# Ancient Web: Notable Ultima Treated Britannia Like a Research Subject Bob Gregg's 1997 Notable Ultima built hand-organized notebooks of Ultima game transcripts, histories, collectible products, books, and fan research. 2026-10-08 :: Switchboard Tech Services ![Ancient Web: Notable Ultima Treated Britannia Like a Research Subject](https://switchboardtechservices.com/static/images/defaults/articles.webp) Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). Some role-playing game fans keep a notebook beside the keyboard. Bob Gregg, writing as Underworld Dragon, turned his notebooks about *Ultima* into an entire website. [Visit The Notable Ultima](https://www.notableultima.com/). The homepage describes a collection of oddities and research about the computer games and the people who made them. Its navigation is divided into named notebooks: **Collectible**, **Historical**, **Literal**, **Rhetorical**, **Trivial**, **FAQtual**, and **Personal** Ultima. That filing system has a personality. A chronology of fictional Britannia sits beside collectible-product history; opinions and questions are separate from transcripts; trivia gets its own shelf. The legal-pad motif honors the yellow paper notebooks the author says he filled while playing through the games as the Avatar. The site's copyright date is **1997**, and its linked resources retain traces of that era, including references to WinZip, GeoCities, and now-obsolete game-reference websites. It is a hand-built fan archive, not a wiki assembled by committee. ## Dialogues that ordinary playthroughs might never reveal The [Literal Ultima notebook](https://www.notableultima.com/literal/) is unusually ambitious. Gregg says he transcribed nonplayer-character conversations from several main games through *Ultima VII: The Black Gate*. The section offers text for early entries and, where files were too large, downloadable ZIP archives. He explains that extracting *Ultima IV* conversations began as a technical experiment. Once the text was collected, previously unseen jokes and secret dialogue became discoverable through a text search. A player trying to remember who mentioned the grappling hook in *Ultima V* could look it up instead of wandering through every town again. The same section lists in-game books, scrolls, and signs, and notes that some gravestone inscriptions served as acknowledgments of developers and testers. The archive therefore records a layer of game writing normally scattered across play sessions and easy to miss. Not every promised game transcript is complete. The author labels the *Ultima VI* ZIP as roughly half finished, and later games appear without linked transcripts. Those gaps are important: the website shows a fan's actual progress rather than pretending to be exhaustive. Even with incomplete sections, the Notable Ultima preserves something distinctive about early game fandom. One person took a fictional world seriously enough to catalog its dialogue, printed ephemera, timeline, and stray jokes. [Explore the Literal Ultima transcripts and the other notebooks](https://www.notableultima.com/literal/). Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). - Categories: [Ancient Web](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/categories/ancient-web/) - Tags: [#ancientweb](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/ancientweb/), [#1997](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/1997/), [#fandom](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/fandom/), [#videogames](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/videogames/), [#ultima](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/ultima/) [Articles RSS](https://switchboardtechservices.com/feeds/articles.xml "Subscribe using an RSS reader") --- Canonical URL: https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-notable-ultima-treated-britannia-like-a-research-subject/ Language: en-us Content type: article Author: Switchboard Tech Services Published: 2026-10-08T21:26:04+00:00 Modified: 2026-10-18T21:04:05.835116+00:00