The monsters in Akalabeth: World of Doom—the precursor to the Ultima series, sometimes called “Ultima 0” by fans and series creator Richard Garriott himself—look ridiculous. The thief is just a floating cloak, the mimic is a featureless cube, and the final monster (straight-up called a Balrog) looks a bit like Firebrand if he was crushed under a cartoon steamroller. To be fair, it was 1979 and Garriott was a teenager; the Apple 2 could only draw a pittance of lines on screen at a time, so he designed wireframe silhouettes for each enemy using coordinates on graph paper.
Akalabeth’s world was a meager, primitive trick of the light. But in the days of text-based multi-user dungeons and Zork it was a crumb of revelatory proof that the emergent worlds players imagined in freeform sessions of Dungeons & Dragons—which was only five years old at this point—could be cast in a virtual mould, simulated with math, and explored through the phosphor glow of a CRT monitor.
YouTube documentarian Majuular, or Luke, was not at ground zero for this CRPG revolution. He grew up with the RPGs that live in Ultima’s long shadow and had been making videos sifting through their complexities since age 14, informed by the zany YouTube stylings of the Angry Video Game Nerd and Classic Game Room. But while he was researching the origins of his most beloved game genre and reading the 450-page tome Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games, he was singularly struck by Akalabeth’s futurism.
11 videos deep, the Majuular Ultima Retrospective embodies the fastidious, affectionate critique that is gaming YouTube at its best
“Something broke through in my head and I realized how incredible it was that somebody thought this up, made it, and put it out, and not solely Akalabeth,” he recalled, measuring out each word with the enthusiasm and clarity of a habitual storyteller. “It was like the root of a tree that grew out and became this incredibly nuanced world of RPGs that I already had grown up with. I had always taken that seedling for granted.”
Galvanized by Barton’s book, Luke was inspired not only to play through the series which he had only dabbled in previously for himself, but to use his newest, relatively young YouTube channel to relay the wild story of its creation in his own way. Charting the sparse corridors of the World of Doom to the endless eccentricities of creator Garriott (represented in each game as the preposterously named Lord British, ruler of Britannia) has been a two year undertaking, but more than 500,000 people are showing up for each new video.
Britannia makes the waves
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Eleven videos deep as of late 2025, the Majuular Ultima Retrospective embodies the fastidious, affectionate critique that is gaming YouTube at its best. Many are multi-hour features that trace Ultima’s burgeoning influence on both western and Japanese roleplaying games, discuss the human stories and context around its creation, and actually involve the dirty work of playing the games while analyzing Ultima’s lore on its own terms.
While you might associate gaming-centric video essays with long-winded synopses or provocative hot takes, Luke’s Ultima series is the fruit of exhaustive research compiled from decades of interview material, elusive photographs, and details cataloged by communities like the Ultima Dragons virtual fan club (without whom Luke says he’d be “totally lost”).
That research might seem tiring given the pace at which Luke has pumped out these videos while also making detours to the likes of William Shatner’s TekWar—he’s covered 1979’s Akalabeth through 1993’s Ultima 7 Part Two in just two years—but immersing himself in each game’s history is precisely what keeps him going.
A single question remains his creative north star: “What would it have been like to dream this up at the time?”
“There’s something really intriguing about knowing there’s just a group of young guys with very little experience in the real world who are actually able to create something that is a real contender, something that can threaten these huge videogame companies that have infinitely more employees and resources. It turns out that just a good idea and infinite drive and lots of Diet Pepsi is pretty good fuel for redefining entire genres or even creating them, in the case of CRPGs or id with the FPS,” he said.
“You almost wish you were there. You wish you could hang out with these guys and spend the afternoon eating leftover pizza in [early id Software’s] lake house … there’s something romantic about that kind of scrappy, amateur, just-doing-it-for-the-love-of-it and hoping something comes out of it, then not only does something come out of it, but something that is still very obviously prevalent to this day. You cannot ignore the influence of these people and the things that they’ve created.”
Exodus
Luke has over 200,000 subscribers on YouTube and a healthy following on Patreon these days, but he’s been making videos for as long as he’s had the means. His earliest works were “angry reviews,” ripoffs of AVGN. He didn’t pull in many viewers then, but his was a wildfire enthusiasm for games: crude, self-sustaining, and uncontainable.
“It turns out that taking somebody’s shtick and doing the same thing but worse usually doesn’t bear fruit on YouTube,” he says, but those attempts taught him how to write a script and cut together gameplay clips.
Before Majuular, Luke worked for the better part of a decade as a pizza delivery driver, a retail worker, and eventually in manual labor to make rent as he moved with his girlfriend “from basement to basement” as a college dropout. He noticed YouTube video essays become a huge part of the online conversation as channels like Joseph Anderson, MandaloreGaming, and Matthewmatosis rose to prominence, but it all seemed like watching the back of a train he’d missed slowly become a pinhole on the horizon.
“What a great idea, to talk about videogames in this way,” he remembered thinking. “Well, it’s too late. Somebody else has already cracked the code; back to the lumber yard with me.”
It was in a rare clump of obligation-free months between a second college exit and a planned return to hauling construction material that he decided “to go all-in” on a few highfalutin dreams. One of those dreams was still YouTube, and so he pumped out lengthy retrospectives on the likes of Chrono Cross, The Legend of Dragoon, and eventually, Ultima, on a new channel he named after a Devin Townsend song. Little by little Patreon members trickled in.
Now with 2,700 people paying to see more, Luke and his girlfriend have saved up enough money to afford “a home, and sunlight for our cats.” It’s the first time they’ve had a kitchen and windows in years.
“It’s totally changed my life,” he said. “It’s given us a degree of security and it’s just cool to have a group of people who are interested in what you have to say and it’s something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to. Seeing people say ‘I’m so excited for this video’ … it’s almost overwhelming.”
His work ethic has hardly changed since his days at the lumber yard. “Very much a creature of habit,” Luke says—he puts in his hours like clockwork each day, whether they’re spent researching, playing and note-taking, or trawling obscure archives for an era-appropriate picture of Warren Spector. It’s natural to spend a dozen hours or more a day working on the next video, split between script writing (which he “rarely” looks forward to, dreading the piercing gaze of a blank Word document) and the “more workmanlike,” if tedious, editing process.
Ultima Forever
Garriott’s CRPG series may not claim the title of “first computer roleplaying game,” but its best entries are some of the most influential in the medium’s history. Baldur’s Gate 3 creator Swen Vincke and Majuular agree that the one to try today is Ultima 7—its emphasis on player agency and interactivity was a marvel when it originally released.
The routine is fueled by the sense that he owes whatever he can spare to his audience, and a sense in the back of his mind that YouTube, what with its fickle algorithm, is precarious. He made it this far by showing up, so he’s mimicking a 20th century videogame designer to barrel forward with as much drive and Diet Pepsi as it takes.
You can see the effects in the resulting work—his Ultima series alone has only grown more detailed and elaborate with each new video.
Take The Tyranny of Virtue, Luke’s retrospective on Ultima 5. By this point, the games have grown into a sprawling story about good and evil, acknowledging the player character directly as the Avatar; Ultima 4 had a remarkably robust morality system that rewarded virtuous in-character behavior, and Ultima 5 flips that on its head, using the previous game’s virtues as the basis for a tyrannical villain’s absolutist dogma.
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It may have been easy to write these narratives off as cool for the time but pedestrian now, but Luke was up to the task of combing through the thematic implications thoroughly: he honors the game as a work of fantasy fiction in its own right, comparing its findings about the meaning of virtue to inspirations like Lord of the Rings and praising its willingness to interrogate its own messaging and encourage players to do the same.
Luke concedes that the narrative itself is a bit pedestrian in a post-Baldur’s Gate 3 world, but the way the story leveraged the medium was wildly forward-thinking for its time. Those moments where the player’s actions are brought into the story and roleplay is rewarded are, to Luke, some of “the most clever implementations in an RPG that I’ve ever seen to this day.”
“The idea at the time of, like, ‘you beat the game by acting virtuously,’ would have been so abstract and such a hard sell for a lot of people,” he said. “The narrative really reaches beyond the computer screen and becomes meta in a way that I would describe, as much as the word gets thrown around very flippantly these days, as genius.”
His life somehow now revolves around talking about games in this way.
“Even on those 14-hour editing days, I’m glad that, at least for now, I don’t have to get out into the car at -40 degrees Celsius to go lift drywall all day. That’s a pretty positive change I would say,” he laughed. “I know it won’t last forever, so I’m always trying to make hay while the sun shines, and a big part of that is trying to improve my craft.”
Through the ages
Akalabeth’s wireframe Balrogs may seem primitive, but it’s an essential piece of history for the nascent CRPG.
Ultima 5’s metafiction streak was remarkably forward-thinking for a game narrative at the time, and as Majuular put it, remains “genius.”
Underworld’s dazzling first-person perspective makes up crucial DNA in series like The Elder Scrolls and System Shock.
One of the most celebrated RPGs of all time, Majuular says Ultima 7 is at the “perfect crossroads” of accessibility, quality, importance, and coziness.
Onto new worlds of adventure
The Ultima retrospective is nearing its end. Luke plans to get through the main series ending with Ultima 9 and, beyond that, at least cover Ultima Online, which even taken alone was hugely influential in the world of MMORPGs. After that, there are a few “lesser games” to chew through: assorted cash grabs, phone games, and a glitchy mess PC Gamer’s Rick Lane gave a 25. But while Luke’s channel has always covered a variety of roleplaying games and accounted for a contingent of his audience with no interest in the games, ending a retrospective odyssey longer than a Ken Burns documentary will prove bittersweet.
“Ultima is not for everybody, but it’s for me, because when I pull the brakes on it and when I give myself a chance to kind of recalibrate, by the time I’m diving into the next game, I can’t wait to get back to the research component and see how things are changing in Britannia,” he said.
“I’ve thought about Ultima pretty much every day for the last—I don’t even remember when I started this series—two-and-a-half years ago at this point? It’s been a huge part of my life, so I’m probably always going to bring it up. It’s always going to be part of the identity of the channel, it’s always going to be something that interests me, even just talking about it. What it did: how it changed the world of RPGs.”
