Ultima: Exodus

Game of the Day series.

My brother got this game one Christmas while my sister and I were away visiting our grandma in Montana. Our return is fairly vivid considering how long ago that was. It was late, cold, and the ankles of my brother, mom, and stepdad were peppered by tiny red flee-bites with the culprit, our cat Gizmo, banished to the outside. He had other issues besides. Anyway, the game I came to find my brother playing turned out to be the third installment of the Ultima series, and the first for the NES system, entitled Exodus. From thereon I temporarily forgot about everything else and became engrossed in the massive and complex video RPG.

Each of the save games had a bunch of character slots that you filled in and picked from to create a group of four to play with at a time. You romped about the countryside on an epic quest to do ... something. I actually can't recall the plot besides going to another world called Ambrosia, diving into choppy three-dimensional dungeons, and stopping some monstrous invasion of the mainland through some kind of vortexes.

Aside from the representation, not much has changed in modern games of the genre in regards to choice. You could play something like a dozen different classes, talk to people, strategize in turn-based battles, steal from shops, attack townsfolk, rob towns, destroy pirates, etc. I absolutely loved it and it was my first taste of a massive non-linear world inside a video game.

Unfortunately, it also represents an equally large investment of time to design your characters and pound through their development in order to achieve final victory. Being an artifact of the old-school there is no tutorial, no in-game direction besides what NPC's tell you, and it's possible to start and immediately be crushed by enemies just outside the castle of Lord British. Thus unlikely the chance I'll ever tour its vistas again, but still the sweet memory lingers and drives a hunger for future engagements of mightier interaction.