Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness

Originally known simply as Ultima, this was the first entry in the long-running franchise of the same name, conceived of by Richard Garriott, and developed by Origin Systems. Players take control of a blank slate protagonist and fight against the evil wizard Mondain, with cameo appearances from Garriott himself as his alter-ego “Lord British”. An early genre-defining work, Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness made use of both top-down adventuring and first-person perspective dungeon-crawling, with tropes and ideas inspired by high fantasy tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons.