Well, fear not good friends. All will be revealed in time.
I always loved the Ultima games. Ever since the day we got Ultima III for the Commodore 64 I was hooked. An adventure game with a whole world to explore is not something you see everyday, and boy was it good. Ultima III (Exodus) was followed by IV (Quest of the Avatar), V (Warriors of Destiny), VI and VII (Pagan), along with Underworld and the new Online version. These games followed me to the Amiga as only up to V was released for the Commodore 64. The games (III through VI) incorporated cloth maps styled to look like crude old world maps to enhance the feel of real adventure. Many a computer user spent their nights map in hand questing. A few years back I picked up Ultima: The Second Trilogy. This re-release of Ultimas III through VI was to be the last release of the original cloth maps and was only available in diskette form for the Gates Crate. I bought it to have a piece of history, like my Commodore 64 and Amiga 1000. The fact that it was never released for the Amiga or C64 was annoying but not unwarranted as Origin was moving away from Commodore development and the box would have to have been unwieldy to include all those disks. The announcement that the entire Ultima series was to be released on CD-ROM held promise. It includes I through VII and the game that started the whole series, Akalabeth. It also includes all maps, in paper form, and facts and interviews about the games and their development.
So, wait, Tone gearing up yet again to buy a Gates Crate software package? Why? Well, I'll tell you. I had high hopes that this CD would contain, as sort of hidden bonuses, the versions for the C64 (in D64 format), and the Apple and Amiga games. Why not? CD's can hold so much data and these floppy disk games did not take up much space. What a fitting way it would have been to include versions for the machines that made Origin what it is today. Let's face it, in the early days it was surely the sales to Apple and C64 owners and the like that kept food on Lord British's table and paid his bills as most Gates Crates were typing memos and crunching spreadsheets. I was quite saddened to find these versions missing from the compilation. All told the GC versions, docs, interview, product trailer, and history videos take up 513 MB, leaving not a lot of space. This could have been made into a two-CD set as many games are now, with CD's being so inexpensive. It would have made for a great multiplatform CD-ROM. As it is, it is a good way to own all the manuals as MS Word documents. I believe Wordsworth in its latest version can read these files.
It is continually upsetting that even up to now we are ignored even by those we have helped in the past.