As a kid I was thrilled to meet Lord British at the Apple Fest in Boston (1985, I think?). I told him all about how I loved his game and he said that since I l

As a kid I was thrilled to meet Lord British at the Apple Fest in Boston (1985, I think?). I told him all about how I loved his game and he said that since I liked it so much why didn't I present at his kiosk? Later I realized that I was telling him I loved his game which was unreleased and already being copied illegally. I was pretty obsessed with learning enough Apple IIe assembly to reproduce the tile graphics of ultima but never got close. These days... there's a community dedicated to reverse engineering the source code for Ultima and fixing bugs: https://xu4.sourceforge.net/ https://xu4.sourceforge.net/ and even a team that made a modern Apple IIe Ultima-like (https://www.6502workshop.com/p/nox-archaist.html https://www.6502workshop.com/p/nox-archaist.html) Another thing I realized, playing Nox archaist, is that much of the modern game mechanics already existed at that time: it was key to pay tons of attention to arming your fighters and using the right spells by your cleric and magician. I never knew I was supposed to optimize my builds when I was a kid, so my teams always ended up wimpy and dying. I learned how to hex-edit my player's disk sectors to give them 99 HP, which made the end game much easier.