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The Legend of Escape from Mt. Drash

16 May

The only published advert for Escape from Mt. Drash

Ultima collectors are a hardy and dedicated lot, not only authoring web sites but even huge books on their passion. An oddity called Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash has for years been rivaled only by the original hand-assembled Akalabeth as the Holy Grail for these folks. Drash, a game for of all platforms the lowly Commodore VIC-20, trickled out of Sierra in the spring of 1983, achieved minuscule distribution and minuscule sales, then vanished from history. For some years there was reason to wonder whether it had actually been released at all, rather than only being something that came and went from a single advertisement (as shown above, from the July 1983 Compute!) and a few product catalogs. Only in 2000 did a working copy of the game finally surface on the Internet, the source being an Indiana teenager whose parents had come home from a garage sale with it several years before.

As befits a Holy Grail, a legend sprung up around Drash that consisted of a few known facts woven together within a tapestry of conjecture. Drash, the story went, was an attempt by Sierra to make a quick buck off the Ultima name by releasing a slapdash game to the VIC-20 market, terra incognita to Richard Garriott, without his knowledge or consent. The implication is that someone at Sierra eventually got nervous about this dubious scheme and buried the game — in some versions of the story literally, by dumping remaining copies into a landfill in a tale that echoes the (itself likely exaggerated) tale of Atari’s dumping of millions of E.T. cartridges into a New Mexico landfill that same year. It’s a glib story which seems to explain much about the game’s obscurity while also investing it with a nice dollop of the nefarious, a plus for collectors of an industry that, let’s face it, isn’t exactly rife with the sort of dark secrets and forbidden fruits that their pals who collect, say, vintage records get to enjoy. Yet it’s also a story that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, to an extent that it’s hard to understand how so many bright people could buy into it. There are two serious objections, either of which would make it highly improbable. Together they make it impossible to believe.

We should first of all take note of the author of Drash: Keith Zabalaoui. Zabalaoui was a member of what I somewhat facetiously called Garriott’s “entourage” in my previous post, one of his old high-school running buddies who hung around with him in Houston and helped from time to time with his various projects. It could only have been through Garriott that Zabalaoui came into contact with Sierra in the first place. So, the legend requires us to believe that Zabalaoui met the folks at Sierra through Garriott and sold them a game, then agreed with them to secretly release it as an illegitimate knockoff of his friend’s work. Finally, after publishing the game and receiving at least some sort of royalties he continued to keep the whole affair a secret from his buddy. That’s behavior that borders on the sociopathic. There are also some serious plotting problems to this little narrative; didn’t Richard ever say, “Hey, Keith, whatever happened to that game you were working on for Sierra?”

And then let’s look at this from the other side, from the viewpoint of Sierra. Yes, the company may have started with advertising pasted together from newspaper clippings around Ken and Roberta Williams’s kitchen table, but those days were already long gone by early 1983. Sierra was by then negotiating licensing deals with Big Media players like The Jim Henson Company and accepting millions from venture capitalists who saw them as major players in a major emerging industry. Can we really believe that such a company, which by now employed a substantial legal team, would risk their reputation by sticking someone else’s trademarked name on a game in the hopes of making a quick few (tens of?) thousands of dollars and maybe sticking it somehow to Garriott, the man who had recently jilted them? As John Williams says, “Sierra On-Line management was young but not stupid.” Ken Williams had been closely involved in the complications of securing for Garriott and Sierra legal right to the Ultima name from the now defunct California Pacific after Garriott had first agreed to sign with Sierra. To imagine that he would then just blatantly steal the trademark is… well, absurd is perhaps being kind. To imagine that the legal team the venture capitalists insisted be in place would even allow him to do so is to fail to understand how such relationships work.

So, the true story is, as these things so often go, more prosaic than the legend. Zabalaoui did visit Sierra in Garriott’s company, where he was inspired to start work on a simple maze-running action game. When he eventually showed the finished product to them, they were doubtful. It wasn’t a terrible game, but it wasn’t a great one either. And by early 1983 the huge but breathtakingly short-lived VIC-20 software market had already passed its peak and started on a downward slope that would soon turn into a veritable cliff as the ever-plunging price of the vastly more capable Commodore 64 made the older machine more and more irrelevant. And Zabalaoui’s game required more than just a VIC-20: one also needed to have the 8 K memory expansion (to boost the machine’s RAM from just 5 K to 13 K) and a cassette drive, since it was too large to be installed onto a cartridge. Most of the kids who owned VIC-20s as learning toys or game machines didn’t equip them with such luxuries. Sierra hemmed and hawed, and then made a suggestion: if they could maybe market it as an Ultima that might help… Garriott was perhaps not thrilled with Sierra at this point in time, but he was always good to his friends. When Zabalaoui came to him with Sierra’s request, Garriott agreed, likely more as a personal favor to someone who had helped him out with his own projects quite a bit in the past than anything else. Today, of course, when the industry is so much more mature and so much more sensitive to the power of branding, one in Garriott’s position would never risk tarnishing his trademark in such a way. But in 1983 both Garriott and his industry were still very young.

Even with the Ultima name, Sierra was obviously skeptical about the game’s chances, particularly as the VIC-20 software market continued to decline even as packaging was prepared and the game was sent off for duplication. They manufactured the minimum quantity required by their contract with Zabalaoui, on the order of a few thousand units, placed that one halfhearted advertisement, and watched with disinterest as the game foundered commercially. The vast majority of the production run was likely, like that first copy that was rediscovered in 2000, written off and trashed, whether by Sierra themselves or their various distributors. It’s an example of a phenomenon you see from time to time in business, where a project about which no one (with the possible exception in this case of Zabalaoui) feels terribly enthusiastic just sort of drifts to completion through inertia and the lack of anyone stepping up to kill it with a definitive “no.” In this case that led to Escape from Mt. Drash passing into history as the first of the spin-off Ultimas, games that are not part of the main sequence but nevertheless use the name. Future entries in that category would actually be some of the most impressive to bear the Ultima name; Mt. Drash, however, should most definitely not be included in that group.

I’m not the first one to reveal the true story of Escape from Mt. Drash. John Williams has occasionally tried to correct the record in the past via comments to other blog posts and the like that repeated the legend. Recently it has begun to seem that word is finally getting out. Blogger Pix had the opportunity to interact with Garriott personally last year, and asked him directly about the Mt. Drash legend. Garriott at last confirmed to him that he had known about the game and duly authorized its release.

So why should I take up the cause now? Well, there are still plenty of online sources that repeat the legend. I’d thus like to add this blog’s weight — to whatever extent it has weight — to the true story. This I partly do as a favor to John Williams, who has gifted me (and you) with so many memories and insights on the early days of Sierra and the industry as a whole. John is, understandably enough, annoyed at the persistence of this falsehood, as it directly impinges the honor of Sierra and by extension himself.

More generally — and yes, I know I rant about this more than I should — this can serve as a lesson to people who consider themselves historians in this field to be a bit more rigorous, and not to substitute easy assumptions for research. I won’t get into the original source of the false legend here, only say that I’m disappointed that it was repeated for so long without ever being seriously questioned. When you are thinking of saying something that directly accuses people of unethical dealings you really need to be sure of your facts and careful with your words. Frankly, that’s a lesson that Richard Garriott himself could learn; despite my admiration for his vision and persistence as a gaming pioneer, I find his glib dismissal of the folks at California Pacific and Sierra who launched his career as dishonest, “stupid bozos,” and “heavy drug users” to be unconscionable. It’s a lesson his fans should also take to heart.

If you do have one of those websites that repeats the legend of Escape from Mt. Drash… hey, it happens. I’ve made a hash of things myself once or twice in public. But maybe think about taking a moment to make a correction? I’m sure that at the very least John Williams and the others who built Sierra would appreciate it.

 

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18 Responses to The Legend of Escape from Mt. Drash

  1. hitfan

    May 16, 2013 at 10:16 pm

    I had heard that Richard Garriott had denied for years knowing about Mt. Drash–it was interesting to read here that in reality, he had full knowledge of the game’s existence and even consented to it’s release as an Ultima game to help out his friend.

    I think that considering Zabalaoui’s close association with Garriott and that Garriott himself had tacitly endorsed it’s release as an Ultima should put to rest any notion that Mt.Drash is not a legitimate Ultima release. Call it apocrypha, but it’s an Ultima nonetheless.

    RG’s feigning surprise about Sierra publishing Mt. Drash without his knowledge was just a case of sour grapes and revisionist history after all. It just shows that people are not immune to bouts of ego or momentary pettiness. Even those we admire and lionize suffer from character flaws. We are all human.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      May 17, 2013 at 1:03 pm

      To be fair, I don’t have a source that directly implicates Garriott in this particular piece of misinformation about his career. As far as I’ve been able to glean from scouring archive.org, this tale dates back to the late 1990s, when Mt. Drash was *really* a Holy Grail with no known working copies. Collectors seem to have invented the tale of Mt. Drash as an illicit release then, albeit in the beginning generally prefacing it with qualifiers like “apparently.” (I could name names, but really why?) In time those qualifiers fell away and the story became accepted fan canon. To the extent that Garriott is guilty here, it’s of simply not bothering to come forward and correct the story. Considering he had plenty of other things going on — like flying into space(!) — I can’t say that I blame him much for not knowing/caring what collectors were saying amongst themselves about a single obscure old game. When finally asked directly, he did, to his credit, give the actual story.

      There’s of course other misinformation floating around for which he is directly responsible. I find that much more disappointing.

       
      • hitfan

        May 18, 2013 at 9:51 pm

        Fair enough.

        An interesting anecdote, I remember scanning the COMPUTE! ad for Mount Drash back in 1999 for somebody on the comp.sys.cbm usenet forum who was looking for the game. He eventually obtained a copy in 2000.

         
  2. Bob Meyer

    May 29, 2013 at 12:07 am

    Such a nice post. Reminded me of a game I once owned, and after a day of looking, discovered that I still do! Its an incomplete copy, just a cassette in very nice condition.

    It will most likely end up on eBay shortly.

    Bob

     
  3. Nori

    May 29, 2013 at 7:09 pm

    Thank you again for another great post. As always, your article on “Mt. Drash” is pretty informative, insightful, to-the-point, and elegantly packaged.

    Being a long-time enthusiast for the early history of computer games in US, of course I know the original edition of Akalabeth and its background, but this Drash thing has been completely slipped my attention. It seems not only myself – probably “Mt. Drash” has been unknown in my country. I did some quick research on web but didn’t find any mention of the game written in Japanese. I think that rather odd because the story itself is so interesting. It sounds like the legends of the Holy Grail.

    At any rate, I wrote a concise post about the game and its history on my little blog, based mainly on your article. I also provided a link to your article as a source.
    http://blog.livedoor.jp/trakt/archives/1729240.html
    (Please note this is all written in Japanese, and there’s nothing new if you’ve already read this article which I’ve commented on.)

    Your blog always urges me thinking to do something similar. That is, I’ve been thinking to start a blog about a history of the reception of Western computer games in Japan, written in English. Regarding the theme, there are some things I want so badly to write for people outside Japan.

    For example, in early eighties, there was a small, monthly computer game magazine called “Yugekishu.” The title is a baseball term, meaning Shortstop. Considering its name, the ironic thing of all this thing is that it was so short-lived. Only 8 issues were published, shy of a year. But this magazine is so influential, and the back numbers have been sought-after to this day.

    http://www.tcp-ip.or.jp/~danbo/gif/yuugeki.gif
    (It looks like this.)

    What makes this magazine so special? Well, I would say because it could be described as “the first computer gaming magazine for literary minded,” as far as I know. (I heard there was other magazine like this, published in Australia, but I’m not sure.)

    It aimed for mature audiences. So naturally, it had to deal with American computer games, because the qualities of US titles were far, far superior than domestic ones. There was no Infocom in Japan. Both Wizardry and Ultima were eventually ported to domestic machines but it took some time and happened much later.

    And Yugekishu promoted reviewers from the world of literature. Literary critics and translators who were usually writing about people like Sam Shepard or Richard Brautigan reviewed computer games. For example, a female literal translator praised the Coveted Mirror of Penguin so ravishingly, and that was very impressive. (that game is my favorite too). I was just a kid then and had no access of foreign computer games, but read the magazine with much interest.

    Unfortunately, this magazine was published by a small company which went out of business long time ago, and its copies are now very hard to find.

    What makes me refraining from writing about it is that I cannot find my copies of the magazine. I know I do have them but I don’t know where they are. Keeping things tidy and in order is one of the things I’m not good at.

    Anyway, thank you again for great post.

    Nori from Japan

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      May 30, 2013 at 7:41 am

      Thanks for sharing this! I know all too little about goings on in Japan. Because I don’t know the language, the country is effectively a closed book to me. I’ve already accepted that that means I’ll pretty much have to just cover Japanese games as they come over to the West, viewing them through Western eyes. Not entirely ideal, perhaps, but the number of worthy/interesting games to cover keeps increasing fast enough year by year as it is. And anyway, as many lengths as I’ve gone to at times for these articles, learning Japanese is just a bridge too far. :)

      But maybe we could talk again when I get to those games. You could share what’s known about them from the other side of the Pacific…

       
  4. Anders Carlsson

    May 21, 2014 at 10:57 am

    Regarding the comment that Mt Drash is too large to fit on a cartridge, there were plenty of 16K cartridges for the VIC-20. However the game would either need to be started from BASIC with a SYS command like the Scott Adams text adventures, or somehow split up into two halves which generally the BASIC interpreter would choke on. Whether manufacturing costs was an issue, apparently a tape would be cheaper to produce than a cartridge.

    Also the 8K or even 16K memory expansions were not quite that uncommon among VIC users as both this text and Wikipedia suggest. There were plenty of quality tape games for expanded VIC-20 from larger software houses like Epyx and others, so the requirement of a memory expansion should not have made a too large dent in the sales figures. The gameplay in Drash though would not have attracted most kids looking for shoot’em-ups and other more action oriented games.

     
  5. Josh Persons

    November 3, 2015 at 2:20 am

    The original copy wasn’t found at the bottom of a cliff in British Columbia … It was found at a garage sale by my parents in northwest Indiana in the mid-nineties. I played that game off and on for a few years until 2000, when I randomly performed an Internet search on it and found that the president of the Ultima online fan club had a standing bounty of $250 on it. Being in my late teens at the time that seemed like a lot of money, so I got in contact with him and shipped it off.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      November 3, 2015 at 6:35 am

      Thanks so much! Correction made.

       
    • Erik Elsom

      December 29, 2015 at 5:02 am

      I have that exact copy you speak of now, Josh. It’s in safe hands and is a valued part of my collection!

       
    • KilrPilr

      March 3, 2017 at 12:05 am

      Hello Josh,
      Just to set the record straight, Your copy of Mt.Drash was the second copy to surface. Mine was the first. As a vic-20 collector myself, I didn’t sell my copy to Edward franks or Ward Shrake but I was the person to prove to them it existed and yes indeed I found my copy at the bottom of a cliff in Williams Lake, British Columbia Canada. I don’t remember what year it was but I do remember that maybe a year or even 6 months after I was talking with Ward and Ed that he came forward on comp.sys.cbm and told the world he had acquired a copy. The game was already proven to exist. Believe it or not, doesn’t really matter but I feel It should be known.

       
  6. Mike Taylor

    March 5, 2018 at 7:56 pm

    “miniscule distribution and miniscule sales” … it’s everyone’s favourite mis-spelling :-) I was saved from this one by Bill Bryson’s advice to think of “minus”, not “miniature”.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      March 6, 2018 at 9:27 am

      :) Thanks!

       
  7. Ben

    January 1, 2021 at 9:37 pm

    Garriot’s -> Garriott’s

    bozoos -> bozos

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      January 2, 2021 at 9:49 am

      Thanks!

       
  8. Elise

    August 28, 2022 at 11:06 pm

    “…at the very least John Williams…”

    Sorry to be a nit-picker, but should that be Ken Williams?

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      August 29, 2022 at 7:07 am

      Nope, as intended.

       

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