Game 160: Ultima: Escape from Mount Drash (1983)

The game title is abbreviated "Mt." everywhere but the title screen.

    

Ultima: Escape from Mount Drash

United States

Keith Zabalaoui (developer); Sierra On-Line (publisher)

Released 1983 for Commodore VIC-20; ported to Windows in 2003

Date Started: 23 August 2014
Date Ended: 23 August 2014

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 8
Ranking at Time of Posting: 2/158 (1%)

Ranking at Game #457: 7/457 (2%)

This is the story as it's been told in plenty of places elsewhere: In 1983, Keith Zabalaoui wrote a 3-D dungeon run for the Commodore VIC-20 and had it published through Sierra. (Sources vary as to whether Zabalaoui wrote the game independently and then offered it to Sierra, or whether Sierra approached Zabalaoui with the basic idea of the game already in mind.) Zabalaoui was a friend and colleague of Richard Garriott (he has credits on Akalabeth, Ultima, and Ultima II), and Sierra had been Garriott's publisher for Ultima II. Garriott thus granted permission to slap the Ultima label on the otherwise-unrelated game. (Some sources say it was done without Garriott's consent, but this seems to have been debunked by Garriott himself.) For the subtitle, the publisher chose one of the random dungeons in the first Ultima: Mt. Drash.

Technically, the Ultima dungeon is the Mines of Mt. Drash.

By 1983, the VIC-20 market was in serious decline, and Drash couldn't even be played on a vanilla machine: it required an 8K memory expansion and a cassette reader (most VIC-20 games were sold on cartridge). Sierra never had any faith in the game, only advertised it once, in the July 1983 Compute!, and only produced about 3000 copies on cassette. Sales were low, unsold copies were destroyed, and for years Sierra denied that the game ever existed.

The game didn't even merit its own ad.

  
(For a longer summary debunking common myths, I highly recommend Jimmy Maher's May 2013 article at The Digital Antiquarian. Keith Zabalaoui went on to have a productive career, founding Atomic Games and serving as lead developer for well-received strategy games like the V for Victory series and the Close Combat series, the latter of which was apparently so realistic that the U.S. Marine Corps contracted with Atomic to produce tactical training games.)

Naming the game Ultima had been a cheap attempt to cash in on the growing fame of Garriott's series, and while this didn't work in the way Sierra intended, it ironically worked decades later. Over the years--particularly as Ultima fame grew--Drash became known as a famous "lost" game. When copies first started to emerge in the early 2000s--one famously discovered at the bottom of a cliff in Vancouver, where some retailer had dumped unsold games--they sold at auction for thousands of dollars. Only about a dozen or so original copies are currently known to exist. For most games, we don't even bother to tally the number of known physical copies, but the Ultima title has made Drash undeservedly famous.

The Museum of Computer Adventure Game History has this box, famously recovered from a trash heap at the bottom of a cliff in Vancouver.

The box image was taken from an ad for Ultima's Sierra re-release.

  
The consequences of this undeserved fame extend to my blog, where, for the sake of its Ultima pseudo-history, I am offering an entry on it despite it being 1) not an Ultima game and 2) not an RPG. It is specifically lacking all three of my core RPG elements: there is no character development, there is no inventory, and combat is entirely action-based. Your character has no attributes, never finds anything, never gets any stronger, and doesn't even have a name. To play, I took time to find a VIC-20 copy rather than the PC remake everyone else seems to play. This VIC-20 version was presumably copied off one of the recovered tapes, though I haven't yet found anyone taking credit for that.

The back story, which is not referenced in-game and has no impact on gameplay, is that you are the prisoner of "the evil, wretched Garrintrots" (an obvious and weird play on "Garriott") and must escape 15 levels of timed mazes. The levels get progressively harder as you make your escape. Starting on Level 5, for instance, you have to find one of two gems before you find the exit. Starting on Level 7, the maze's corridors no longer appear on the automap. Starting on Level 9, monsters no longer appear on the automap. On level 11, you lose your compass and position on the automap, and Levels 13 and 14 require you to find both gems.

Level 6 in Mount Drash. You can see the revealed part of the automap in the upper-right. The X's on the map are monsters and the diamonds are gems (I've retrieved the one in the upper-right corner). My character is the blue circle, and the exit is ahead of him in the upper-left corner.

By Level 8, you can still see the monsters and gems, but the corridors themselves no longer appear on the automap.

  
All 15 mazes have you start in the bottom-right and exit in the upper-left, with the two gems in the other two corners. You have only 99 seconds to complete the levels, which are randomly-generated for each new game. Because of the nature of the random generation, some of the levels are remarkably quick and easy--at least until the penultimate two levels, when the need to collect both gems means you're running around the entire dungeon and fighting the timer.

This gameplay could have been exciting as an action game, but the lack of any other features makes it fall flat. You don't even see monsters or gems in the 3D view--only on the automap (at least until Level 9). The game could have strengthened its ties to Ultima by using the same monsters, but alas the two games share only "gremlins." There are only four other monsters in Drash, and they are unique to the game: floating orbs, dancing demons, phantoms, and purple slimes. Functionally, the different monster "types" make no difference, as they either die in a single hit or kill you in a single hit.

Lunging at some kind of beholder thing. I'm on Level 10 here--note the absence of monster features on the automap.

Monsters move to intercept you as you near them in the maze. On levels after 9, when you stop seeing them on the map, you have to keep a finger on "C," ready to use a timed thrust the moment you abruptly switch to the combat screen. Mercifully, the timer pauses during combat.

Combat is blunt and dumb, slightly reminiscent of Crown of Arthain from a couple years prior. You face off against the foe in a side-view. He minces towards you, the speed increasing as the levels get higher. Your three moves are thrust, "counterthrust," and return to the "ready position." If there are any tactics associated with this--such as the need to ever return to the "ready position"--I don't see it. The trick to combat is more to do with timing than anything else: if you thrust right when the monster has closed about 4 or 5 steps, he'll immediately die. I found that if I missed this shot the first time, it was virtually impossible to kill him after that. He'd keep encroaching on me, and none of the flailing I did ever killed him. I understand the PC version is much easier.

You start the game with three "lives," and if a monster kills you, you lose one. Fortunately, this also removes the monster from the maze. If you lose all three lives, you get a quick message that you've failed, followed by a new maze on Level 1.

Losing a life.

Beyond this, the only tactics you have are in the form of three spells: "Blast" destroys the wall in front of you; "Sleep" puts all monsters to sleep for three turns (allowing you to walk over them); and "Teleport" moves you to a new location within the level. You can cast three spells per level and "Blast" only three times in the entire game. You don't really need any of them until the last three levels, when they become vital.

When monsters aren't on the screen, the game displays your current rank, from "Qwimby" to "Questor," with a "Cadet" somehow outranking a "Corporal" on the way. I have no idea what a "Qwimby" is supposed to be; The Simpsons hadn't aired yet, so no help there.

Level 15, the last one, has no gems and no maze--just a long, winding corridor with about 10 combats, culminating in a flashing screen and a message that you've achieved "Questor" level. The game then resets and starts a new maze. A winning game takes less than 20 minutes, but it takes considerable luck to win, particularly given the mindless and unpredictable nature of combat. You have to get lucky with the maze designs, avoid as many monsters as possible, run past some with "Sleep," and get lucky in your hits with the others. Despite all of this, I was able to win "mostly honestly" in a couple of hours. I say "mostly honestly" because I used save states just before I wanted to capture particular screen shots, and I reloaded if a monster attacked and killed me while I was taking the screen shots.

The victory screen leaves me feeling nothing. Nothing.

I've seen some sources praise the music, which plays on a constant loop in the background. Among the selections are bits of Camille Saint-Saëns "Danse Macabre" (1874), Johann Sebastian Bach's "March in D Major" (c. 1722), and--during combat--Robert Schumann's "Knecht Ruprecht" (c. 1854). These are not in any way commonly-known pieces, especially (and sorry to trade in stereotypes here) by the average Texas teenager in the early 1980s. That he included them instead of something trite and obvious like "In the Hall of the Mountain King" is remarkable, although I can't say the VIC-20's sound capabilities do the music justice or sound good to modern ears. Still, if you're interested in the music, it's a good reason to play the VIC-20 version, as the PC port doesn't have any.

  

Lacking any RPG credentials, I expect Drash to provide one of the lowest GIMLET scores on record. Let's see:

• 1 point for the pitiful attempt at a back story that makes up the game world.

• 0 points for no character creation and development.

• 0 points for no NPCs.

• 1 point for the tactically-indistinguishable foes.

Of all the monsters to keep from Ultima . . .

• 1 point for the strategically-bereft combat system

• 0 points for no equipment.

• 0 points for no economy.

• 1 point for a quest that technically has an ending, but no actual plot.

• 2 points for the graphics, sound, and inputs. The automap works reasonably well and the music is an original touch. But the controls are sometimes unresponsive and the blank corridors don't deserve any credit.

• 2 points for gameplay. Too much is based on luck and I can't imagine wanting to replay it. It has the virtue of being short.

The final score of 8 puts it at the second-lowest rating I've given. To be fair, it never claims to be an RPG--it's much more an action/arcade game--and as a erstwhile VIC-20 owner, I think I might have had a modicum of fun with it when I was 10.

Because of its limited release, there are few contemporary reviews. A single paragraph in the July-August 1983 Computer Gaming World calls it "an intriguing adventure game because of its unique graphics and marvelous musical score," but it's not clear from the article (which is a long summary of available games) that the writers were doing anything other than parroting the press materials. Reviews from the post-rediscovery period have been far less kind, with Hardcore Gaming 101 calling it "absolutely, horribly unplayable," Ophidian Dragon calling it "truly, truly awful" in his "Blogging Ultima" series, and the one review available on MobyGames summarizing it thusly: "Without the Ultima brand on it, this game would be justly long forgotten."
  
Nonetheless, decades of Ultima fans have fallen for Sierra's cynical marketing gimmick and continue to fuel its legend. Despite his disdain for the game, Ophidian Dragon worked the story into a non-canonical history of Ultima in which clearing the monsters from Drash was the final quest of the hero of Akalabeth. Game programmer Kasper Fauerby produced a PC version in 2003. In 2006, Santiago Zapata (aka "Slash") created Mt. Drash: The Roguelike as part of the annual "Seven Day Roguelike Challenge." And now, look, I've gone and added to the unnecessary and unproductive perpetuation of the game's memory on a blog that's supposed to be about games that Drash is the opposite of.

Ironically, I'm leaving this faux Ultima for an Ultima clone. Let's see how Telnyr performs in comparison.