Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress

Due to mostly to intellectual property egest, There are at least 3 different versions of this game. Richard Garriott had searched for a publisher who would include a cloth map with the game. Only Sierra On-Line agreed. But there were problems with the business arrangement almost immediately. Sierra wanted more control and to pay less royalties than what Garriott was willing to put up with. To further complicate matters, Garriott had a full set of courses at college to attend to while Ultima II was being written completely in assembly (his first such product). Although the game would end up being more complex than Ultima I as far as end-users could see, under the hood, the assembly language, was greatly simplified from what was originally planned. Meanwhile Sierra did things unbeknownst to the very distracted Lord British. They ported games to whatever system they pleased, naming their own price in royalties in the process, and made cheaper maps and boxes. They made changes to the code. They also used the Ultima trademark and "Ultima of Lord British" on an unrelated product they were publishing that they re-branded "Ultima: Escape from Mount Drash". The relatively short business relationship left Sierra hold important art, properties, and code of Ultima II and of the Ultima franchise that would remain unavailable to this day. The "moongate" cover for Ultima II still belongs to Sierra. Origin would reuse its 3rd Akalabeth cover, "Wrong Way", for subsequent releases of Ultima II. Other things behind the scenes, such as ported versions were also lost. Origin eventually bought all code of Ultima II back from Sierra and began a remake version of Ultima II (like their Ultima I release). Every version of Ultima II dated 1989 or later is this remake version. But there's a catch. Some of the files were corrupted and the game is unbeatable. Origin for a time provided patches on the website for a fee, to fix the problem. These days one needs to find the patches on fan sites.

Ultima II is set on Earth and the Sol system. Later Ultimas tell the story as happening in Sosaria. Its noted that Minax and the stranger were both messing around with space-time. Regardless of the explanation, the official condition is this: it happened on Sosaria.