Eyes up, dungeon delvers! Or down, rather. Some bright spark has remade Looking Glass classic Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss in the Unity engine with new 3D models and sound effects, plus controller support. Ultima Underworld, often cited as the original first-person 3D RPG! Ultima Underworld, also considered a primordial specimen of the immersive sim! Ultima Underworld, which has influenced everything from Bioshock to Tomb Raider! Ultima Underworld, which… some appropriately rousing fourth thing!

The Unity revival is an unofficial project, titled Unity Underground. I guess we must brace for the potential wrath of license holders EA, but it does require ownership of the old game files to work, so surely it’s on the level? Anyway, here’s the first ten minutes in video form.

Now that I’ve lured you down past the trailer embed, it is time for a disgusting confession: I have never played Ultima Underworld. The game launched for DOS originally, and I was a repulsive Macintosh gamer back in the 90s – the closest I came was playing the heavily Ultima-inspired Exile: Escape from the Pit. Naturally, I’m interested to read thoughts from returning Ultima players who can talk in detail about the newly protuberant and sheeny character models. I think they clash with the environment textures a little, but again, I’m not really in a position to judge.

The project has been in the offing for a while. “I’ve been working on this since 2015, and [it] wouldn’t have been possible without previous hackers’ generosity in sharing their results,” writes developer Kweepa on the Itch.io page. In a comment, the dev also responds to some concerns about the 3D models being AI-generated (the game has been tagged “AI-assisted”).

“No, they are all hand-crafted, working with the sprite sheets as reference,” Kweepa explains. “The artists are Spherical Horse (for the items) and Lil Pupinduy (for the critters). I know they didn’t use AI because there were multiple rounds of revisions and I was able to direct the art down to minute details. Plus, these models are way more clean, tidy, and efficient than anything AI can produce. I did have some AI generated UI textures and audio during development but it was all stripped out or replaced before I released the game.”

This appears to be the full extent of the project’s usage of generative AI. While I’m pretty anti-generative AI myself – amongst other causes for concern, billion dollar corporations have used it to transform me into Microsoft Clippy – I think a modder channelling the chatbot tech for placeholder material isn’t all that diabolical. Still, I wish they’d done a Slay the Spire 2.

Unity Underground launched a month or two ago, so I am playing Johnny Come Lately even with this post in which I admit that I am playing Johnny Come Lately with Ultima Underworld. Johnny Come Lately, my favourite game! Somebody should remake that too. The upside of our tardiness is that you’re hearing about Unity Underground in the wake of a lot of bug-fixing. Thanks to reader Nah for lobbing this into the accursed wishing well we call our Contacts email.