Richard Garriott’s Handwritten Ultima II Notes Surface

Ultima series creator Richard Garriott shared a couple of pages of handwritten notes from the development of Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress with the folks of fansite Ultima Codex, who promptly posted some high-quality scans of the notes and a brief note about them on their website.

The two pages show a list of features planned for the title and some very early and very rough plans for the packaging of the game. What’s most fascinating is how removed they are from today’s game design documents. These are brainstormed scribbles that mostly offer an insight on what a 21 year old Richard Garriott thought would be cool. As pointed out by the folks at the Ultima Codex, though, they’re also a very relevant piece of history for the series:

The notes themselves are pretty self-explanatory; one records the need for Ultima 2 to be well-packaged for presentation, and the other lists a bunch of features or events that are present in Ultima 2. Interestingly, the game of Nim merits a mention in the feature list, though you’ll note that it has been crossed out. It would ultimately not be until Ultima 6 that a playable form of Nim would be included in an Ultima game.

And, as Richard Garriott points out, Ultima 2 was the first game in history that shipped in a box, and the first to include a cloth map and a trinket. And we know, of course, what followed from that.