GOG customers can now pick up Richard Garriott’s debut role-playing game for free.
The holiday season can be a great time of the year for gamers. Between digital distributors launching huge sales and people just generally feeling more charitable, it’s not uncommon to for video game fans to wind up with a stack of new titles when the New Year hits. That in mind, if you’re interested in a retro classic to cap off your 2014 collection, you might want to swing over to GOG where, earlier this week, the site added a new free title to its catalog.
The new game is the RPG classic Akalabeth: World of Doom. Originally launched in 1980, Akalabeth was the first commercial release from famed game developer Richard Garriott. Often referred to as Ultima 0, it was one of the earliest PC role-playing games and served, in many ways, as a testing ground for the mechanics that would later appear in the mainline Ultima series. The game itself tasks the player with a quest to prove themselves to the ever-demanding Lord British.
Akalabeth is the fourth game by Garriott to be released as a free product at GOG. The site also offers Ultima IV, Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire and Ultima Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams as free downloads for registered customers. Give them a try if you’re somehow entering 2015 without any new games to play. I can’t speak personally for Akalabeth (yet), but I can say that Ultima IV is still worth investing time in.
Source: GOG
