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Ultima
D&D28b
When Richard Garriott was highschool he wrote many little games for himself with QBasic.
He used to write out the games on paper first, because access to a terminal was so hard to come by. He literally wrote out lines of basic code in a notebook, and being a huge D&D fan, he called the codes D&D1, D&D2, D&D3, and eventually he created one called D&D28.
Then when Apple II computer came out with graphics (the earlier ones didn't have any) Richard re-wrote the old D&D games for Apple II.
One of them was D&D28 which became D&D28b and later Akalabet, the first Ultima.
Ultima - the creation
Richard Garriott is the creator of the Ultima series.
In 1979 he created a game called Akalabet, which is fairly simple in today's standards. He got the idea for the game from an even simplier game called "Escape".
The game so impressed the manager of a store that he convinced Richard to offer it for sale. After Richard spent 200 dollars on Ziplock bags and cover sheets he sold only 8 copies of the game.
But one found it's way to the west-coast software company California Pacific. Eventually California Pacific contacted Richard and asked if it could get the rights of the game and publish it. Richard agreed.
Releasing the game on 5 1/4" floppies, the game was a big hit, selling 30,000 copies. Dissatisfied with the original cover sheet design, a new one was commissioned by Richard from aquaintance Denis Loubet, who goes on to provide artwork, both traditional and digital, for every Ultima game up to Ultima IX.
Thus begun Richard's job with computer games.
He started a company called Origin Systems Inc. and started to create games.
His next job was to create Ultima 1, the First Age of Darkness.
Later in 1992 Electronic Arts bought Origin. Richard realized that such a small company like Origin couldn't stand by it's own. So Origin merged with Electronic Arts.
Then, in 1999 Ultima 9: Ascension came out. It was pulled away from the stores because of problems (bugs and such). It came back in 2000 but it still had lots of bugs.
Luckily more patches were made to make the last single player Ultima better.
Where Ultima got it's name?
Ultima was originally going to be called Ultimatum, but the name was already in use.
Richard shortened the name making it Ultima.
The meaning of 'ultima' is latin and it means 'farthest'.
So Ultima is actually Farthest, a land far away.