Ultima was done during Garriott's freshman year at the University of Texas with the help of a friend, Ken W. Arnold; they finished it in less than a year. Ultima was coded in Applesoft BASIC on an Apple II computer, and Arnold wrote code in assembly language for the tile-based graphics system, the first game in the genre to do so. Unlike Akalabeth, the commercial sale of which was an afterthought to a hobbyist endeavor, Ultima was approached with a much more professional attitude right from the start of the project. The game was first planned to be called Ultimatum, but it was discovered that the name was already in use by a board game company, and so it was shortened to Ultima. Garriott later commented on the title, "When I wrote the first game, of course I had no idea there would ever be a second." The California Pacific Computer Company published Ultima in 1981 for the Apple II only. By June 1982 it sold 20,000 copies, and went on to sell 50,000 copies. By 1990, the game earned $300,000. Sierra Online re-released Ultima for the Atari 8-bit computers. In 1986 Origin Systems completely re-coded the game in Assembly and re-released it. Because the 1986 remake was re-coded entirely in Assembly, it had significantly improved running speed and was able to handle superior graphics. Some small cosmetic changes to the content were also made, such as the addition of another castle map variant and three new city maps, the introduction of traveling monsters in the outdoors section, and the division of the money the player has into separate "copper", "silver" and "gold" coins. It was first released for the Apple II on December 23, 1986 as Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness. Ports for the Commodore 64 and DOS/EGA were also released. Later releases included the 1989 version for the MSX2, published only in Japan by Pony Canyon, and an Apple IIGS specific port in late 1994 by Vitesse. In 1997, the DOS/EGA version of Ultima was released by Electronic Arts as part of the Ultima Collection. In 2022 the game received a visual overhaul from modder Jeremy Abrahamson that used the Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar tile set to provide the game a consistent look and feel to the most famous entry. Reception Softline stated in 1981 that "Ultima seems to be the best" available Apple