The Obscure Ultima, Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash

Back in Ye Olden Days, I knew nothing of blogs and was content to post materials on forums and newsgroups and the like.  I contributed a few writings to GameFAQs back before the days when it was purchased by GameSpot.  The only actual FAQ for a video game I ever contributed that described how to beat a game was for the VIC-20 game Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash.  When GameFAQs took over, I removed all my content from that site.  Now, having finally been able to play the game on original hardware, I think it is time to revive the old FAQ.  Moreover, no longer limited to plain, monochrome text, I can do more now that I have my own blog and the ability to add images, color text and link video.  Let's take a trip into a rarely visited part of the Ultima Universe.

The Search for Artifact Color on the Commodore 64

NTSC composite artifact color is something typically relegated to computers with off-the-shelf graphics hardware.  We associate it with the Apple II mainly, which used it in its high resolution modes.  TRS-80 Color Computer fans also know it very well, because it was the only color available in that computer line's graphics until the Model 3.  IBM PCs also used with more frequency than was commonly known in the early days in CGA graphics cards.  But Commodore didn't rely on off-the-shelf 74-series logic to drive its home computers' displays.  It had bought the MOS company and all its chip fabrication expertise.  Its computers used real graphics chips and they displayed real color.  They didn't need the composite tricks to get their graphics working and they didn't need boards devoted to graphics either.  But I have come across some information which suggests that the assumption that the Commodore 64 did not support composite artifact color may not be supportable.

Memories of Ultima Online

In September of 1997, I considered myself a very lucky person.  I was in my freshman year in college and I quickly fell in love with the high speed internet access available to colleges and universities.  I was looking for a new game to play and Ultima Online was the game I had to play.  I had ordered it and it shipped to my home address, but my mother drove an hour to deliver it to me at college so I would not have to drive home in the middle of the school week to take possession of it.

Starting the Ultima Online Demo on The Second Age CD

In those days, you had to pay full price for the game ($64.95) and an additional monthly subscription fee ($9.95).  I did not buy the Charter Edition (which came with 3 months free), I bought the regular retail edition.  That edition came with the cloth map, the UO pin and rather sparse documentation.  I was puzzled because there was little more than a pair of quick reference cards to tell you how to play this massive game.  Nonetheless, I installed the game on my computer, registered an account, gave my credit card information and began my journey by logging in.  

Adventures in Porting - US PC Game Developers and the FM Towns

Released in 1989, the Fujitsu Micro (FM) Towns home computer was an amazingly powerful gaming computer for its time.  It used a 386DX CPU running at 16MHz with 1MB of RAM (upgradeable to 2MB). It could display many resolutions like 640x480 with 256 colors and could support 15-bit color at 320x240 and lots of sprites.  It came with 1x CD-ROM drive, providing redbook audio support in addition to the 4-Operator FM Synthesis 6-channel YM-2612 chip (also used in the Sega Genesis) and 8-channel 8-bit Ricoh RF5c68 PCM chip.  It also came with 2 HD floppy drives and could be connected to an external hard drive.  The Operating System, FM Towns OS, was a Windows-like GUI operating system.  A bootable only version of the OS was freely available to applications developers so their software could boot in the CD drive without needing to load the OS.

Of course, this powerful machine was available only in Japan, where it competed with the Sharp X68000 and the NEC PC-9801 series.  Of all the three system lines, the FM Towns was the closest, hardware-wise, to the IBM PC compatible machines in the west.  Fujitsu came calling to US companies looking for software to showcase their new machine, and several companies were interested.  Most licensed their games to be ported in Japan, but a few put in something extra when it came to the FM Towns.

LucasArts

LucasArts was quite enthusiastic when it came to the FM Towns, porting many of its classic SCUMM adventure games to the system.  Unlike other companies, they did not ship their code off to Japan for a local company to convert their game.  Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders was their one game where none of the advanced features ever found their way back to the US.

Zak's FM Towns version featured a 256 color graphics update of the 320x200 Enhanced PC version.  There was a great deal more music, with the CD containing 23 CD audio tracks for background music throughout the game.  The original C64 version had music two tracks and none of the other versions had more than that until this FM Towns version.  Most of the tracks consist of ambient noise and sounds appropriate to the scene with new age music themes popping up from time to time.  The sound effects also received an upgrade thanks to the more capable sound hardware.



























































Zak is easily accessible to non-Japanese players because it kept the English language text.  Not all games would use Japanese text.  However, all of LucasArts' games had a Japanese text option, but in Zak the graphics for the player characters were altered to give their eyes a larger, more anime-style look.  The effect is more creepy than cute and the faces of the non player characters are not altered.

Next we turn to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure.  This game shares the graphics from the 256-color PC VGA version, which was floppy-disk sized.  There were a few 16-color graphics left over in the PC VGA version that were fixed in the FM Towns version.  However, there is an error in the FM Towns version where some of the tiny character sprites are in 16 colors instead of 256 colors as they were in the PC VGA version.

The audio in the PC 16 color or 256 color version supported nothing better than the Adlib, but the FM Towns version's music received a huge upgrade.  The music appears to be taken from the film's soundtrack, so it really cannot get much better, quality-wise.  Not every scene and area in the PC version used music, but there are 14 tracks on the CD devoted to John Williams' recordings.

 After Indy comes Loom.  Here the graphics were updated to 256 colors, except for the icons that appear when you click on objects.  Unlike the PC version, the graphic for the FM Towns' distaff uses a palette not strictly limited to the 16 color IBM CGA/EGA palette.

Whereas the PC CD version of Loom devotes its CD audio space to speech and sound effects, the FM Towns version of Loom devotes it to music.  There are two sets of eight tracks used for music in the game, and they correspond to the music in the PC floppy disk version.  The first set of tracks (1-8) sound like they were recorded with a real orchestra.  The second set of tracks (9-16) were clearly composed with a synthesizer.  When music starts to play, the track from the first set plays, then the second set plays.  Unfortunately, after that the inferior second set track loops.  Whoever thought that was a good idea?

Interestingly, of all the boxes, only Zak and Loom used artwork that was not found on LucasArts' own PC boxes.  Indy's box art and the rest essentially follow the LucasArts' PC boxes.  Zak included a translated version of The National Inquisitor and collectible cards featuring the playable characters.  Lucas or Fujitsu went the extra mile and had the Audio Drama from Loom done by Japanese voice actors.   Loom and Zak took much longer than the other games to be converted due to their 16-color origins.  Indy for the FM Towns had been completed within two months of the PC 256-color version, while Loom took a year to be released after its 16-color PC version.

Since all the dialogue is kept from the PC floppy version and the portraits have been redone in 256 colors, some consider this to be the definitive version of the game.  The cutscenes and animations lost in the PC CD version are kept here.

With the Secret of Monkey Island, the inventory item graphics were in 16 colors compared to the 256 color pictures of the PC CD VGA version?  They were not planning 320x200 EGA 16-color support for the CD version in 1991-1992.  So why bother to create 16-color versions of these graphics?  My theory is that they were in 16-colors because the lower part of the screen is using an overlay mode.

Essentially put, many PC ports to the FM Towns would use the nearest analogous mode, 320x240. However, kanji text requires a high resolution mode.  I believe the SCUMM engine games used 320x240 with 256 colors (the mode is capable of 15-bit color) for the main graphics window and a 640x480 overlay for the text on the submenu and the spoken dialogue. This gives the kanji 16x16 pixels for each character, but the mode only supports 16 colors on the screen.  This minimized the performance hit compared to everything being drawn in a 640x480 resolution.  An unfortunate side effect is that the inventory graphics in SoMI and the closeup graphics in Loom would have to be in 16 colors.

Zak takes advantage of the extra resolution compared to its PC versions.  It essentially uses 432 of its 480 lines for the text-based portions of the game.  This allows the player to select three additional rows of inventory objects over the PC versions.  The rest of these games do not use the extra space and just leave back letterbox-like bars there.  While Loom puts the bars on the bottom of the screen, the rest of the games center the game in between top and bottom bars.  This tends to suggest that these games were made with a 1.6:1 aspect ratio in mind when most PC games, including LucasArts, really were not.

The Secret of Monkey Island looks, sounds and plays like the PC CD version.  This is when LucasArts' ports no longer have substantial value over their corresponding PC versions.

LucasArts also released Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, but Fate corresponds to its PC CD version and MI2 to its PC version, which was not enhanced for CD. Fate's Japanese text option uses the English voice acting.  Neither CD has CD audio, making them rather uninteresting from a PC perspective.  There are some palette changes, but otherwise they play the same.  LucasArts's iMUSE music engine was too complex to be handled by CD Audio at the time.  The only addition FM Towns' MI2 has over the PC release is a Japanese language option.  These games boot to a language selection screen instead of the FM Towns OS. Compare Loom with Monkey Island 2's boot options :

Origin Systems

Another interesting FM Towns port is that of Ultima VI: The False Prophet.  The major CD enhancement for this port is the addition of voice acting.  There is both English and Japanese voice acting, each is used for the appropriate language choice.  For the English voice acting, employees from Origin Studios and their relatives were used. Richard Garriott voices Lord British and Shamino, for example.  The samples are stored on the CD in files, so the resulting quality is 8-bit.  The sound effects have taken a major improvement over the PC speaker sound effects in the PC version.  This particular port was overseen by Origin.  They were probably planning to use their efforts to release an Enhanced PC CD-ROM version, but that never happened.

For Ultima VI, the 640x480 mode's extra height allows for an extra box.  Typically, this has icons to allow the user to select the English or Japanese language language, save or load a game and return to the FM Towns OS. Uniquely of the games I have sampled, Ultima VI allows you to select the language by either an executable or in the game.  When in dialogue, this allows you to select any conversation choice revealed by the dialogue without typing. Of course you can still type anything into the box to ask the character.




Origin also ported Wing Commander to the FM Towns.  The FM Towns version includes both the expansion packs and you can select either expansion pack from the main menu, unlike the PC version.  The CD audio is used for the music, while the sound effects are substantially upgraded.  Unlike Ultima VI, there is no voice acting and selecting between English and Japanese is done via executables.  Interestingly, there are three executables for each language choice, one for each drive you could use to save your progress.  In the FM Towns, Drives A and B are floppies, Drive C is for the internal ROM and Drive D is for an external hard drive.

Wing Commander II requires an installation to a hard drive, and like its predecessor it uses the CD audio for music.  Ultima Underworld uses it for voice acting heard in the introduction in the PC version.  The samples are obviously of higher quality than what floppy disks could hold, but after you finish the intro, the PC and the FM Towns should play identically thereafter.  By this time, the early FM Towns with their 386D X/16 CPUs were not quite up to the task of running these games, so a faster system was recommended.

Origin also ported the first three games in the Ultima Series as the Ultima Trilogy.  The CD audio is used for fanfare.  Richard Garriott recorded a short introduction in his Lord British voice that also plays as an audio track.  Each game has an introduction with pictures accompanied by text and one of the tracks playing.  Character creation for each game is accompanied by another track.  There is in-game music for all three Ultimas, but it is completely original.  The sound effects are digitized as well.  The graphics are completely redone in high resolution and the games may feel a bit off compared to the Apple II or PC versions.  These conversions were not done in-house by Origin.

Additionally, Origin ported Ultima IV and Ultima V to the FM Towns, but they are much less remarkable.  Ultima IV uses Ultima V's PC tiles and has two CD audio tracks with renditions of Towns and Stones.  These are played during the special introduction and main menu, otherwise music is played through the internal FM chip.  Ultima V has CD audio tracks for the Ultima Theme and Greyson's Tale, played through the special introduction and the main menu.  Otherwise Ultima 5 uses the tiles from the PC and similarly plays music through the internal FM chip.  Again these conversions were not from Origin.

For the Ultima ports, Origin used the built-in YM-2612 for music.  LucasArts did the same for MI2 and Fate of Atlantis.  In these games, the Adlib music is roughly ported to the FM Towns chip.  When I mean rough, I mean in the sense that the results are inferior to the original despite the fact that the FM Towns' YM-2612 (which is also used in the Sega Genesis) is mostly superior to the Adlib's YM-3812.

Sierra Online

Sierra only just dipped its toe into FM Towns ports.  It released King's Quest V for the FM Towns apparently before it did for the PC.   It also released Roberta Williams Mixed-Up Mother Goose which also is cut from the same cloth as the PC CD version of the game.

King's Quest V for the FM Towns has Japanese and English voice acting.  The default voice selection is Japanese, you can change it to English by clicking on the mountain button in the settings menu after you start a game.  Unfortunately, you won't be able to hear the English dialog in the introduction in this version.  Restarting the game returns you to Crispin's house, not the Title Screen.  All in-game text in this version is in English, even when the Japanese language option is selected.  No version of the King's Quest V CD version contains text for the speech or a text option.

This game uses the YM-2612 sound chip for music but does have digital sound effects.  The music does sound like it was ported from the Adlib, so do not expect much.  While the PC CD versions play a low fidelity recording of the MT-32 music for the introduction and finale of the game mixed with the voice acting in the audio file, the FM Towns version plays the FM music and the speech is not mixed with anything until the FM Towns mixes the two audio sources.

There is an early and a late version of King's Quest V for the PC CD-ROM, the major difference between the two being the processing applied to the voice samples.  In the early (December 1991 file date) version, there is minimal processing, leading to crisper sample playback but it gives very pronounced sibilant sounds.  The later (April 1992 file date) version suppresses the sibilant sounds and some of the background noise, but the overall output of the samples is noticeably more muffled.  The voice samples for the English and Japanese voice options in the FM Towns version generally follows the later PC CD version, although NewRisingSun observed there is more reverb for the narrator's voice samples.

Interestingly, while the Icon Bar from the FM Towns version is identical to the PC version, the FM Towns uses the black and white mouse cursor icons from the floppy version.  The PC version uses multicolored mouse cursor icons when run in DOS and black and white mouse cursors when run in Windows. Unfortunately, another thing the FM Towns shares with the Windows version is the ugly stretching algorithm used to stretch 320x200 graphics into 640x480 graphics, leading to lines that have uneven heights.

FTL

FTL released Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back.  Both have CD audio music, but Dungeon Master II does not appear to have an English language option.  All the tracks for Dungeon Master and some of the tracks for Chaos Strikes Back were released for Dungeon Master: The Album, which could be purchased via mail order as stated in an advertisement booklet in the PC release.  These pieces were done by Western musicians.  Otherwise they look and sound like their western originals.  I must note that Chaos Strikes Back was never released for the PC.

Dungeon Master II was also released for the FM Towns two years before it was released for the PC. Dungeon Master II came on CD and floppy for the PC, but the CD does not appear to offer any advantages over the floppy.  The same CD audio tracks on the FM Towns CD can also be found on the Sega CD version of the game.

How Game Remakes Skew Perceptions

When you play a remake of a game, then progress to the next game in the series, which has not been remade, often you can feel a sense of disappointment.  This is because you have not really progressed through the series as the developer intended over the years.  You are getting only a skewed impression of a game when you do not play the original.  In this post I will profile a couple of well-known series in which the first game was remade at a later point and dramatically changed expectations for the next games in the series.

Ultima to Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness

Ultima - Title 1

Ultima - Title 2

Ultima - Demo 1 

Ultima - Demo 2

Ultima - Main Menu

Ultima - Character Generation

When Richard Garriott was programming Ultima on his Apple II Plus with 48KB of RAM, he programmed the game using Applesoft BASIC for the most part.  He released the game in a ziplock bag with a crude manual through an early distributor of computer software called California Pacific Computer in 1981.  The game was a comparative success, selling about 50,000 copies at the time, in the nascent computer game market. However, Temple of Apshai and Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord were much more successful at this point.

Five years later, Garriott was publishing his own games through his own company, Origin Systems.  Sierra On-Line released a port of the game for the Atari 8-bit computers after California Pacific Computer went bust in 1983.  Sierra also released Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress across almost every major computing platform of the mid-1980s.  Origin had already had considerable success with Ultima III: Exodus and Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, publishing both games on most major computing platforms.  Feeling the original Ultima was a bit clunky and rather hard to find, Origin decided to give it an assembly-language makeover.

Ultima 1 - Title 1

Ultima 1 - Title 2

Ultima 1 - Title 3

Ultima 1 - Title 4

Ultima 1 - Main Menu

Ultima 1 - Character Generation

Even though both Ultima and Ultima I were developed on the Apple II and fit on one double-sided disk, the differences are quite profound.  Ultima gives you an intro with crude outline drawings.  Ultima I gives you a colorfully animated intro with an Eagle and a sword being thrust up out of the water, Excalibur-style.  Ultima uses the Apple II text mode and mixed text/high res-graphics mode, Ultima I uses graphics mode everywhere.  Screenshots of the two versions look similar, but the differences in gameplay are quite drastic.

Ultima - Castle

Ultima - Town

Ultima - Outside 1

Ultima - Outside 2

Ultima I is a lot less frustrating to play.  You move over the overworld quickly, and can see your enemies coming.  Ultima has a slow shifting overworld and you do not see enemies until you are on top of them. There are more than one town and one castle map in Ultima I and you move much more quickly across them.  In the dungeons, Ultima I gives rapid movement while Ultima redraws the screen every turn.  Finally, when there is dialogue, you see it overlaid on the main graphics area rather than on the four lines of text.

Ultima - Dungeon 1

Ultima - Dungeon 2

Ultima - Death

While there are many more differences between the two versions, you can get a sense that the remake went through a lot more polish.  The presentation was also vastly upgraded in the remake, with a large cardboard box and a manual that gives detail about the world and feelies in the form of Sosarian coins.   There are also cardboard maps of each of the four continents in the game.  The original (non-Progame) manual does not even give you your goal, you have to learn that via the pub in game.  The manual illustrations also got a huge boost in quality.

Ultima 1 - Dungeon 1

Ultima 1 - Dungeon 2

Ultima 1 - Dungeon 3

Ultima 1 - Dungeon 4

Ultima 1 - Dungeon 5

Ultima 1 - Dungeon 6

When you go from Ultima I to Ultima II, you may be disappointed.  In Ultima I, you could shoot with some weapons more than one tile but you can't in Ultima II.  Your stats in Ultima II will roll over if they go above the maximum, they do not in Ultima I.  Ultima II has some nasty saving rules (essentially whenever you enter or exit a town or dungeon on any Earth time period).  Death in Ultima II requires a reboot.  While death in Ultima did allow for resurrection, the pathetic stats you continue with and the possibility that you may respawn on a mountain or ocean time make it useless.  Ultima I is sufficiently lenient with death and respawning to make it worth considering.  Ultima II has vast and mostly empty overworlds and the dungeons are not particularly useful.  Ultima II does not have custom text fonts (with the exception of the Apple II update in the Ultima Collection) and the PC version does not have an animated intro.

Ultima 1 - Town 1

Ultima 1 - Town 2

Ultima 1 - Outside 1

Ultima 1 - Outside 2

Ultima 1 - Castle 1

Ultima 1 - Castle 2

However, when you compare Ultima to Ultima II, there are many, many improvements.  First, the towns, castles and the overworld all use the same tiles.  Second, the world is far larger and exploring it is no longer a chore.  Third, you can explore planets and do not have to engage in space combat.  Fourth, the dungeons can be mapped, they are no longer randomly generated each time you start a new game.  Fifth, there are many, many more items to acquire from killing enemies.  Sixth, you can warp to different time periods in Earth with Time Doors instead of needing a boat.  Seventh, you can talk to people in towns and castles, some of whom will provide you clues without payment.  Eighth, water now animates, giving a more lively feel to the world. Ninth, there was a proper manual, box and cloth map.

King's Quest to King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown SCI

The original King's Quest was released for the IBM PCjr. as a showcase for that system's graphical capabilities.  It came on one floppy disk and that disk was copy protected and cannot be installed to a hard drive.  Sierra released versions for the IBM PC and Tandy 1000 when it discovered that PCjr. sales were not going to break any home computer sales records.  Eventually it ported King's Quest and its other games to many platforms.  In late 1986 or early 1987, Sierra revised King's Quest for the PC to support hard drives and improved the music and sound effects, added support for EGA, MCGA, VGA and Hercules graphics and added drop down menus.  This brought the game to parity with King's Quest II and King's Quest III in terms of presentation at the cost of an extra disk. Even with improved 3-voice PCjr./Tandy music support, things sounded a little sparse.

King's Quest - Title

King's Quest 1 SCI - Title

In 1990, Sierra decided to remake King's Quest I and the other inaugural games in its Quest series (Police Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory, Leisure Suit Larry) with its new SCI engine.  King's Quest came first and still used 16-color graphics and a text parser.  However, these graphics were far more detailed because they were in 320x200 instead of 160x200.  A musical soundtrack was added supporting the popular sound devices of the day, Adlib, Game Blaster, MT-32, Tandy 1000.  It even supported the DACs found in the later Tandy 1000s and the Sound Blaster for sound effects.

King's Quest - Castle of King Edward

King's Quest - King Edward's Throne Room

King' Quest - King Edward's Quest

King's Quest I SCI - King Edward's Castle

King's Quest I SCI - King Edward's Throne Room and Quest

Of course, Sierra did not leave everything in place exactly the way it was.  The Sorcerer's spell can leave you vulnerable to other monsters now (death by Ogre, theft by Dwarf) and different monsters can appear on the monster screen.  The most infamous puzzle (involving the Gnome) now has a different solution.  One item has to be found in a different place.  The castle takes up three screens instead of two and the screen scrolls rather than redraws.  Instead of playing the introduction, you watch it.  The game is now linear, you have to complete the quests in a certain order.  The Magic Shield, which could shield you from almost any enemy, must be found last.  Essentially, the changes allowed Sierra to keep people who played through the original version (and may have kept their hint book) from breezing through the game as well as give a more cinematic flair to the original game.

King's Quest - Golden Egg

King's Quest - Dragon's Lair

King's Quest - Stairway

King's Quest - Gnome

King's Quest - Witch's House

King's Quest - Woodcutter's Hut

Sierra eventually dropped its plans to remake all their old games in each quest series.  Remakes took a long time to make, were not cheap and did not sell as well as original games.  When Sierra began to release CD compilations of its Quest series games, it would release both the original game and the remake.  If you played the remake, you would be disappointed when you played the next games.  From King's Quest I SCI, the next two games would appear to be inferior because they are still using the AGI engine.  With other Quest series games, the contrast would be even starker because their remakes were using 256 color VGA graphics.

However, in August, 2001 a group of fans remade the SCI remake with 256-color graphics and support for then-modern computing platforms.  King's Quest I "VGA" was released and received major upgrades in version 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0.  The game was last updated in September, 2010.  King's Quest I VGA followed in the footsteps of Sierra's other SCI remakes by using an icon based interaction system.  Graphically it is on-par with King's Quests V and VI and takes a few assets from the former. It essentially follows the Sierra SCI remake in terms of quests and solutions.  Music was originally General MIDI based (the MT-32 was supported directly) but was later digitized.  Support for digital speech came as an option in 2.0, which in those days was a hefty-sized download.  Eventually speech became integrated into the main download, and they got Josh Mandel to voice King Graham as he did in the CD versions of KQ5 and KQ6.  The portraits were given a graphical overhaul in 4.0, making them look more professionally done.

King's Quest I SCI - Witch's House

King's Quest I SCI - Woodcutter's Hut

King's Quest I SCI - Suspended Walkway

King's Quest I SCI 0 - Golden Egg

King's Quest I SCI - Gnome

King's Quest I SCI - Dragon's Lair

KQ1 VGA was well-received, and encouraged Tierra Entertainment, later known as AGD Interactive, to remake more games.  They released King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones, Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire, and later King's Quest III: To Heir is Human Redux.  Infamous Adventures also released a KQ3 remake and a Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge remake.  Eventually, even Sierra developers got into the act, Al Lowe released Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards in 2013 as Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded.  Of course, in LSL's case, that game was sold for profit received a license from Activision, which owns the Sierra IP.  The other games were fan remakes are freeware and are tolerated by Activision with a fan license.

Educational Games

However, if you want to get really nutty about remakes, no article can go without mentioning Sierra's Mixed Up Mother Goose.  Sierra originally released the game as an AGI game in 1987, then an SCI 16-color remake in 1990, a 256-color SCI remake on floppy and CD-ROM in 1991 and finally a Deluxe SVGA remake in 1995.  This continual cycle of remaking the game was important to try and capture each new generation of preschoolers with a game with graphics and features they would appreciate.

It is not uncommon for educational/edutainment games to nearly-continually reinvent themselves to keep up to date with new technology.  Math Blaster began on the Apple II and the last game in the series was released for Windows 7.  The Oregon Trail has been around for 40 years, beginning on an HP2100 minicomputer, a beast the size of a large dresser, but the latest edition has been released for mobile devices far smaller and more powerful.  Despite vastly different technologies that have come in that time, the basic game is still the same.