo”, then this will follow a lot of the basic plot points, though I will take some of my own twists and turns as well. I definitely have to give it some inspirational credit, as well as @theonceoverthinker for her help with a few plot issues I was trying to wrangle, and for the lovely ladies on the Discord chat: @kmomof4  @profdanglaisstuff @ultraluckycatnd @darkcolinodonorgasm @teamhook @wellhellotragic  for helping me with title suggestions.

Please enjoy, and I’d love to hear what you think of this opening!!)

Summary: Sheriff Killian Jones has done his best to leave behind a troubled past and bring law and order to the town of Blanchard Ridge. However, when he upholds his duty in the face of the most feared and dangerous outlaw gang in the area, allies are few and he dreads trapping them in the same situation he finds himself. The small Western town is about to become a powder keg, and one lawman, his deputies, and a resourceful woman too stubborn for her own good are all that stand in the way of bloodshed and lawlessness...

Chapter One

Sun beat down brutal and unyielding from the hot August afternoon sky onto the packed dirt of Main Street in Blanchard Ridge while the town was sleepy and still; not even the bark of a dog or the clop of hooves from a passing rider disturbed the dusty hours before the evening meal. The stage was due in at four, but as far as Killian Jones’ sharp gaze could reach from where he sat, chair tilted back on the wooden slats of the porch, appearing relaxed and lazy, nothing moved in the time of the ‘siesta’ as their neighbors just a few hours south in Pioche would call it. 

Though all appeared normal - more still than normal, even - in the sleepy little town he was meant to watch after, Jones was not about to drop his guard; he had learned long ago that calm could turn to chaos on a dime, and he aimed to be ready when the storm came. Idly, he flicked his pocket knife along the grain of the whittling stick he worked as he sat surveying the nearly deserted street, hoping to convey boredom despite every sense being keenly attuned, nerves jangling in a way that warned him something was coming - even if he didn’t yet know what it might be. He hadn’t survived as long as he had, nor gained the reputation he possessed, by growing careless, and he trusted his instincts. He slowly let his hand slide down casually, almost without notice, making certain his favorite Colt Single Action was in its holster, before going back to the soft humming and carving he’d employed since he took up his seat just past the noonday meal, upon his return from lunch at the Nolans’, and since his deputy, Scarlet, had taken off for the afternoon. 

Reflecting for a moment as he watched heat shimmer in waves before his eyes, Jones knew that he was far from the typical lawman, even in these rough territories, and the irony of his ending up here wasn’t lost on him. He didn’t give himself leave to think much on the twists and turns his life had taken, and he tried not to waste much time debating whether or not he deserved the opportunity and trust he had been granted, seeing as how neither did anyone a lick of good. But on long, lonesome afternoons such as this one, when the parched brown earth and flat, monotonous chaparral stretched before him as far as the eye could see - such a contrast from the verdant rolling hills and cool breezes of Ireland, from whence he’d immigrated with his father and brother more years ago than he could rightly count - he did sometimes wonder how he had wound up here in the desert. He was a haunted man, and he didn’t like to leave the gate open to thoughts of the past any longer than he could help it, so he slammed it closed before they could go much further. Suffice to say, he’d been offered a second chance on the right side of the law, to be part of something that wouldn’t lead to jail, lynching, or death in some back alley from a knife in the back, and he had taken it.

There was only one inmate in the jail behind him, but it was one more than usual in the peaceful settlement where folks generally got along and abided by the few simple laws there were. It had him on edge, this Felix Nightshade in their cells, and it was why he had sent Will out for a few hours when he had, so they would both be around once night fell. They’d bunk in the jail, just to be cautious. Nightshade himself might only be a bank and stagecoach robber, interchangeable with any other, but word had it that he was the lieutenant to Pan Malcolm himself, the feared and bloodthirsty outlaw who had lead the notorious Lost Boys gang terrorizing the state for some years. Killian expected a rescue attempt to come before the Federal Marshals came to fetch Nightshade and take him into custody, and if so, he reckoned they  would strike under cover of darkness. It was what he would do himself.

He was standing to stretch his long legs and lean frame from the stiffness of sitting in one position for too long when the ground beneath his feet began to tremble and there was a rumbling sound like distant thunder suddenly drawing near. A cloud of dust kicked up on the horizon and drew ever closer, until Killian began to think that he had been wrong to surmise his adversary would wait for nightfall, when he recognized what was coming. His stance eased and his hand once more slid away from his six shooter as ‘yips’ and ‘haws’ rang out with the sound of hooves and the lowing of cattle. A train was driving their herd into town.

From under the awning, the sheriff waited to see if he knew any of the riders, but it was the distinctive brand on the cows themselves as they jostled into view taking up the whole street in a lumbering river, that let him know whose livestock had arrived. The ornate “O” interlocked with a “Q” told him the whole lot of them were a former compadre of his, Robin Sherwood’s, and coming from his ranch out on the Rio Bravo river, a prime bit of real estate that had been in his second wife’s family for generations. Another former immigrant, and once ne’er-do-well like Killian himself, Rob had found love, married a powerful heiress and become one of the most prominent cattle ranchers around, going respectable with impressive style and giving his spread the name Outlaw’s Queen.  Jones didn’t know Rob’s wife all that well, didn’t even see his friend that often, as the ride out to their land was long and he didn’t often give himself days off, but she was rumored to be quite the lady. Robin truly did treat her as royalty… and was happy to do so.

Chuckling, Killian moved forward as the herd cleared through, driven into the holding pens down by the livery kept for such wagon trains passing through, then came down the steps to meet Sherwood as he swung from the saddle, smiling widely and already calling out a greeting.   The rest of his riders, including the young orphan he had taken under his wing upon hiring him as a ranch hand back in the spring, moved the cattle on, slowing them as they neared the large corral and began to guide them through the gate.

Killian had started down the weathered plank steps of the boardwalk to the packed dirt of the street, and already had his hand out to shake Rob’s, even as his old friend moved forward in a similar fashion, when the loud crack of a gunshot ran clearly in the afternoon air. Even over the lowing and stamping of the herd, the sound was unmistakable, ricocheting off the buildings and startling everyone nearby, who ducked instinctively. Unfortunately, the bullet had already found a target. Whether its intended one or not, the damage was the same, and Robin Sherwood listed to the side horribly, crashing to his knees at the foot of the steps, his hand going almost dazedly to where blood was already seeping through his shirts at the ribs.

“Rob!” Killian called out an alarmed warning too late to do the other man any good. Even as Killian hurried the last few steps to where his friend was slumped in the street, still breathing, though painfully labored, but unable to right himself from his knees where he had crumpled. “Mate, hang on,” Jones added fervently, as he knelt to survey the damage. Where the bullet had entered, if it had exited cleanly or was still inside, played a huge part in what could be done for the rancher. And even as he looked, Killian was also remaining in a crouch himself, hoping to make as small a target as possible for the unseen gunman, and keep an eye on their surroundings in case more shots were yet to come.

Chaos had erupted around them at the crack of the gunshot; the straggling cows not yet in the corral threatened to stampede in fright, and the rest of Sherwood’s riders darted here and there, whooping and hollering to keep their animals in line. All except one of them -

Killian swallowed back an unwanted lump of emotion trying to burn its way up his throat at the sound of young Henry’s cracked voice crying out an anguished “No!” over the melee, his horse thundering up to the hitching post near them and his gangly legs swinging into Killian’s view as he dismounted and slid to his knees beside them, looking to the sheriff for some sort of reassurance. Killian honestly didn’t know if it was the living hope still alight in the youth’s wide brown eyes - not yet having lived long enough in the crooked old world to have lost faith in things turning out alright - or if it was the vivid flash of horrific memory, bringing his brother’s pained face, as he last remembered seeing it, swimming with ghastly clarity before his eyes too quickly for him to fully shutter it away. Jones didn’t have time for sentiment; the shooter needed to be found. He also needed to be certain no other citizens were hurt, and see to Rob’s wounds once the dust settled. It looked as though the injury had been a clean through-and-through shot, and if he could get Sherwood to Nolan’s without his losing too much blood, he thought David’s pretty, fresh-faced wife: cook, seamstress, and pretty much anything else a person could call for, could stitch him up while they got Doc Hopper to make sure no infection set in. 

The melee around them seemed to be settling down; the riders herding the rest of the cattle into the pen safely and no further shots coming from wherever the assailant’s hiding place had been. The thought that the bullet in Rob’s side had quite probably had his own name on it, was another thing Killian Jones had no time to ruminate on. Clearly the shooter had turned tail when they’d botched the job of taking the Sheriff out of commission, and ridden back for further instructions rather than risking discovery. From what Jones had heard of Malcolm and the precision with which he expected his orders to be followed, the law man reckoned that bloke had every bit as unpleasant a few hours in front of him as Robin did with people poking and prodding at his side.

Pushing all his numerous worries and concerns back for the moment, Killian met the eyes of the lanky young man before him, “Henry, isn’t it?”

The boy nodded, not saying anything, but acknowledging the sheriff’s words with a determined furrow of his brow, trying manfully to hold in his obvious fear and worry for his adopted father. Killian was grateful for the youth’s gumption, even if he hated asking more yet. He knew well how much Sherwood must mean to the lad. When Henry had arrived in town back in the spring, by far the oldest child on the Orphan Train that had driven through seeking homes to take their charges in, it had been clear that a boy of nearly fourteen was not the age most childless families were hoping to start out with. Robin, however, having lost a first wife and young son who would have been about Henry’s age to the influenza years prior, hadn’t hesitated for a second when Killian had mentioned the boy’s plight to him.  It did some good to even Jones’ toughened and grizzled outlook on the world to see that the arrangement had worked out better than he could have hoped. Aiming to put some semblance of encouragement in his tone he added, “I think he’ll recover if we can stop the bleeding and get him sewn up,” he offered. 

Moving to brace Robin on one side, and gesturing Henry to do the same under his arm on the right, between the two of them they got Sherwood to his feet, thought unsteadily and leaning on their combined strength. In a shuffling walk they had soon guided him across the way to the inn and restaurant, finding its proprietor, David Nolan, already at the door and coming to help usher them in to safety, his petite, dark-headed wife Mary right behind.

In a better moment, Killian might have shaken his head and laughed at the pair of them, never far from one another and both with hearts as wide as the Rio Grande itself, always trying to do what they could for anyone in need who came to their door. He’d had Mary’s cool, soft hands fluttering over him more than once after some on-the-job injury in the line of duty, and so he knew the woman must already be itching to get her hands on Rob and do what she could to ease his pain.

To speak his mind plainly, Killian would have been forced to admit that he’d often wondered how two people as fine as the Nolans, whose very nature and bearing spoke of class and manners unheard of this far West, had ended up in this rugged New Mexican outpost. They both were too kind, too open and trusting for their own good, and Killian spent more time than he would admit to hoping they weren’t robbed or taken advantage of by whatever rough characters might come riding through. Yet beneath the surface, where he sensed there may once have been a sheltered, easy life that would never have been enough for either one of them, he had long since decided the pair must have a wealth of strength he hadn’t at first been able to see. They’d come to Blanchard Ridge and opened the inn not long after Killian had pinned on the Sheriff’s badge, and neither one seemed to have a thought in their heads towards leaving. 

Once they got Rob laid out on a bed in the closest possible empty room, Mary began preparing hot water, clean washcloths, and other materials she needed, while her husband set out with the young ranchhand to fetch the Doctor. Sherwood had clung to his senses as long as possible, but he seemed to be drifting away from awareness, now that he was settled and had reached relative safety. Killian made sure the lady had no need of his assistance, to which she shooed him away to go watch for the others’ return.

Striding out in the main dining area, Jones set up watch at the door, not as much for the doctor, Nolan, and Henry as to see what was happening in the main street. Gunfire was as unusual as he could possibly make it in the center of their small outpost, and so after the ruckus of the last hour the dirt thoroughfare was deserted, people having no wish to be caught in the crossfire - whatever was going on.

His first instinct, the gunfighter’s fire within that had pushed him along until settling there and seeking out a modicum of peace, even if he had to keep it himself, had him edgy, chomping at the bit to get out after the culprit firing on himself or his townspeople in broad daylight. But the lawman he had become had to allow his temper to subside; he couldn’t lash out with the need for vengeance and retaliation. And, if the shot hadn’t been meant to kill him outright, then it had no doubt been meant to send him chasing after shadows rather than staying on guard with his prisoner awaiting the Federal Marshall.

The only thing that was stirring as he continued to stare out at the street before him was the cloud of dust drawing closer and signalling the arrival of the four o’clock stagecoach. They pulled up down the way by the post office, before heading on to the livery, for those horses to be watered, brushed down, and a new team hitched up before the stage headed on to the next settlement. One rider jumped down from up top to run the mail pouch in to the postmaster. The whole routine carried on exactly as usual, until a dainty booted foot stepped out onto the wooden boardwalk from inside the stage. A deep green traveling dress, accented in places with an overlay of black lace, drew his eye up to a stunning, pale feminine face, a strong chin and pert little nose, though the rest of the unknown woman’s visage was hidden by an artfully tilted hat with wide brim to shade her face. Now that was unusual; visitors to the Ridge were exceedingly rare.

He tried to move on from the arrestingly lovely sight, as the woman surveyed her surroundings and then began walking in his direction towards the inn, an enticing sway in her step. No call to be gawping at her like some untried greenhorn, no matter how long it had been since --   No, no time for those thoughts either. He was standing lookout over the main way in and out of town, the jail, and his friend; that was more than enough to focus on.

However, as the lady neared the entrance, Killian did open the door for her, touching the brim of his hat slightly, with an easy dip of his chin and a simple, “Afternoon, Ma’am.” 

She raised her head enough for beguiling green eyes to be seen from beneath her own chapeau. They twinkled with some bit of mischief and humor, as she replied, “Why thank you, Sheriff,” with a pointed glance to his badge. “Good afternoon to you.”  She then brushed by him so closely that he felt her warmth, making the small hairs on his arm stand on end, and caught the inviting scent of apple blossom, and the cold mix of leather and cinnamon along with it.

Was it only an hour or so ago that the town had appeared sleepily uneventful? Sheriff Killian Jones sensed now that his trouble was just starting, and in more ways than one.

Tagging some who may enjoy: @resident-of-storybrooke @hollyethecurious @let-it-raines @revanmeetra87 @linda8084 @jennjenn615 @searchingwardrobes @laschatzi @effulgentcolors @thisonesatellite @whimsicallyenchantedrose @snidgetsafan @shireness-says @spartanguard @winterbaby89

[talesfromtheindigoghost]

Good Intentions: Entry 4

The noise ringing through my mind was like trying to tell someone you were on the phone with about a movie, only to get tired of explaining and just held the phone up to the TV.

Screams of the thing in front of me’s regret rang through my skull, a hateful symphony of slammed doors and shattered lives pounding to the melody of a poorly tuned violin accompanying a macabre dance. Every demon I had imagined when I started shampooing my hair had made itself known to me with desperate hunger and empty hatred.

Before I could even begin to think of an appropriate way to react the thing closes the short distance from the door to the tub and sends me slamming against the freezing cold porcelain with an unintended shoulder tackle.

You ever get that moment of panic when you’re in the shower? That sudden sense of dread that convinces you that you’re about to slip and break your neck at any given moment? It’s usually inspired by dropping something or not feeling as completely sure footed as you expected to in that half a moment that feels exactly like leaning too far back in your chair and realizing you’re teetering over the edge.

My inspiration let out a horrifying and meaty screech as flecks of toxic bile and tar flew out of its dish water oatmeal mouth. An uncomfortably thick and hot mound of quivering mush violently ripped open, only to clamp down just as suddenly onto my shoulder. The dull pressure shocked me far more than any tooth or claw ever could, the thing’s obsessive jaw, or what’s passing for it, suddenly becoming a gross tourniquet as it kept me pinned against the wall.

I have no idea who I’m so furious with, whose very existence drags me to the depths of hell and its boiling lakes of rage. I can feel every bit of the thing that used to be someone’s grudge, every idle thought of dark violence or worse tightens its inhuman vice grip as I let out my own howling screaming. I hear the bone in my arm splinter before I start to feel it a solid moment later.

The radio static in my skull hisses louder, an ear piercing electronic squeal resonates through my mind until the picture comes into the view. I can hear the person this thing used to be sobbing into a glass of water after their final meal. I can taste all of the chemicals and poisons the water washes down. I can feel myself swallowing my own hatred, seething from the very depths of my soul that my death poisons someone else with regret.

The crushing creaking of my arm snaps me back to reality with a sickening pop. I hear something heavy and wet slap against the edge of the tub.

I’ve been through a lot of physical traumas in my life. Fifty times back and forth, after all, I would say it’s downright reasonable to assume I have. They were always relatively quick and painless. Slow and quiet. The kinds of things your mind doesn’t like to let itself dwell on for too long or else it’ll just ruin your day. My point is that I’ve experienced pain and shock before.

I’ve never experienced losing an arm.

I don’t care for that shit one bit, now that I think about it.

We scream together, the noises blurring together with the crashing red river pouring out of where my arm used to be. I found myself lost in that indescribable haze of death I had gotten so familiar with over the years. Blindly feeling my way through the darkness and confusion of being confronted by the monsters of our mistakes, like a starving beast that stumbled into the open back door of a butcher’s shop during payday.

Whoever the person this thing used to be had died alone. I know his life story the moment I sink my teeth into its neck in sheer desperation. His poisonous entitlement flood my mouth with tar and the deep, hateful taste of his woeful sexual frustration. I chew through waterlogged grey flesh covering my prize, the demon’s intruding desires to flay and gnash the skin of the women that denied him.

I feel everything within me become violent disgust. I live through every excruciating moment of the person this thing used to be’s life and turn around to see reality coming to splash ice water down my exposed spine. I experience the sensation of being a monster. I feel the warm blood pour over me as I end lives after I’ve violated them. I feast on their fear as they beg me for mercy. I grow drunk on the power of denying it. I crave more, I demand more. I deserve more. They should be grateful that I they had the opportunity to make me feel good.

I feel my pride and power melt away as I read the letter from someone who knows what I am.

I realize that even in death this monster can’t help but violate people.

My stomach growls and I remember my hunger.

I bite through the thin, pathetically weak vine of black licorice and feel its entire body go limp and slide away from me. The haze of death lifts like rain clouds after a storm and lets the shining sun and rainbows of euphoria fill me with an inner sense of peace and balance as I understand that this accursed demon will no longer torment the innocent.

It felt great, right up until I noticed that I was being pulled down by the dissolving blackened carcass that no longer pinned me up against the tiles. It took me half a moment to understand that I no longer had an arm to catch myself before I fall and break my neck on the side of the bath tub.

I close my eyes as the second half of the moment is spent accepting what was about to happen.

I never remember how I get here. Not at first, at least.

It’s always the same, yet it feels like it’s the first time this has ever happened.

At least, I thought so at first. I’m not alone this time. The person that thing used to be had taken its place on the ground beside me, both of us climbing to our feet in front of that gaudy gated community and its obnoxiously overstated security gate.

I look up from the jarring sight of my whole, intact arm and notice that Peter is already on his walkie talkie with a look that shows he’s just as surprised to see me as I am to be here. My gut tenses, the lead weight of anger yanks my guts into my knees and spills the contents of my heart from my mouth in a bloody and furious geyser of righteous ire.

“What in the fuck are you doing here?”

I roar at the pathetic monster whose sins had just torn my arm off and broke my neck. I don’t even feel myself hesitate from marching up to Peter’s desk and slamming my fist down on top of the golden “Ring For Service” bell situated right in front of the nervous man awaiting a response on his radio.

“What in the fuck is he doing here?”

Peter stammered and fumbled over his words, his eyes darting back and forth between the monster and I in apparent confusion, weakly shirking the responsibility of an answer through halfhearted shrugs and another plead into his walkie talkie for someone to come to the gate.

I’m so insulted at the notion that this monster, this vile and unforgivable creature, is even allowed to approach what appears to be heaven. I’m so angry that I don’t even care that we’re both still completely nude and, even further unnoticed, whole and human once more.

Not even the soothing hymns floating serenely through the golden breeze, lighting up the clouds softly with its love and profound purpose could distract me from the overwhelming indignation of knowing the monster responsible for every single one of its horrific life experiences that I had been made to relive was being entertained the opportunity to plead for entry into what I can only assume is a peaceful eternity.

Peter and I were so caught up in this sudden, unexpected confrontation that neither of us had noticed the sorry excuse for what may be considered human trying to jump the shimmering gold fence. It wasn’t until I saw it wobbling and threatening to bend forward under the murderer’s weight that I understood just how flimsy and decorative the fence itself was.

Whatever either of us were about to say or do was violently interrupted by the sound of three rapid gunshots as the monster’s chest exploded outward into a spray of meaty confetti across the clouds and its head simply ceased to be.

In the blink of an eye he, and any evidence of the scene that had just unfolded vanished. Out of sight, and just as suddenly, out of mind.

I turn just in time to see a cowboy proudly slipping a golden six-shooter back into an ornate fast draw holster around his waist. He shoots me a wink and tips his ten gallon hat with a knowing grin, the ringing in my ears easing and fading into an easily dismissed memory of annoyance. It’s easy to see that Peter is just as stunned as I am at how abruptly this situation has been forcefully diffused

I find myself holding my hands up in uncertainty, an unease I don’t think I’ve ever felt in the times I’ve been here. I take a bit of comfort in seeing that I’m not the only one here that’s uncomfortable as the tall, intimidating law man steps forward with both hands resting confidently around a huge, audacious belt buckle in the shape of a shining star emblazoned with a flaming sword.

“Well howdy there, fellas.”

Peter stands up straight and adjusts his suspenders and name tag, coughing lightly in an attempt to find his bearings with a stern, yet frazzled face.

“It took you long enough. I specifically asked you to try and be here before either of them got here.”

It wasn’t hard to see how little this towering cowboy cared about punctuality with the casual, yet shockingly firm way he clapped a hand onto my shoulder in near perfect time with the gate swinging open to welcome us both.

“You and I need to have a talk about the mess you’ve got yourself into, son.” His words hit me like a series of left hooks and dazzling footwork, sending me into a stumbling stupor and making it all the easier for the strange figure with all the charisma and commanding presence of the toughest sheriff in all of the wild wild west.

I manage to break the trance for a moment as we approach another office just beyond an unrecognizable wall of clouds that the obnoxiously golden gate were built into. I can’t seem to get the words out but thankfully stopping in your tracks with an expression of confusion is fairly universal, even here.

“Right, I’m gettin’ ahead of myself. Introductions.”

Before I know it, his strong and powerful hand is gripping me in a handshake that overwhelms me with its command for respect. The kind of strength that makes a man tremble in awe and question every single one of his life choices.

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, I’m a fan of your work. You can call me Michael.”

--

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/indigoghost ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/indigoghost twitter: https://twitter.com/theindigoghost

[ciathyzareposts]

Life Off the Grid, Part 1: Making Ultima Underworld

The 1980s was the era of the specialist in game development, when many of the most successful studios did just one or two things, but did them very, very well. For Infocom, that meant text adventures; for Sierra, graphic adventures; for MicroProse, military simulations; for SSI, strategic wargames and Dungeons & Dragons; for Epyx, joystick-twiddling sports and action games; for Origin, Ultima. When such specialists stepped outside of their comfort zones, the results were occasionally a triumph, but more often merely served to reemphasize their core competencies.

The most respected studios of the 1990s, however, tended toward more eclecticism. Developers like Dynamix and Westwood may have had their roots in the previous decade, but they really came into their own in this one, and did so with games of very diverse types. Westwood, for example, was happily making CRPGs, graphic adventures, real-time-strategy games, and Monopoly, for Pete’s sake, all virtually at the same time. Even the holdover specialists from the 1980s — those who were still standing — aggressively tried to diversify in the 1990s: Sierra moved into strategy games, MicroProse into CRPGs and graphic adventures, Origin into Wing Commander.

Still, if we look harder at many 1990s developers, we can find themes that bind together their output. In the case of Dynamix, we might posit that to be an interest in dynamic simulation, even when working in traditionally static genres like the graphic adventure. In that of Westwood, we can identify an even more pronounced interest in bringing the excitement of real time to traditionally turn-based genres like the CRPG and the wargame. And in the case of the studio we’ll be meeting for the first time today — Looking Glass Technologies, arguably the most respected and beloved 1990s studio of all — the binding thread is crystal clear. From beginning to end, they used the flexibility of 3D graphics to bring virtual environments to life in unprecedentedly immersive ways. Whether making a CRPG or a flight simulator, a first-person shooter or a first-person sneaker, this was their constant.

3D graphics were, one might say, baked right into Looking Glass’s DNA. Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner, its two eventual founders, met one another circa 1980 in a computer-science course at Wesleyan University, where Neurath was studying environmental science, Lerner physics. For the course’s final project, they teamed up to make a 3D space game rendered in ASCII text. They got a B-minus on it only because their professor considered games to be beneath his course’s dignity.

After university, the two New England boys remained friends as they started their professional careers. When the home-computer craze got rolling in earnest, each bought an Apple II. They started experimenting, together and apart, on games much like the one they written for that computer-science class, only implemented in real bitmap graphics, with a real joystick as a controller. These efforts culminated in a joint game known as Deep Space: Operation Copernicus, which they sold in 1985 to the publisher Sir-Tech, purveyors of the Wizardry CRPG series. Sir-Tech didn’t seem to know quite what to do with Neurath and Lerner’s very different sort of game, and it never escaped Wizardry‘s long shadow. Nevertheless, the experience of making a game and getting paid for it — however modestly — lit a fire in both partners. Each went off to pursue his own agenda, but they remained in touch, keeping one another updated on their progress and often sharing code and technical tricks.

Initially, it was Ned Lerner who made the most determined effort to become a real commercial game developer. He formed a little company called Lerner Research, and started gathering like-minded souls around him. As fixated as ever on 3D graphics, he decided that an at least semi-realistic flight simulator would be a good application for the technology. The leading product of that type on the market, subLOGIC’s generically titled Flight Simulator, he considered akin to a “textbook lesson”; he envisioned a flight simulator of his own that would be more accessible and fun. He hired a retired Air Force aerodynamic engineer to design a flight model for his game, which would focus on high-performance military aircraft like the legendary SR-71 Blackbird rather than the little Cessna that was forever tooling around from airport to airport in subLOGIC’s simulator. In fact, his game would let you fly any of fourteen different airplanes, in contrast to its rival’s one, and would concentrate on goal-oriented activities — “Flight Instruction,” “Test Flight,” “Formation Flying,” or “Airplane Racing” — instead of just expecting you to choose a starting airport and do whatever tickled your fancy.

Chuck Yeager and Ned Lerner discuss the vagaries of aerodynamics.

Electronic Arts, who lacked a competitive flight simulator and were eager to get in on one of the industry’s fastest-growing segments, signed on as publisher. Unlike Sir-Tech, they knew the appeal of snazzy packaging and celebrity endorsements. They convinced Chuck Yeager to put his name on the product. This was quite the coup; Yeager, a World War II fighter ace and the first man to break the sound barrier, was by far the most famous pilot in the country, after having been brought to indelible life by the actor Sam Shepard in the recent hit movie The Right Stuff. It was a decidedly nervous group of nerds and businessmen who met this aerospace legend for the first time in March of 1987. Lerner:

As we were sitting there in the office, listening to the rain outside, Rich Hilleman, associate producer at EA, was first to spot the Blazer entering the parking lot (license plate “BELL X1”). A few minutes later, we heard the unmistakable West Virginia drawl outside the door, as pure and easygoing as the man on TV who sells spark plugs with a shotgun. For a brief second, I remembered the opening scene of Patton where George C. Scott steps forward, dressed to the teeth in full military regalia. The door suddenly opened, and there he was: wearing cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a polo shirt under his racing-style jacket. General Yeager had a trim figure, and his face was tan, well-weathered, as if he had spent a lot of time outdoors. The general stepped forward, shaking hands with the members of the group, but I sensed a certain degree of reservation in his actions.

To get past this awkward beginning, we loaded in the current version of Advanced Flight Trainer. I flew the simulator for a while, then offered to let General Yeager take over. “I never fooled with these things,” he said. “That’s because, you know, the damned things are so…” — he searched for the word — “…insignificant. If you want to really scorch something, hell, you can program the X-31 in there, the aerospace plane. Now, see, you got some kid who can say, ‘Man, this thing is smoking along at mach 25.’”

The ice had finally been broken, and we all began contributing to the conversation. After discussing the subjects of liquid-oxygen fuel and the current type of aircraft that are touching the edge of space, the day was practically over. “This thing’s pretty dang realistic,” he told us. “You’ve got a lot of goodies in there.”

Released about six months later with much publicity, Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer became by far EA’s biggest hit of the year, and one of their biggest of the whole decade. With that push to get them off and running, Lerner Research continued their work on the frontiers of 3D graphics, giving EA a substantially revised version 2.0 of their flagship game in 1989.

Even as Ned Lerner was hobnobbing with famous test pilots, Paul Neurath was making his own inroads with the games industry. Shortly after finishing Deep Space, he had heard that Origin Systems of Ultima fame was located in New Hampshire, not all that far from him at all. On a lark, he drove down one day to introduce himself and take the temperature of the place. He hit it off immediately with Richard Garriott and the rest of the crew there. While he never became a full-fledged employee, he did become a regular around the Origin offices, contributing play-testing, design ideas, and occasional bits of code to their games on a contract basis.

In early 1987, Richard Garriott, who loathed New England with every fiber of his being, packed up and moved back to Austin, Texas, with most of Origin’s technical and creative staff. He left behind his older brother and business manager Robert, along with the latter’s support staff of accountants, secretaries, and marketers. A few developers who for one reason or another didn’t want to make the move also stayed behind. Neurath was among this group.

At about this same time, Neurath got the green light to make a game all his own for Origin. Space Rogue began as another 3D space shooter — another Deep Space, enhanced with some of the latest graphics technology from his friends at Lerner Research. To this template Neurath grafted a trading economy, a customizable spaceship, and a real plot. The player was even able to exit her spaceship and wander around the space stations she visited, talking to others and taking on quests. There was a surprising amount of ambition in this fusion of Deep Space, Elite, and Ultima, especially considering that Neurath designed, wrote, and programmed it all almost single-handedly from New Hampshire while most of his friends at Origin pursued other projects down in Austin. Although its disparate parts don’t ever gel quite well enough to make it a true classic, it’s remarkable that it works as well as it does.

Space Rogue sold in moderate numbers upon its release in 1989. More importantly in terms of gaming history, Chris Roberts of Origin spent a lot of time with it. Its melding of a space shooter with an adventure-game-like plot became one of the inspirations behind Wing Commander, the first Origin game to fully escape the shadow of Ultima — and, indeed, the beginning of one of the blockbuster franchises of the 1990s.

Space Rogue‘s hilarious cover art, with its artfully pouting male model who looks better suited to a Harlequin-romance cover. Paul Neurath remembers Origin’s marketing department asking him about his packaging preferences for his game. He said he would prefer a “non-representational” cover picture. Naturally, the marketers delivered about the most representational thing imaginable.

By the time of Space Rogue‘s release, Paul Neurath was a lonelier game developer than ever. In January of 1989, the last remnants of Origin’s New Hampshire operation had moved to Austin, leaving Neurath stranded in what Richard Garriott liked to call “the frozen wastes of New England.” For him, this was a crossroads of life if ever there was one. Did he want to continue to make games, and, if so, how? Sure, he could probably move down to Austin and get a job with Origin, but, truth be told, he had no more desire to live in Texas than Garriott had to live in New England. But how else could he stay in games?

At last, Neurath decided to take a page from Ned Lerner’s book. He would put together his own little company and try to establish it as an independent studio; after all, it had worked out pretty well for Ned so far. He registered his company under the name of Blue Sky Productions.

Neurath had always loved the CRPG genre, ever since Wizardry had become one of the first games he bought for his new Apple II. That love had once led him to publish Deep Space through Sir-Tech, and sent him to out to Origin’s New Hampshire offices for that fateful visit. Now, he dreamed of taking the first-person dungeon crawl beyond the turn-based Wizardry, even beyond the real-time but still grid-based Dungeon Master, the state of the art in the genre as the 1980s expired. On a visit to Lerner Research, he saw the technology that he believed would make the genre’s next step possible — the foundation, one might even say, for everything he and his fabled studio Looking Glass would do in the 1990s. What he saw was the first 3D texture mapper that was suitable for use in an ordinary computer game.

3D graphics were hardly unknown on personal computers of the 1980s, as can be seen not least through the early careers of Ned Lerner and Paul Neurath. Yet, being enormously taxing to implement in the context of an interactive game, they demanded a lot of aesthetic compromise. Some early 3D games, such as Elite and the first versions of subLogic’s Flight Simulator, didn’t draw in the surfaces of their polygons at all, settling for wire frames. With the arrival of more powerful 16-bit computers in the mid-1980s, filled surfaces became more common in 3D games, but each side of a polygon was drawn in a single color. Combine this fact with the low polygon count that was still necessitated by the hardware of the time — resulting in big, fairly crude polygons — and you had a recipe for blotchy landscapes made up of garishly clashing primary colors.

A few clever developers were able to turn the limitations of 3D graphics into an aesthetic statement in its own right. But most of those who used them — among them makers of flight simulators and space shooters, such as Lerner and Neurath — suffered with their limitations because there just wasn’t any practical alternative for the sorts of games they were making. For an out-the-cockpit view from an airplane, the aesthetic compromises necessitated by going 3D were just about acceptable, given the way the distant landscape below tends to blur into hazy abstractions of color even in real life. But for a more personal, embodied experience, such as a first-person dungeon crawl, real-time 3D graphics were just too crude, too ugly. You couldn’t render the grain of a wooden door or the patina of a stone wall as one uniform splotch of color and expect to get away with it — not with the way that gamers’ audiovisual expectations were increasing every year.

A screenshot from Dungeon Master, the state of the art in dungeon crawls at the end of the 1980s. Notice how the walls, floor, and ceiling are textured. This was possible because movement in Dungeon Master was still based on a grid, giving the computer plenty of time to draw each view. A free-scrolling, truly 3D version would have had to replace all those lovely textures with great uniform slabs of gray. The result, needless to say, would not have been pretty.

None of these problems were unknown to academic computer-graphics researchers; they’d been wrestling with them since well before the first personal computer hit the market. And they’d long since come up with a solution: texture mapping. The texture in question takes the form of an ordinary image file, which might be drawn by hand or digitized from a real-world photograph. A texture suitable for a wooden door, for example, could be an extreme closeup of any slab of wood. The texture is “glued” onto a polygon’s face in lieu of a solid color. Just like that, you suddenly have doors that look like real doors, slimy dungeon walls that look like real slimy dungeon walls.

The problem with texture mapping from the perspective of game development was the same one that haunted the whole field of 3D graphics: the problem of performance. Simple though the basic concept is, a lot of tricky math comes into play when one introduces textures; figuring out how they should wrap and fit together with one another over so many irregular polygonal surfaces is much more complicated than the lay observer might initially believe. At a time when just managing to paint the sides of your polygons in solid colors while maintaining a respectable frame rate was a real achievement, texture mapping was hopeless. Maybe it could be used in another decade or so, said the conventional wisdom, when Moore’s Law put a supercomputer on every desk.

But one recent arrival at Lerner Research wasn’t so sure that texture mapping was impossible using extant PC hardware. Chris Green had considerable experience with interactive 3D graphics, having spent several years at subLogic working on products like Flight Simulator and Jet. He arrived at Lerner Research knowing that texture mapping couldn’t be done on the likes of an 8-bit Apple II, the computer on which Neurath and Lerner among so many others had gotten their start. On the latest 16- and 32-bit MS-DOS hardware, however… he suspected that, with the right compromises, he could make it work there.

There was doubtless much efficient code in the texture mapper Green created, but it was indeed an unabashed compromise that made it feasible to attempt at all. The vertices of the polygons in a 3D graphics system are defined with an X, a Y, and a Z coordinate; it’s this last, of course, that makes such a system a 3D system at all. And it’s also the Z coordinate that is the source of all of the complications relating to 3D graphics in general. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of texture mapping. To do it correctly, textures have to be scaled and transformed to account for their position in relation to the viewing location, as largely defined by their Z coordinate. But Green didn’t bother to do texture mapping correctly; he effectively threw away the Z coordinate and glued his textures onto their polygons as if they were in a 2D space. This technique would come to be known inside the industry as “affine texture mapping.” It yielded an enormous increase in rendering speed, balanced by a degree of distortion that was almost unnoticeable in some situations, very noticeable indeed in others. Still, an imperfect texture mapper, Green decided, was better than no texture mapper at all.

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The video clip above, from the finished game of Ultima Underworld, shows some of the spatial distortion that results from affine texture mapping, especially when viewing things from a very short distance. Moving through the game’s virtual space can look and feel a bit like moving through real space after having drunk one beer too many. Nonetheless, the environment is far more realistic, attractive, and immersive than any first-person 3D environment to appear in any game before this one.

Ned Lerner had recently signed a contract with EA to make a driving game bearing the name of Car and Driver magazine. Knowing the technology’s limitations, he planned to use Chris Green’s texture mapper in a somewhat constrained fashion therein, to draw onto the faces of billboards and the like. Yet he wasn’t averse to sharing it with Paul Neurath, who as soon as he saw it wanted to use it to take the next step beyond Dungeon Master.

To do so, however, he’d need more programmers, not to mention artists and all the rest; if there was one thing the two years or so he had spent making Space Rogue had taught him, it was that the days of the one-man development team were just about over. Luckily, a friend of his had a nephew who had a friend who was, as Neurath would be the first to admit, a far better programmer than he would ever be.

Doug Church was an MIT undergraduate who had let himself get so consumed by the fun going on inside the university’s computer labs that it had all but derailed his official education. He and his buddies spent hours every day hacking on games and playing them. Their favorite was a 3D tank game called Xtank, written by one of their number, a fellow student named Terry Donahue. They tinkered with its code endlessly, producing variations that departed radically from the original concept, such as a Frisbee simulator. When not coding or playing, they talked about what kinds of games they would like to make, if only they had infinite amounts of money and time and no hardware limitations whatsoever. They envisioned all sorts of little simulated worlds, rendered, naturally, in photo-realistic 3D graphics. Thus when Neurath introduced himself to Church in early 1990 and asked if he’d like to work on a free-scrolling, texture-mapped 3D dungeon crawl running in real time, he dropped his classes and rushed to get in on the chance. (Terry Donahue would doubtless have been another strong candidate to become lead programmer on the project, but he felt another calling; he would go on to become a priest.)

Neurath also found himself an artist, a fellow named Doug Wike who had worked on various projects for Origin in New Hampshire before those offices had been shuttered. Together the three men put together a crude non-interactive demo in a matter of weeks, showing the “player” moving up a texture-mapped dungeon corridor and bumping into a monster at the end of it. At the beginning of June, they took the demo to the Summer Consumer Electronics Show, where, behind all of the public-facing hype, many of the games industry’s most important deals got made.

As Neurath tells the story, the response from publishers was far from overwhelming. The demo was undeniably crude, and most were highly skeptical whether this unproven new company could get from it to a real, interactive game. It turned out that the only publisher willing to give the project any serious consideration at all was none other than Neurath’s old friends from Origin.

That Neurath hadn’t taken his idea to Origin straight away was down to his awareness of a couple of strategic decisions that had recently been made there, part of a whole collection of changes that were being made to greet the new decade’s challenges. Origin had, first of all, decided to stop giving contracts to outside developers, taking all development in-house so as to have complete control over the products they released. And secondly, they had decided, for the time being anyway, to make all of their output fit into one of two big franchises, Ultima and Wing Commander. Both of these decisions would seem to exclude Blue Sky’s proposed dungeon crawler, which they were calling simply Underworld, from becoming an Origin product. Nor did it help that a sexy public demonstration of the first Wing Commander game1 had become the hit of the show, making it difficult for Origin to focus on anything else; they could practically smell the money they were about to make from their new franchise.

Luckily, Blue Sky and Underworld found a champion at Origin even amidst all the distractions. Warren Spector was a relatively recent arrival at the company, but Neurath knew him pretty well; as his very first task for Origin, Spector had spent about a month expanding and polishing the text in Space Rogue just before its release. Now, looking at Underworld, he was sure he saw not just a game with real commercial potential but a technologically and aesthetically important one. “I was blown away,” he says today. “I remember thinking as I watched that demo that the world had just changed.” Spector convinced his colleagues to take a chance, to violate their rule of in-house development and sign a contract with Blue Sky, giving them a modest advance of $30,000. If the game worked out, they might be in on the ground floor of something major. It might also be something they could brand with the Ultima name, make into the beginning of a whole new sub-series in the franchise — a revival of the first-person (albeit turn-based) dungeons that had been in every Ultima through Ultima V. And if it didn’t work out, the $30,000 they’d lose on the flier was far from a fortune. The deal was done.

With that mission accomplished, Neurath’s little team returned to the office space he’d rented for them in New Hampshire. They spent almost a year there trying to understand the new set of technical affordances which Chris Green’s texture mapper had put at their disposal. They didn’t invent anything fundamentally new in terms of 3D graphics technology during that time. Like the texture mapper which spawned the project, everything they put into Underworld could be found in any number of books and journals at the MIT library, many of them dating well back into the 1970s and even 1960s. It was just a matter of adapting it all to the MS-DOS architecture. As it happened, the hardware they had to work with was about equal to the cutting-edge research workstations of ten years ago, so the old journal articles they pored over actually made a pretty good fit to it.

They kept coming back to the theme of embodiment, what Neurath called “a feeling of presence beyond what other games give you.” None of the earlier dungeon crawlers — not even those in the Dungeon Master tradition that ran in real time — had been able to deliver this. They could be exciting, stressful, even terrifying, but they never gave you the feeling of being physically embodied in their environments. It was the difference between reading a book or watching a movie and really being someplace.

It went without saying that Underworld must place you in control of just one character rather than the usual party of them. You needed to be able to sense the position of “your” body and limbs in the virtual space. Neurath:

We wanted to get a feeling that you were really in this dungeon. What would you expect to do in a dungeon? You might need to jump across a narrow chasm. You might expect to batter down a wooden door. You might expect to look up if there was a precipice above you. All these sorts of physical activities. And we tried to achieve, at least to a reasonable degree, that kind of freedom of motion and freedom of action. That really extended the R&D stage. It was about nine months, even a year, before we had all the underlying technology in place that allowed us to visualize this fantasy universe in a manner that we felt was appropriate and would work well and would allow the player the freedom to maneuver around and perform different kinds of actions.

Over the course of this time, Neurath hired only one more programmer, one Jonathan “J.D.” Arnold, who had previously worked on Infocom’s Z-Machine technology in that company’s twilight years. But finally, in the late spring of 1991, with the basic interface and the basic technical architecture all in place, Neurath decided it was time to hire some more people and make a real game out of it all. Doug Church immediately thought of his old friends back at MIT, and Neurath had no objections to recruiting from that pool; they were smart and passionate and, just as importantly, they were all happy to work for peanuts. Given the time of year it was, Church’s old buddies were all either graduating or finishing up their semester of coursework, leaving them free to come to Blue Sky.

None of these people had ever worked on a commercial computer game before. In fact, most of them hadn’t even played any commercial computer games recently, having been ensconced for the last several years inside the ivory tower of MIT, where the nature of gaming was markedly different, being a culture of creation rather than strictly one of consumption. And yet, far from being a disadvantage, the team’s sheer naivete proved to be the opposite, making them oblivious to the conventional wisdom about what was possible. Doug Church:

I had actually played Space Rogue because one of my friends had a Mac, but the clusters [at MIT] were all Unix boxes so I ran X-Trek and NetHack and things, but I hadn’t played a PC game in five years or something. So we just said, “Let’s do a really cool dungeon game in 3D, let’s go.” It’s interesting because a lot of people talk about how we were doing such a Dungeon Master game, but as far as I know none of us had ever played Dungeon Master. We didn’t have any idea we were doing anything that wasn’t just obvious in some sense because we had no context and the last time any of us had played a [commercial] game was back when we were fourteen. We played games in college, but they were very different; you’re playing networked X-Trek or something, it doesn’t feel like a home-computer game.

At first, the new arrivals all crowded into the New Hampshire office Neurath was renting. But most of them were actually living together in a rambling old three-story house in the Boston suburbs, and it struck them as silly to make the drive out to New Hampshire every day. They soon convinced Neurath to let them work on the game from home. From dawn until night, seven days a week, they ate, drank, slept, and breathed Underworld there.

At a time when most studios had begun to systematize the process of game development, dividing their employees into rigid tiers of specialists — programmers, artists, designers, writers — Blue Sky made a virtue of their complete lack of formal organization. It was an org-chart-wielding middle manager’s nightmare; just about everybody wound up doing a little bit of everything. There was nothing like a designer giving instructions to a technical team. Instead, Blue Sky’s method of working was more akin to the way that things got done among the hackers at MIT — a crowd of equals pulling together (and occasionally pulling apart) to work toward a common goal. Anyone could contribute absolutely anywhere, knowing his ideas would be judged only on their intrinsic worth.

When it became clear that it was time to start making the actual dungeon the Underworld player would have to explore, the team divided up this design work in the most democratic manner imaginable: everybody made one level, then they were all combined together to make the eight-level final dungeon. Dan Schmidt, who had officially been hired for the role of “AI programmer,” agreed to take on the mantle of “writer,” which really meant coordinating with everyone to merge the levels into a seamless whole.

For most of the time the game was in development, Origin’s role and overall interest — or, rather, lack thereof — was a consistent sore spot. It often seemed to Blue Sky that the folks in Austin had entirely forgotten their existence way off in the frozen wastes of New England. This was good in the sense that they got to make exactly the game they wanted to make, but it didn’t do much for their confidence that a committed publisher would be ready and eager to market it properly when they were done. Warren Spector was busy with Wing Commander and, later, with an Ultima spinoff called Martian Dreams, so Origin initially assigned Jeff Johannigman to Blue Sky in the role of producer. Communication with him was nothing short of terrible. After going two full months without hearing a peep from him, Neurath tried to call him down in Austin, only to be told that he had left the company. A second producer was finally selected, but he wasn’t much more engaged. Blue Sky believed they were making a great, groundbreaking game, but it seemed that Origin really couldn’t care less.

In many ways, Underworld was at odds with the prevailing trends inside Origin, not to mention in much of the games industry at large. Following the huge success of the first Wing Commander, Origin was banking heavily on cinematic games with big, set-piece storylines. The company’s org chart reflected the new impetus, with film-making terminology — producer, director, screenwriter — shoehorned in absolutely everywhere. Blue Sky, on the other hand, was making something very different, an immersive, emergent, non-linear experience without cut scenes or chapter breaks. Yes, there was a plot of sorts — the player got cast into a dungeon to rescue a princess or die trying — along with puzzles to be solved, quests to be fulfilled, and other characters to be spoken to, but it was all driven by the player, not by any relentlessly unspooling Hollywood-style script. Origin, it seemed, wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, wasn’t quite sure where it fit. And certainly it’s easy enough, given Blue Sky’s unorthodox working methods, to understand why so many at Origin were skeptical of their ability to deliver a finished game at all.

The danger of Blue Sky’s approach was that they would keep iterating endlessly as they kept having better and better ideas. This tendency among hackers to never be able to finish something and walk away from it had already derailed more than one promising games studio — not least among them FTL, the makers of the storied Dungeon Master, who had yet to release a proper followup after some four years. (Dungeon Master II wouldn’t finally arrive until 1995.) The need to finish games on a timetable was, one might say, the reason that industry executives had begun to impose the very organizational structures that Blue Sky was now so happily eschewing. Doug Church remembers creating “four movement systems and three combat systems because we’d just write something: ‘Oh, this seems cool, go for it.’” Would they just continue chasing whatever shiny objects struck their fancy until the money ran out? That wouldn’t take much longer, given that Paul Neurath was largely financing the whole effort out of his pocket, with some help from his ever-loyal friend Ned Lerner, whose success with his Chuck Yeager flight simulators had left him with a bit of money to spare.

Thus they were all fortunate that Warren Spector, their once and future savior, suddenly returned on the scene late in 1991. Virtually alone among his colleagues down in Austin, Spector had been watching Blue Sky’s progress with intense interest. Now, having finished up Martian Dreams, he got himself assigned as Underworld‘s third producer. He had considerable clout inside the bigger company; as soon as he started to press the issue there, things started to happen on Origin’s side to reassure Blue Sky that their game would in fact be released if they could only deliver it.

Indeed, after almost eighteen months of uncertainty on the question, Origin finally made it official that, yes, Underworld would be released as an Ultima game. As usual, the star would be the Avatar, who was becoming quite a busy fellow between this game, the mainline Ultima games, and the recent pair of Worlds of Ultima spinoffs. The dungeon in question, meanwhile, would be none other than the Stygian Abyss, where the Avatar had found the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom at the end of Ultima IV. Underworld‘s backstory would need to be bent and hammered enough to make this possible.

Blue Sky soon discovered that becoming an official Ultima game, while great for marketing purposes and for their own sense of legitimacy, was something of a double-edged sword. Origin demanded that they go back through all the text in the game to insert Ultima‘s trademark (and flagrantly misused) “thees” and “thous,” provoking much annoyance and mockery. And Origin themselves made a cinematic introduction for the game in Austin, featuring Richard Garriott, one of the industry’s worst voice actors of all time — and that, friends, is really saying something — in the leading role, bizarrely mispronouncing the word “Stygian.” It seems no one at Origin, much less at Blue Sky, dared to correct Lord British’s diction… (The British magazine PC Review‘s eventual reaction to the finished product is one for the ages: “I had to listen to it two or three times before I fully grasped what was going on because for the first couple of times I was falling about laughing at the badly dubbed Dick Van Dyke cockney accents that all these lovable Americans think we sound like. You know: ‘Awlright, Guv’noor, oop the happle un stairs!’”)

While Origin made the dodgy intro in Texas, Warren Spector got everybody in New England focused on the goal of a finished, shipped game. Doug Church:

Not only was he [Spector] great creatively to help us put finishing touches on it and clean it up and make it real, but he also knew how to finish projects and keep us motivated and on track. He had that ability to say, “Guys, guys, you’re focused in totally the wrong place.” He had that ability to help me and the rest of the guys reset, from the big-picture view of someone who has done it before and was really creative, but who also understood getting games done. It was a huge, huge win.

It’s very easy in hacker-driven game development to wind up with a sophisticated simulation that’s lots of fun for the programmers to create but less fun to actually play. Spector was there to head off this tendency as well at Blue Sky, as when he pared down an absurdly complex combat system to something simple and tactilly intuitive, or when he convinced the boys not to damage the player’s character every time he accidentally bumped into a wall. That, said Spector, “doesn’t sound like fun to me” as a player — and it was the player’s fun, he gently taught Blue Sky, that had to be the final arbitrator.

At Spector’s behest, Neurath rented a second office in Boston — officially known as the “Finish Underworld Now” office — and insisted that everyone leave the house and come in to work there every day during the last two months of the project. The more businesslike atmosphere helped them all focus on getting to the end result, as did Spector himself, who spent pretty much all of those last two months in the office with the team in Boston.

Spector did much to make Blue Sky feel like a valued part of the Origin family, but the relationship still remained rocky at times — especially when the former learned that the latter intended to release Ultima Underworld just two weeks before Ultima VII, the long-awaited next title in the franchise’s main series. It seemed all but certain that their game would get buried under the hype for Ultima VII, would be utterly forgotten by Origin’s marketers. Certainly marketing’s initial feedback hadn’t been encouraging. They were, they said, having trouble figuring out how to advertise Ultima Underworld. Its graphics were spectacular when seen in motion, but in still screenshots they didn’t look like much at all compared to a Wing Commander II or an Ultima VII. Blue Sky seethed with frustration, certain this was just an excuse for an anemic, disinterested advertising campaign.

In Origin’s defense, the problem their marketers pointed to was a real one. And it wasn’t really clear what they could have done about the release-date issue either. The original plan had been, as they didn’t hesitate to remind Blue Sky, to release Ultima Underworld in time for the Christmas of 1991, but the protracted development had put paid to that idea. Now, Blue Sky themselves needed Ultima Underworld to come out as quickly as possible because they needed the royalties in order to survive; for them, delaying it was simply impossible. Meanwhile Origin, who had cash-flow concerns of their own, certainly wasn’t going to delay Ultima VII, quite possibly the most expensive computer game ever made to that point, for a mere spinoff title. The situation was what it was.

The balloons fly as Doug Church, Paul Neurath, and Warren Spector celebrate Ultima Underworld‘s release.

Whatever was to happen in terms of sales, Blue Sky’s young hackers did get the satisfaction in late March of 1992 of seeing their game as a boxed product on store shelves, something more than one of them has described as a downright surreal experience. Dan Schmidt:

We were a bunch of kids straight out of school. This was the first professional project we’d ever done. We felt lucky that anyone would see it at all. We’d go into a games store and see our game there on the shelf. Someone would walk up to it, and we’d want to say, “No! No! You don’t want to buy that! We just hacked that together. It’s not, like, a real game.”

In the beginning, sales went about as expected. A snapshot from Origin’s in-house newsletter dated July 31, 1992, shows 71,000 copies of Ultima VII shipped, just 41,000 copies of Ultima Underworld. But, thanks to ecstatic reviews and strong word of mouth — Origin may have struggled to see how groundbreaking the game really was, but gamers got it immediately — Ultima Underworld kept on selling, getting stronger every month. “It was the first game that ever gave me a sense of actually being in a real place,” wrote one buyer in a letter to Origin, clear evidence that Blue Sky had absolutely nailed their original design goal. Soon industry scuttlebutt had it outselling Ultima VII by two to one. Paul Neurath claims that Ultima Underworld eventually sold more than half a million copies worldwide, an extraordinary figure for the time, and considerably more than Ultima VII or, indeed, any previous Ultima had managed.

Shortly after Ultima Underworld‘s release, Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner finally did the obvious: they merged their two companies. They had recently discovered that another, slightly older company was already operating under the name of “Blue Sky Software,” making educational products. So, they named the merged entity Looking Glass Productions. Their first release under the name would be Ultima Underworld II.

Two months after the first Ultima Underworld appeared, a tiny company out of Dallas, Texas, who called themselves id Software released Wolfenstein 3D, another first-person game set in a 3D environment. Their game, however, had none of the complexity of Ultima Underworld, with its quests and puzzles and magic spells and its character to develop and even feed. In id’s game, you ran through the environment and killed things — period.

For the remainder of the 1990s, 3D games would exist on a continuum between the cool, high-concept innovation of Looking Glass and the hot, visceral action of id, who were interested in innovation in the area of their graphics technology but somewhat less so in terms of their basic gameplay template. id would win the argument in terms of sales, but Looking Glass would make some of the fascinating and forward-looking games of the decade. “We were thinking, ‘Why don’t we just run around and shoot?’” says Austin Grossman, another early Looking Glass employee. “But we were interested in simulation and depth. We were driven by this holy grail of simulated worlds, by that enabled choice and creativity of the player.”

We’ll be following the two companies’ artistic dialog for a long time to come as we continue with this history. First, though, we need to give Ultima Underworld a closer look, from the perspective of the player this time, to understand why it’s not just an example of groundbreaking technology but a superb example of pure game design as well.

(Sources: the books Game Design: Theory & Practice 2nd edition by Richard Rouse III, Ultima VII and Underworld: More Avatar Adventures by Caroline Spector, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic by Brad King and John Borland, and Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation: Modeling, Rendering, and Animating with 3D Computer Graphics by Michael O’Rourke; Questbusters of February 1992 and September 1992; PC Review of June 1992; Game Developer of April/May 1995, June/July 1995, August/September 1995, December 1995/January 1996, and April/May 1996; Commodore Magazine of January 1988; Origin’s internal newsletter Point of Origin from January 17 1992, March 27 1992, May 8 1992, August 28 1992, and December 18 1992. Online sources include “Ahead of Its Time: A History of Looking Glass” on Polygon, an interview with Paul Neurath and Doug Church on the old Ultima Online site, Gambit Game Lab’s interviews with Paul Neurath and Dan Schmidt, and Matt Barton’s interview with Paul Neurath. My thanks to Dan Schmidt and Ned Lerner for making the time to talk with me personally about their careers.

Ultima Underworld and its sequel can be purchased from GOG.com.)

Wing Commander was actually still known as Wingleader at this time. ↩

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/life-off-the-grid-part-1-making-ultima-underworld/