Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar Retrospective | Reimagining the RPG

Please never get rid of this intro. It makes me so happy.

I think this guy might be the 100% best retro “RPG” YouTuber to ever do it.

You know someone's content is gold when you immediately click on a new video as soon as it drops

For about 3 years my analysis of Ultima IV was the second most popular video about it on YouTube. It hasn’t yet, but, in a short while, this video will surpass mine… And I couldn’t be happier. Ultima IV is a very special game. The experience of playing it 3 years ago is one that had a tremendous impact on me. If this excellent video brings greater attention to it – far greater than it had in decades – there will be more people giving this game a shot and… maybe at least one of those people will discover in this game the same treasure I had. So, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for making this video. Thank you for keeping Ultima alive.

Ah yes. My favorite. A feature length film about a game that I have not played and have never thought of before.I can’t wait to watch it all.

Dude you dropped this at 10:30 PM EST on a Saturday like we ain't got responsibilities, now the kids gotta starve tonight cause Daddy's too busy learning about Ultima

Just got off work, had a long shit ass grinder of a day, and this hits literally the minute I clock out. Thanks, king.

Never have I asked the question, "I wonder if Rich Evans has ever played Ultima?" but that's the magic of a Majuular video, boyos.

I'm truly impressed by the amount of footage and background info you've managed to find and gather for this series for the developer history parts, you're like a one man documentary crew. Bits like the Roe R Adams nod are invaluable gaming history, and things like that are often in risk of being lost to time when chronicling the 70s - 80s, early to mid 90s game history. Maybe you and Matt Barton could team up one day

New Mangojuular on a Saturday night? Excellent indeed.

Seeing one of the creators of Ultima with a T-shirt of Bank of Brazil is a crossover of universes I was not prepared for. Not even the writers of marvel could come with something so wild

I'll be honest and say I really like "Majuular story time" at the start of every video. I'm a brainlet that uses youtube to eat dinner, and the history recap at the beginning is pretty fun stuff.

Yooo, just as I plopped my plate of supper upon my desk, this video dropped its way into my recommended!

Thanks for giving me a glimpse into a world I knew nothing about. It’s interesting to see how some of the ideas in this game reappear in so many RPGs decades after.

You know it's good content when youtube's notification actually works and notify you of an upload

I think the biggest appeal of these videos is the history lesson as well as gaming lore. The contemporary footage adds a lot of vibes, especially the nice blizzard footage. Anyway, learning about the developers and where they were at while making the game, adds to the game section of the video so much. So often ive played a game and found myself wondering "what were they thinking?!," sometimes happily, sometimes with bemusement and sometimes even anger. I've seen the making of DOOM and the guys at id, including transdimensional weigher of souls, John Carmack. This is a lot like those videos but about way nerdier guys making weird fantasy rpgs

Terrific video. I played this game an enormous amount when it was new, and it helped inspire me to write RPGs for a living. Two notes. 1. The Apple version I played had a cheat code which showed your levels in each virtue, a number from 1 to 100. 100 was full Avatar status. However, I found that if you were penalized in a way that dropped your level to exactly 0, it wrapped around to 100 and you got full Avatar status. I was speedrunning this game in 1986. 2. There WAS a clue to the final answer, infinity. When you got full avatar status at a circle, you briefly saw a single rune. If you wrote those runes down and translated them using the docs, you got letters that spelled "infinity."

Just wow. Near the end I couldn't stop being teary eyed, both hearing how Ultima IV affected people and how it affected the industry, as well as remembering Akira Toriyama, may he rest in peace, both for his contributions to the arts, and for lending his creativity to video games. While I DEARLY want to hear about how you cover the less fortunate Ultima titles, this was truly a remarkable piece Maj. Thank you for making it.

New Majuular AND new Red Letter Media....some times good things do happen. Thank you for the awesome, high quality videos. So much history.

Thanks for doing Ultima justice. My favorites are 4 for the lore, 5 for the perfection of Ultima mechanics, and 6 for nostalgia of my childhood. Ultima Online gets an honorable mention for introducing me to the existence of the series.