Two years into a deep-dive that charts Ultima from Akalabeth to Ultima 9, YouTube essayist Majuular has produced more than 20 hours of documentary-style content that now draws audiences in the hundreds of thousands per installment. The series has become a focal point of gaming history on YouTube, with each new video drawing as many as 500,000 viewers.
Luke grew up with the RPGs that live in Ultima's long shadow and began making videos sifting through their complexities as early as age 14, inspired by the abrasive energy of Angry Video Game Nerd and Classic Game Room. While researching the origins of his favorite game genre and reading Dungeons & Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games, he was singularly struck by Akalabeth's futurism: "Something broke through in my head and I realized how incredible it was that somebody thought this up, made it, and put it out, and not solely Akalabeth." He added that it felt like "the root of a tree that grew out and became this incredibly nuanced world of RPGs that I already had grown up with. I had always taken that seedling for granted." Galvanized by Barton's book, Luke resolved to not only play through the series but to tell its wild origin story in his own way. Charting the sparse corridors of Akalabeth's World of Doom to the expansive experiments of creator Richard Garriott—represented in-game by the preposterously named Lord British—has been a two-year undertaking, and more than 500,000 people are showing up for each new video.
Majuular's channel has matured from a sideline project to a living archive. By late 2025 the Ultima Retrospective spans 11 videos, with multi-hour features tracing Ultima's influence across Western and Japanese RPGs and with Luke taking on the games themselves to analyze lore on its own terms. The work draws on decades of interview material, obscure photographs, and community archives such as the Ultima Dragons virtual fan club, without which Luke says he'd be "totally lost." Luke has grown his audience to over 200,000 subscribers on YouTube and a robust Patreon—roughly 2,700 supporters—that sustains the channel and its research. The income has funded a real-life upgrade: a home with sunlight for his cats and a kitchen he and his partner can finally share. "It's totally changed my life," he says. "It's given us a degree of security and it's just cool to have a group of people who are interested in what you have to say and it's something I don't think I'll ever get used to. Seeing people say 'I'm so excited for this video' ... it's almost overwhelming."
Very long editing days are part of the ritual. Luke describes himself as "a creature of habit," splitting days between research, gameplay, and note-taking, then boiling everything down in a process he calls the "more workmanlike" editing phase. Before YouTube found its current form, he worked a string of jobs—from pizza delivery to retail to manual labor—moving with his girlfriend "from basement to basement" as a college dropout. He recalls those days as the prelude to a discipline that sustains a high-output project: "I know it won't last forever, so I'm always trying to make hay while the sun shines, and a big part of that is trying to improve my craft." A second wave of work on Ultima—alongside detours into William Shatner's TekWar—has culminated in a deeply researched, deeply personal chronicle of a genre-defining series.
Ultima Forever Garriott's CRPG series may not claim the title of "first computer role-playing game," but its best entries remain among the medium's most influential. Baldur's Gate 3 creator Swen Vincke and Majuular agree that the one to try today is Ultima 7—its emphasis on player agency and interactivity was a marvel when it originally released. The routine is never merely nostalgic; the retrospectives pull through the rough edges of history, such as Akalabeth's wireframe Balrogs, which look primitive but are essential artifacts of the nascent CRPG. Ultima 5's metafictional streak—its treatment of virtue as the engine of a storyline—gets particular praise from Luke, who calls its approach to morality and narrative structure "genius." The Tyranny of Virtue, his retrospective on Ultima 5, treats the game as a fantasy fiction that dares to interrogate its own messaging and invite players to think critically about virtue and power. "The idea of beating the game by acting virtuously would have been abstract and hard to sell at the time," Luke notes, but the execution was a forward-thinking leap that still resonates, even as modern RPGs evolve beyond its constraints. The narrative itself is foregrounded to the point where Luke argues the moments where player actions are woven into the story represent some of the most clever implementations in an RPG that he's ever seen.
The Ultima Retrospective is nearing its end, with Luke planning to close the main arc by tackling Ultima 9 and, if time permits, Ultima Online. He concedes the project will feel bittersweet: after two-and-a-half years of daily commitment, stepping away from Britannia will be strange, but the discipline has become part of his life. "Ultima is not for everybody, but it's for me," he says, reflecting on what the series has meant to him and to the audience that has stuck with him through long forms and deep dives. "When I pull the brakes on it and give myself a chance to recalibrate, by the time I'm diving into the next game, I can't wait to get back to the research component and see how things are changing in Britannia. I've thought about Ultima pretty much every day for the last two-and-a-half years at this point. It's been a huge part of my life, so I'll probably always bring it up."
The Ultima Retrospective stands as a case study in how culture and opinion intersect with archival gaming history on YouTube: not merely a narrative reliving of a beloved franchise, but a model for how creators fuse scholarly rigor with personal storytelling. Luke treats the project as a history lesson about the people who built these worlds as much as about the worlds themselves—the scrappy, passionate teams who imagined new realities with limited resources, and the communities that kept their memories alive long after the screens dimmed.
