RPG HISTORY, RETOLD

How YouTuber Majuular's life changed course after telling the story of ULTIMA

- Justin Wagner

Wallpaper by Lee Macleod.

YouTube documentarian Majuular, or Luke, was not at ground zero for the CRPG revolution led by games like Akalabeth: World of Doom (1979), colloquially known as Ultima 0. He grew up with the RPGs that live in Ultima's shadow and has been making videos sifting through their complexities since the age of 14, informed by the zany YouTube stylings of the Angry Video Game Nerd. But while he was researching the origins of his most beloved game genre, he was singularly struck by Akalabeth's futurism—even if the wireframe silhouettes of monsters, drawn by a teenage Richard Garriott, looked ridiculous to contemporary eyes. “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 recalls, 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 the book Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games, Luke was inspired not only to play through the series which he had only dabbled in previously for himself, but to use his small YouTube channel to relay the wild story of its creation in his own way. Charting the sparse corridors of the World of Doom to Garriott's endless eccentricities (he inserted himself in each game as the preposterously named Lord British, ruler of Britannia) has been a two-year undertaking, but it's resonated. More than 500,000 people are now showing up for each new video.