a couple of years earlier for the Atari 8bit, that both programmers enjoyed playing. The player participates in a real-time space combat environment, confronted with enemy spaceships that they must shoot down in order to progress further along the story. Richard Garriott says he added this just because he wanted to fill up every space there was on the disk, and do everything he possibly could. Plot Setting Ultima is set in the fictional world of Sosaria, a land broken into four different continents. The land is ruled by a total of eight different lords, two for each of the world's four land masses. The four continents contain two castles each, where quests can be obtained by the player. There are two types of quests given out in the castles—one entails visiting a certain location on the main map, the other killing a specific type of monster in the dungeons. Fulfilling the former type of quest gives stat boosts; the latter gains the player an important item needed to reach the endgame. There are also a variety of towns where different goods and services can be purchased. The world has dungeons to be explored, and is populated by forests, mountain ranges, lakes and oceans. All towns are exactly alike in the original release of the game, as are all dungeons (their maps are different, but are not designed but rather randomly created); castles differ only in the different quests that may be assigned. In the 1986 remake, more variety was added to the appearance and content of the towns and castles. Sosaria is inhabited by numerous monsters and beasts that attack the player character on sight. There are also ruins and places of interest on each continent (usually in somewhat hard-to-reach places such as small islands) that the player can enter in order to receive rewards, usually in the form of a weapon or statistic boost, or in order to solve quests. Characters The two main characters featured in Ultima I are Mondain, the evil wizard antagonist who has induced a reign of terror over the world of Sosaria, and the protagonist, a character of the player's choosing. The game features Lord British from Richard Garriott's first game, Akalabeth, and the introduction of characters Iolo and Shamino. These three characters become staples of nearly all future Ultima games (see List of Ultima characters). Story The story of Ultima I revolves