Ultima IX: Ascension Asset Archaeology
Jan 2, 2026
I found myself looking at screenshots of the early development of Ultima IX. This one in particular caught my eye - seeing these dev tools from the 90s got me wondering if there was any trace of this editor, or this original isometric version of Ultima 9, in the very different game that eventually shipped in 1999.
I couldn’t find any modern-Windows-compatible tools for viewing the U9 asset files, but I found some pretty extensive documentation, so I figured I’d just roll my own. You can now find it on Github.
After a lot of scrolling through images, I found these:
I didn’t find anything more from the editor in the assets or from poking around in the executable but it’s neat to find traces of the developer tools tucked away in the game files. I did find these terrain tiles, which have a suspiciously similar noisy dithering to the old screenshots, and a green marbley tileset that looks to date back to then:
Compare with:
The final interesting find was this character art, featuring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-esque green, four-armed alien folk wielding swords, spears and what looks to be an actual gun. I would love to know more about this - as far as I can tell it doesn’t feature in the game and it’s not buried alongside other assets that explain it.
If you’re interested in having a poke around these files, you can check out my projecet on Github, or I later found that this person has already dumped the images online. I shall now resume my wait for the digital playground for the new millennium.
