Development confidential and source code of the game that the creator of Ultima originally created will be released

ByMarco Vanoli

It is said to be one of the originators of computer RPG "UltimaMr. Richard Garriott, author of the series, will be present at the Cloud Funding site Kickstarter in March 2013Fantasy RPG "Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues" solicited investment, And succeeded in gathering 1,911,275 dollars (about 182 million yen). After that Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken VirtuesOfficial siteFunding collection has been continued, and about 2 million dollars (about 382 million yen) is currently collected as the article writing.

With attention being drawn in what form Shroud of the Avatar will receive formal release, the game developed by Mr. Gyriat as a high school student is the first RPG in the world "Dungeons & Dragons"It turned out that it was a game like Shroud of the Avatar, its development privacy and source code are released on the official website of Shroud of the Avatar.

Richard Garriott's D & amp; D # 1 Contest! | Shroud of the Avatar
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?p=39149

The first game developed by Garriott was the source of UltimaAchala baseNot the table RPG named "D & D # 1"Dungeons & DragonsIt was heavily influenced by this.

D & D # 1 was developed in 1977 when Mr. Garriott was still a high school student. The birth of D & D # 1 was triggered by one bet exchanged between Mr. Gyriot and his father. Mr. Gyriot, thenmain frameYaMinicomputerIt was said that teletypes that were used as terminals for the user interface of Yahoo made a lot of programs and simple game code from junior high school students eagerly.


Among programs created by Mr. Gyriot, "ionosphereCalculating Radio Frequency in "There are sophisticated things, and we have won a prize at international science recital. My father who watched such a son's talent gave Mr. Gyarrit a proposal of betting that "If you can make a full-scale RPG, you can buy Apple II".

Even if RPG can not be created, it is about the time that we lost development even if we can not create an RPG, and betting was quite advantageous for Mr. Garriott. Mr. Gyarit who accepted his father's proposal started to make full-scale RPG from that day. It was one teletype that was set up at Mr. Garriott 's high school.

The teletype used by Mr. Garriott is a 16 bit minicomputer series via an acoustic modemPDP-11It was connected to. Mr. Garriott was writing a program on a tape made of paper in a teletype and executing a program created by loading it into a terminal connected to a computer outside the school.


The executed program is an RPG like Dungeons & Dragons, and the player searches treasure hidden in the dungeon while fighting monsters. The developed game was named "D & D # 1". The play screen of D & D # 1 is composed of ASCII characters like the image below, "*" is the wall of the dungeon and the space is a passage. The characters such as "U" "X" "R" in the image also indicate objects in the dungeon.


Mr. Garriott who won the bet with his father and got Apple II developed 28 "D & D" between high school students. That last work "D & D # 28" is redeveloped under the name "D & D 28b" using Apple II, which will become the base of the later Ultima base.

On the official website of Shroud of the Avatar, we hosted the 1st anniversary event of Shroud of the Avatar, and in D & D # 1Source code (PDF), And is undertaking a contest to have users develop the reprint version of D & D # 1. In addition, Shroud of the Avatar is scheduled to be released in October 2014 for Windows, Mac and Linux.