Feed the Gamer looks at this very question and comes away with the conclusion that Looking Glass — the studio that developed both Ultima Underworld games — was very, very awesome indeed.

Founded in 1990, Looking Glass was not only responsible for some of that decade’s most innovative and memorable games, but was also a place where people like Ken Levine (BioShock), Warren Spector (Deus Ex) and Seamus Blackley (Xbox) all worked under the one roof.

The product of a merger between two companies, Blue Sky Productions and Lerner Research, Looking Glass Studios was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Developing mostly for the PC, Looking Glass’ first few games were published by PC gaming giant Origin (Wing Commander, Ultima), but by 1995 the studio was developing and publishing its own titles.

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Looking Glass’ first game (well, while its development side was still known as Blue Sky) was 1992′s Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, a first-person role-playing game that not only broke from the traditions of conventional Ultima games, but in many ways blew right past them, its immersive setting and (for the time) amazing 3D graphics making it a critical success.

The games which came next read like a “greatest hits collection” of PC gaming in the 1990s…

Eidos — massively in debt at the time — shut Looking Glass down in the year 2000, a rather ignoble end for such a talented development house. One could almost argue that such was the curse that afflicted all developers who published Ultima titles, I suppose. But in their short span, the did produce some genre-defining — and genre-shattering — games, which frankly still hold up very well today.

Matthew Jason Weise, writing at Eludamos (The Journal for Computer Game Culture), looks at Irrational Games’ hit title Bioshock from a “critical historical perspective” (thanks for the link, Sergorn!), and notes that the game owes much to the two major franchises for which Looking Glass Studios is remembered: System Shock and Ultima Underworld.

How’s this for an opener?

According to Bioshock’s creators at Irrational Games, Bioshock is the spiritual successor to System Shock 2. Yet System Shock 2 did not originate all the conventions Bioshock employs. Nor did the original System Shock. To truly understand where Bioshock comes from one has to go all the way back to System Shock’s predecessor, Ultima Underworld, released by Looking Glass Studios. Though Looking Glass made games using the first person perspective during the same time period as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake and Half-Life it never made games that could accurately be called first-person shooters. Looking Glass had its own trajectory of first-person game design independent from first-person shooters. Their games experimented with story, character, and immersion in ways first-person shooters did not. Bioshock would not be the game it is without Looking Glass’s innovations.

Long-time fans of the Ultima series won’t find much in the way of new information about Ultima Underworld, and those who keep informed about where new studios draw inspiration from probably won’t find much in the essay as a whole that is novel. That said, it’s a very good look at the historical progression from Ultima Underworld to System Shock to Bioshock, and the legacy and inspiration that those earlier titles gave to Irrational’s (actually quite awesome) hit game.

He wasn’t sure he was going to do it, and wasn’t sure he could secure a copy of the game, but Spoony evidently managed to overcome both doubts. Here is his (just shy of) ten minute review of Looking Glass Studios’ classic, Ultima Underworld:

Of course, it’s the first of a two-part series, meaning that at some point Spoony will get around to reviewing Ultima Underworld 2. I suspect that’ll be another lengthy review, akin to his summary of Ultima 7.

Just in brief, I don’t completely agree with his criticisms of the game (although the voice acting is rather awful…and something I don’t remember being present in the diskette version of the game), and I wish he’d spent more time on just what a technical marvel the game was in its day (as compared to its closest competitor in the first person realm, the first Wolfenstein game).

That said, the bit where he’s protesting in full medieval garb is rather funny.

Update: And just like that, a day later, he’s posted his review of Ultima Underworld 2:

A bunch of you have commented below — correctly, I think — that he really doesn’t get the game, and could should have had a nice warm mug of RTFM before he undertook his attempt to play it. In fairness, I can somewhat sympathize with how he struggled with the sewers, because I find them quite difficult as well. Still, it’s not like the fact that you’re supposed to circumvent the headlesses is any kind of arcane knowledge. Ditto the reaper guarding the armoury key. Both of these things are there for the truly hardcore gamers to try and beat — and good on them if they can. For the rest of us, there’s a side route.

Infinitron commented that after the glowing review Spoony gave Ultima 5, there might have been a reasonable expectation that his review of later games would have been similarly positive. I would argue that it became apparent with Spoony’s review of Ultima 6 that no such even-handedness was to be expected. Ultima 5 got a pass because it occupies a special place in Spoony’s heart and history as a gamer, but almost every other review he’s turned in has been of a decidedly modernist bent. He doesn’t review these games in their historical context; he reviews them (essentially) as though they were new releases in this day and age, and lambastes them accordingly. Game mechanics have changed, evolved, and improved since the halcyon days of Looking Glass Studios’ epic series and John Carmack’s raycast pseudo-3D imitations thereof.

Dan Schmidt, former Looking Glass Studios programmer, shares one other little story from the development of Ultima Underworld:

Jon Maiara (the same guy responsible for the Pac-Man homage) was writing the conversations for [the ghouls], and included all sorts of things like the opportunity for you to make fun of Eyesnackís name, to which he would respond by making fun of your name in return. You see the edge case, of course, right?

Do read the whole (short) thing; it’s just the right kind of amusing, and I’m pretty sure it’ll make you miss the days when games couldn’t utilize more than the first 640K of memory. Good times, good times.

File this news item under “what does it mean?“: 

In Zyngaís 10th acquisition in ten months, the social gaming giant is announcing the acquisition of Massachusetts game developer Floodgate Entertainment.

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Floodgate was spawned from computer game developer Looking Glass Studio. In 1990, Neurath founded Blue Sky Productions, which became LookingGlass in 1992. The company folded and Neurath founded Floodgate in 2000.

And Looking Glass was, of course, the studio that gave us the System Shock and Ultima Underworld series.

Now, to be fair, Floodgate produced a raft of games — including some social games — that weren’t particularly RPGish in nature. Still, Neurath is no stranger to making top-notch, story-driven RPGs, which makes me wonder if perhaps Zynga isn’t positioning itself to take on both whatever Richard Garriott has coming (with New Britannia) and whatever BioWare Mythic is working on (with their secret project).

Gamasutra is reporting that former Looking Glass Studios game designer Doug Church, who worked on the System Shock and Ultima Underworld games, has signed on with Half Life developer Valve.

No word has emerged yet concerning what project(s) Church has been assigned to.

And that’s basically it for today…slow news. C’est la vie.

(via)

A big thanks to Cody “Ceearrbee” Baxter for bringing this to my attention via Twitter.

I remember a friend telling me, just before the first Narnia movie came out, that Narnia was his fantasy world as a kid; he had often dreamed of walking the shores of that fantastic land, of having his breath stolen at seeing Cair Paravel’s beauty, of speaking with Aslan^[1].

For Dan Griliopoulos, at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Ultima Underworld 2 is much the same thing. And his essay on both the incredible game (for its time and in general) that Underworld 2 was and how he turned Lord British’s castle into his own personal method of loci — in which he stored every memory of past good times and lost loves — is…simply awesome.

Seriously, read the whole thing. I defy you to remain unmoved.

[1] For me, Britannia circa Ultima 6 filled this role. Hell, I used to set up “my” house in every playthrough of the game…usually in Minoc, for some reason.