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.
Part of the 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.
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 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.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
- Categories: Ancient Web
- Tags: #ancientweb, #1997, #fandom, #videogames, #ultima