Times of Lore (1988)

Times of Lore aka Ultra Realms is a 1988 action role-playing game that was developed and published by Origin Systems. Chris Roberts worked as a Director, Designer and Writer on this game.

The game takes place in a very complex world, featuring 13,000 screens of map according to the promotional material. There is no loading during the game, which was quite a feat at the time for such a massive environment. The game's story tells of the kingdom of Albareth who's monarch High King Valwyn has disappeared and the dukes and barons are wrestling for power. Barbarians are threatening to invade, and monsters are pillaging the land. The player must assume the role of one of three heroes (choosing between a barbarian, a knight, and a valkyrie) and unravel the conspiracy and find three magic items.

Trivia:

Entering an Austin tabletop-gaming shop called Hexworld one day, Chris saw a beautiful picture of a gladiator hanging on the wall. The owner of the shop told him the picture had been drawn by a local artist, and offered to call the artist for him right then and there if Roberts was really interested in working with him. Roberts said yes, please do. The artist in question was none other than Denis Loubet, whose professional association with Richard Garriott stretched back to well before Origin Systems had existed, to when he’d drawn the box art for the Califorina Pacific release of Akalabeth in 1980. He was just hired as a full time artist 3 weeks ago. However Richard Garriott and Dallas Snell at Origin, who were impressed by the work-in-progress of Chris Roberts, and they invited him to Origin’s offices to ask if he’d be interested in publishing it through them. Garriott liked what he saw from the young programmer, but as it turned out, Roberts had already pitched Times of Lore to the big publishers of the day: EA and Broderbund. But after mulling it over, Roberts opted to go with Origin.

The Soundtrack was by Martin Galway and he said: Chris was trying to squeeze something akin to "The Gauntlet" on the C64 by this point, something which we all thought was crazy, but after a lot of squeezing he managed to put out "Times Of Lore" (I remember I squeezed the code & data for 25 sound-effects into 923 bytes - not bad, eh?) Times of Lore went on to inspire several later titles by Origin Sytems. This includes the 1990 title Bad Blood, another action RPG based on the same engine by Chris Roberts.

It also inspired the 1990 title Ultima VI: The Flase Prophet, which adopted several elements from Times of Lore, including real-time elements, a constant-scale open world (replacing the unscaled overworld of earlier Ultima games), and an icon-based point & click interface.

Here is the official RSI-Museum video for Times of Lore

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