A Distant Friend.

We all have a number of favourite games, but there's always one that stands above all others and holds a special place in our hearts. Some games we rate highly because they were just plain fun, others because they were technically brilliant or graphically marvellous. My most treasured game was none of these. Yes, it had some technical brilliance and yes, it was fun to play, but many ‘better’ games existed at the time.

My favourite game is one that I haven't played for ten years. It currently rests in a box gathering dust, and that's where I want it to stay. Ignoring the fact that it would be a pig to get working on a modern system anyway, I'm not going to play my favourite game again, because if I did it would alter my recollection. I can't go back and I can never re-create what this game meant to me. The game is Ultima Underworld and it's one that helped a friendship become the closest in my life so far.

Bet you thought it was going to be Hunchback Olympic, didn’t ya?

I was about seventeen years old when Underworld was released and I was struggling through the last year of school – losing friends, making enemies and generally having a miserable time. I'd turned to computers for comfort and began losing myself in the world of games to distract me from the cold reality of life.

I had played the previous Ultima games but they hadn't grabbed me like Underworld, and Underworld only got me hooked because Jamie was playing it too. It was either through luck or piracy that we both started playing it at the same time, but regardless of our beginning our end was the same.

We lived a good distance from each other. We could both drive and had occasional access to cars but on the whole we were apart. We had the odd night out, but our friendship only grew because of the telephone and playing Ultima Underworld at the same time.

Defending yourself against foul spectres of the netherworld, with a pointed stick.

There was a thrill in getting home and firing up the game, knowing that someone else was doing the very same thing. We would regularly put in a couple of hours and then call each other and spend another hour discussing where we'd got to, what we'd missed and what we'd seen. We'd guide each other through the world, one person always slightly ahead of the other in a little push-me pull-you dance of progress. It was a shared adventure. We shared our feelings, we shared our excitement, frustration, pain and we did it every day until the game ended.

Ultima Underworld gave us a friendship. Our shared progress through it gave us a bond we've yet to break and Ultima Underworld is my most treasured game because of it. The treasure of this dungeon was our friendship at the end, and that was a better reward than any closing credits have offered before or since.

My only regret is that Jamie finished the game first. He went on to to continually beat me at Doom as well, the bastard. Despite us living in different continents these days, we're still as close as we were the time we took that journey through The Stygian Abyss together. That's why games are special.

JIMAROID, March 2004

Comments

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Things to 'Make' and 'Do'.

Map, walkthrough, bug fix, MIDI music. Goodbye, reality.

Another Underworld. It’s not very good, but it’s got Kate Beckinsale in it.

Enter the fascinating, sightless, underworld world of moles.

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