Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash is a role-playing video game published for the VIC-20 home computer by Sierra On-Line in 1983. Gameplay and plot In the game, creatures called "garrintrots" have imprisoned the player in Mt. Drash, and the player's task is to escape the dungeons. The game itself is a very simple series of three-dimensional randomly generated dungeons, and the idea is to destroy all monsters that stand in way and exit to the next level. There is a time limit as well. The game doesn't employ custom graphics, but rather uses the VIC-20's standard set of graphical characters to draw the game scene. The game was also notable for its soundtrack; using the 4-voice sound capabilities of the MOS Technology VIC video chip in the VIC-20 to provide background music. Very few games written for the VIC-20 featured such a background soundtrack that would become commonplace in games for the Commodore 64, Nintendo Entertainment System, etc. The source code was written in VIC-BASIC, with assembly language routines for faster animation of graphics and to handle the background music. Unlike most of the more popular VIC-20 games, it wasn't published as a ROM cartridge but rather on cassette tape. Due to the complexity of the source code and the unusual (by VIC-20 standards) length of the game, as well as the fact that unlike a cartridge game all of it had to fit in RAM, an 8k or 16k RAM memory expansion cartridge was required to be installed in the VIC-20 before running the game, further limiting the target audience. Copy protection consisted of the RUN-STOP and RESTORE keys on the VIC-20 keyboard being disabled (to prevent "breaking in" to the BASIC code), as well as the original cassette being recorded and mastered in a way which made duplicating on a dual-cassette deck troublesome. The game itself doesn't tie in to the Ultima series in too many ways. Both have a fantasy setting, Mt. Drash is the name of a dungeon in Ultima I, and the name "garrintrots" is an obvious pun on Richard Garriot's surname; but there the similarity ends. Development The game was written by Keith Zabalaoui for Sierra On-Line in 1983. Sierra, which had published Ultima II, named the game an Ultima to improve its sales. Richard Garriott gave permission to the company and Zabalaoui—a friend who had worked on previous games for him—to do so.