Courtesy of Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum, and to the hard work of both him and the team at the Wing Commander CIC, Ultima Aiera is pleased to present 5 animated sequences of Ultima Online game assets. These were originally just several series of images, but have been rendered to animated GIFs for web display. If I get more ambitious, I’ll render these and the Ultima 8 monster animations in a QuickTime-friendly format as well.
These animations were, presumably, discovered in the deep recesses of the Origin archives at Electronic Arts (BioWare Mythic), and were likely copied during the Origin Archive Project done in the summer of 2008.
Download the source images:
* Daemon (ZIP) (886.9 KiB, 655 hits)
* Dragon (ZIP (641.2 KiB, 592 hits)
* Fire Elemental (ZIP) (593.3 KiB, 550 hits)
* Lizard Man (ZIP) (67.5 KiB, 558 hits)
* Sea Serpent (ZIP) (437.7 KiB, 572 hits)
Now, a few disclaimers.
The images on display here are animated GIFs, but the files hosted for download are ZIP archives of Targa TGA-format images.
Although the images are quite small as resolution goes, and not overly large in terms of file size, they may take a while to load when you click on them due to their animated nature. Once you click on them, they will appear in a lightbox formatted to fit your monitor resolution; right-clicking on the lightbox and selecting “View Image” (a feature not available in all browsers) will take you to the image directly.
Finally, enjoy. Download up the images. Admire the detail and workmanship that went into them. They afford an interesting glimpse into the development history of the online entry in the Ultima series. This is Ultima history at its finest, and Aiera is indebted to Joe Garrity, Electronic Arts, Mythic Entertainment/BioWare Mythic, BanditLOAF and the team at the Wing Commander CIC, and everyone who worked at Origin for it.
