a month and a half, according to Church. Spector later said that "in that little office, that team created some serious magic. I mean, the sense of doing something incredible was palpable". Neurath summarized, "Despite the austere working environment, the game came together amazingly well in the final stretch, and we delivered the Gold Master just about two years after we had started." The game was released in March 1992. TechnologyUltima Underworld's game engine was written by a small team. Chris Green provided the game's texture mapping algorithm, which was applied to walls, floors and ceilings. The engine allowed for transparencies, walls at 45 degree angles, multiple tile heights and inclined surfaces, and other aspects. Ultima Underworld was the first video game to implement many of these effects. The game was also the first indoor, real-time, 3D first-person game to allow the player to look up and down, and to jump.Ultima Underworld uses two-dimensional sprites for characters, but also features 3D objects, as the team believed that it "had to do 3D objects in order to have reasonable visuals". The game uses physics to calculate the motion of thrown objects. During the game's alpha testing phase, part of the programming team worked to create a smooth lighting model. The game's advanced technology caused the engine to run slowly, and its system requirements were extremely high. Doug Church later downplayed the importance of the game's technology, stating that technological advancement "is somewhat inevitable in our field ... [and] sadly, as an industry we seem to know much less about design, and how to continue to extend and grow design capabilities". Instead, he claimed that Ultima Underworlds most important achievement was its incorporation of simulation elements into a role-playing game. ReceptionUltima Underworld was not an immediate commercial success, which caused Origin to decrease its marketing support. However, its popularity increased via word of mouth in the years following its release. Sales eventually reached nearly 500,000 copies, with praise for its 3D presentation and automapping feature. In 1993 the game won the Origins Award for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Computer Game of 1992, and was nominated for an award at the Game Developers Conference.ACE called Ultima Underworld "the next true evolutionary step in the RPG genre", and noted that its simulation-style dungeon was "frighteningly realistic". The magazine thought that the game's sprite character models "detract from the dense atmosphere a bit", but