/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9947382
No. I'm not shitposting. I'm being serious. This is what Paul Neurath (Looking Glass founder and Underworld's lead designer) had to say about Ultima Underworld's influences:
https://www.ttlg.com/articles/uw2.asp

>Some of my favorite games at that time were the classic CRPGs, such as the Wizardry and Ultima series. I can fondly remember playing the original Wizardry with a group of friends huddled around an Apple II. However, with their abstract visuals, these games required a bit of imagination to achieve suspension of disbelief. In the latter 1980's a game called Dungeon Master was released on the Amiga. While the game play was fairly standard fare, its first person 3D perspective, with detailed bitmapped walls and animated sprite monsters, had more impact and immediacy than prior CRPGs. This game provided a glimpse into the future.

> After finishing Space Rogue for Origin in 1989, I decided to try my hand at a traditional fantasy CRPG game, but with a new approach that would bring even more immediacy than Dungeon Master. I wrote a high level game design for what was then simply called Underworld, and contracted with Doug Wike, an x-Origin artist, to do concept artwork. It seemed promising.

So yeah, it was Wizardry and Dungeon Master. You could argue Ultima as well but then again the key genre they were going after was the first-person, grid-based dungeon crawler genre. Ultima only did that in the dungeons and they'd abandonned that idea by Ultima VI in 1990.