'a Good Idea, Infinite Drive, And Lots Of Diet Pepsi': How Youtube...

The monsters in Akalabeth: World of Doom—the precursor to the Ultima series, sometimes called "Ultima 0" by fans and series creator Richard Garriott himself—look ridiculous. The thief is just a floating cloak, the mimic is a featureless cube, and the final monster (straight-up called a Balrog) looks a bit like Firebrand if he was crushed under a cartoon steamroller. To be fair, it was 1979 and Garriott was a teenager; the Apple 2 could only draw a pittance of lines on screen at a time, so he designed wireframe silhouettes for each enemy using coordinates on graph paper.

Akalabeth's world was a meager, primitive trick of the light. But in the days of text-based multi-user dungeons and Zork it was a crumb of revelatory proof that the emergent worlds players imagined in freeform sessions of Dungeons & Dragons—which was only five years old at this point—could be cast in a virtual mould, simulated with math, and explored through the phosphor glow of a CRT monitor.

YouTube documentarian Majuular, or Luke, was not at ground zero for this CRPG revolution. He grew up with the RPGs that live in Ultima's long shadow and had been making videos sifting through their complexities since age 14, informed by the zany YouTube stylings of the Angry Video Game Nerd and Classic Game Room. But while he was researching the origins of his most beloved game genre and reading the 450-page tome Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games, he was singularly struck by Akalabeth's futurism.

11 videos deep, the Majuular Ultima Retrospective embodies the fastidious, affectionate critique that is gaming YouTube at its best

"Something broke through in my head and I realized how incredible it was that somebody thought this up, made it, and put it out, and not solely Akalabeth," he recalled, measuring out each word with the enthusiasm and clarity of a habitual storyteller. "It was like the root of a tree that grew out and became this incredibly nuanced world of RPGs that I already had grown up with. I had always taken that seedling for granted."

Galvanized by Barton's book, Luke was inspired not only to play through the series which he had only dabbled in previously for himself, but to use his newest, relatively young YouTube channel to relay the wild story of its creation in his own way. Charting the sparse corridors of the World of Doom to the endless eccentricities of creator Garriott (represented in each game as the preposterously named Lord British, ruler of B

Source: PC Gamer