Ultima VIII: The Lost Vale Character Dialogue and Scripts Surface

Remember our interview with Sheri Graner Ray back in 2013, where we learned that the ill-fated Ultima VIII: The Lost Vale expansion pack was virtually complete and simply didn’t make it to store shelves as manufacturing and marketing costs would have exceeded the revenue from the projected sales? A disappointing story to say the least, but now we learn via this post on the Big Box PC Game Collectors Facebook page that Sheri has turned over an actual 3.5″ disk from her development days at ORIGIN Systems that actually contains some real, tangible data – particularly character dialogue and scripts – from the expansion.

Apparently the data will be released publically in the near future, so we’ll be keeping an eye out for when it debuts to see what nuggets we can glean from it:

ULTIMA 8-THE LOST VALE
Is this for real?!–YES! (almost)

This is an actual disk, donated by Origin developer Sheri Graner Ray, which contains data from the legendary unreleased game. Unfortunately, it is not all of the game, just some of the UNK files used to create the character scripts. I’ve shown these files to a few experts (some EXULT members), in the hopes that I may have struck gold–alas, it was not meant to be, and there is not enough data to rebuild this lost treasure.

What it contains, however, is the only data ever recovered of The Lost Vale. It’s quite interesting, and one can examine the basic functions and actual dialog of characters who made up some of the plot of the game. I am planning on releasing the data in the near future, in hopes that people will be able to see what might have been. Special thanks to Sheri Graner Ray for donating the disk, and to Dino for the pics of the box.