Privateer Easter Egg Bottled up for Thirty Years? (February 21, 2023)

[Bandit LOAF]

I think I might have found a neat reference. Ultima fans, follow me for a moment. Here are screenshots of (some of) bartenders from Privateer. The heads are animated in front of a background that was rendered in 3D Studio.





A larger version of each background is actually stored in the game which gives you a better view. They're for a cut feature so don't ever actually display. But if you look closely there are four different labels for the liquor applied to a variety of different bottle shapes.





But we can get even more detail because the original 3D models and their textures have survived all these years in dev material we've recovered at the CIC!





So Ultima fans: is that last bottle not a map of Britannia?!




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Original update published on February 21, 2023

 

[Gaijin]

OMG it is!!! Nice catch.

 

[st3lt3k]

I vote yes. Great find!

I'm no Ultima expert but it looks like in Ultima VII (apparently released April 16, 1992) the islands were slightly bigger. In game map

The Codex of Ultima Wisdom: Ultima VII map of Britannia

 

[ChrisReid]

Yeah, seems like more than a coincidence to me!

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Yeah, seems like more than a coincidence to me!

Here's another piece of connective tissue, a screenshot from the Ultima VII credits noting the assistance of the Privateer team... then known as Next Frontier. When a title was coming in hot it was all hands on deck at Origin, so folks working on Privateer would've been assisting the Ultima team during the final push.

(These are also the credits that got us Origin Audio CD Vol. 2 after so many people wrote in trying to buy the U7 soundtrack they'd listed as a joke!)