Ultima IX/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Christmas Rushed: EA wanted to get Ultima IX released in time for Christmas with huge chunks of content cut or dummied out, seeing Ultima Online and the in-development Ultima Online 2 as larger money makers than another single player game.
  • Creator Killer: The game was received with disappointment by fans upon release, and this — combined with a development ridden with problems — is seen as responsible for driving Origin to closure. See Executive Meddling and Troubled Production below for examples.
  • Executive Meddling: And a hell of a lot of it too.
  • The Other Marty: Michael Dorn originally recorded the Guardian's dialogue for this game. Due to the amount of Executive Meddling, however, the storyline ended up being radically altered, and Dorn was too busy with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to record the new dialogue. As a result, they ended up having to bring back the Guardian's original voice actor Bill Johnson.
  • Real Life Writes the Plot: The reason why the Avatar opens the Stygian Abyss by summoning Pyros, rather than the originally scripted Slasher of Veils. Because of the development schedule being cut, and the fact that they'd already created a CGI Pyros for an unrelated cutscene in the original plotline, it worked out much quicker to just stick him in the cutscene where the Slasher would have been summoned, and alter the dialogue accordingly.
    • For those who don't know why this is bad... Pyros is not supposed to exist anymore. He's gone, and his essence was consumed by the Avatar back in Ultima VIII.
    • Even worse: in the game Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, you actually destroy the abyss.
  • Troubled Production: Lead creator Richard Garriott originally planned to have Ultima IX pick up exactly where the previous game left off (the Avatar confronting the Guardian on the latter's homeworld). However, after realizing that the fanbase likely wanted a return to the series' roots, he scrapped the idea. Then, as described under Executive Meddling, when development was underway, Electronic Arts moved most of the team over to work on Ultima Online, this held development in limbo for a year, which meant the graphics of the game become woefully outdated due to rapid development in graphics technology, and Origin had to scrap the whole game had and start over from scratch in new engine. Then several key members of the Origin left due to displeasure with the management, which co-incided with EA breathing down Origin's neck with a unnegotional deadline for the game, which at this point had been under development for almost 5 years. Origin was basically had no choice but to rush the game out, cutting the story down to a bare bones minimum and shipping with a large number of bugs unresolved.
    • And things didn't end there either: when pre-production on what was to become Ultima X: Odyssey was underway, EA cancelled all of Origin's other planned projects (including Ultima Online 2) and forced a relocation of Odyssey's development from Austin, Texas to California, leaving developers who couldn't make the move due to family issues out of work. This subsequently led to the project being scrapped altogether, and Origin eventually being disbanded a short time later.
  • Vaporware: In-game, the Avatar can watch a preview for the cancelled Ultima Online 2 MMORPG.
  • What Could Have Been: There are screenshots in existence of the early build of the game, which would have been viewed from above (like the other games in the series), but still featured enviroments and characters which were rendered in 3D. The decision to rework the entire game engine into effectively being a third person shooter was made by the game publishers because 3D games were popular.
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