This keychain looks like it would hurt in your pocket

Here we see an ad for the Super NES version of Ultima VII: The Black Gate. Apparently, when VII received its port to Nintendo’s console, its Roman numeral designation got the axe. As a result, the title became merely Ultima: The Black Gate.

I’m not a big fan of the SNES ports of the Ultima games (VI and VII). In the process of chopping things down to fit in a reasonably-sized ROM cartridge, a lot of content and features were lost (including the Roman numeral in this case). But at the same time, those ports likely gave console fans a taste of the Ultima universe that they would not have had otherwise.

As for me, I was lucky enough to originally play the Ultima games on the PC (and the Atari ST, in the case of Ultima III), so I guess I am spoiled.

Discussion Topic of the Week: In your opinion, what’s the best console port of any Ultima game?

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See Also:

Ultima VII Immortality Contest (RSOTW, 2007)
Ultima VI (RSOTW, 2009)
Ultima V (RSOTW, 2009)
The Savage Empire (RSOTW, 2010)
Tiny Pocket Ultima (RSOTW, 2013)

Tags: 1994, advertisement, EGM, FCI, Nintendo, Origin, PC ports, Pony, Retro Scan, RPGs, Super NES, Ultima, Ultima VII

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2015 at 11:52 am and is filed under Computer Games, Computer History, Gaming History, Regular Features, Retro Scan of the Week, Retrogaming, Vintage Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.