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One of my first RPGs was Ultima III: Exodus on NES and PC. Ultima, along with Wizardry, was considered to be one of the two ancestors of the video RPG genre. Eventually I was able to get a hold of the other games in the series. The entire series is on GOG, including the spinoffs like Worlds of Adventure and Underworld. 

Richard Garriott, known as Lord British, the nickname he had picked up one summer at the University of Oklahoma, was the creator of the Ultima series. He made his first game, Akalabeth, as a high school student, while the early Ultima games were made during his college days at UT Austin. As such, the early games tended to reflect his interests at the time, which included D&D, Star Wars, Time Bandits, and the Eagles, as well as space travel in general, given that his father was astronaut Owen K. Garriott. It wasn't until Ultima III that the series would settle into a more conventional fantasy setting, and Ultima IV was when Garriott created the English-Welsh themed world of Britannia that would be the setting for most of the remainder of the series. Ultima had some of the early elements of the series mixed with a lot of anachronisms.

Ultima was originally made for the Apple II, which was the lead platform for all Ultima games up until Origin developed Ultima VI for PCs to take advantage of VGA graphics and improved sound cards. While Garriott had published his first game by selling floppy disks in a Ziploc bag at his local computer store, he got a company called California Pacific to distribute Ultima. It sold 50,000 copies. Ultima was eventually remade for the PC in 1986, after Garriott and his family had established Origin Systems in Austin and become fairly well-known among computer RPG enthusiasts.

Ultima I is set in a fantasy world called Sosaria. Sosaria is being terrorized by the sorceror Mondain and his army of monsters. Sosaria's kingdoms are powerless to stop Mondain because the Gem of Immortality, an artifact for which Mondain murdered his own father to obtain, makes him invincible. You are the Stranger, summoned from Earth to find a way to destroy the Gem of Immortality and defeat Mondain. You begin in the kingdom of Lord British, armed only with a dagger and the clothes on your back. At the outset, you pick your character's race, class, and sex, picked from the usual stock of D&D/Tolkien tropes. Being an elf thief is pretty much a game-breaker since you can steal almost anything you need and only need money for one part of the game.

Each of the game's four continents has two castles, eight towns, two landmarks, and a number of dungeons. The same set of maps for each of the towns, castles, and dungeons is recycled from continent to continent. The first continent would become the land of Britannia in later games, while the fourth continent would become Serpent Isle, the setting for Ultima VII Part Two.

Here's a complete rundown of the gameplay in Ultima: 

1. Use the towns to upgrade your weapons and armor and obtain food. You can do this either by paying legitimately or by stealing, although if you're caught the guards will come after you. This is why being an elf thief is so game breaking: you can steal any weapons, armor, or food you need easily, and one of the town maps lets you easily steal food without the guards being able to do anything about it because of the game's extremely basic AI. The morality system in Ultima IV was inspired in part by Garriott getting fan mail and learning how many Ultima "heroes" simply stole and slaughtered their way through the first three games. You'll also need to buy vehicles to travel between the continents. You can't really talk to NPCs in this game the way you can in later games.

Starting when your character is level 2, shops will start featuring technologically advanced weapons, armor, and vehicles such as pistols, phasers, space suits, air cars (hovercraft) and space shuttles. 

2. Go to the castles and do quests. On each continent, one king will ask you to find a certain landmark in exchange for a bonus in one of your stats, and give you a hint. The other king will ask you to go into a dungeon and kill a certain monster, rewarding you with one of four colored gems that is necessary to win the game. You must visit each continent to do this, and the further east you go, the tougher the monster you'll be asked to kill. 

Each castle also has a prison with a princess in it, even Lord British's castle. In order to rescue the princess, you must kill the castle's jester for the key, which will cause the guards in the castle to come after you, and then escort the princess out of the castle. You'll get a time machine plus some gold as a reward for rescuing the Princess... but only if you're a Space Ace (see below.)

3. Dungeons are scattered throughout the game and are in first person where the rest of the game is overhead view. The real purpose of the dungeons is to build up your hit points, as when you exit the dungeon, you'll be rewarded with a HP boost based on how many monsters you kill, as well as gold for each enemy killed. However, the monsters mob you in the dungeons. You can gain HP much more easily from weaker monsters, as they won't take away as many HP while fighting you, so other than to do monster killing quests, there is no need for you to descend beyond the second or third levels in any dungeon, and you can use spells to descend quickly to the level where the monster your hunting is at and then use spells to escape the dungeon. So other than building HP and gold and doing a quest, there's no real point in dungeon crawling.

4. Outer space. Yes, you go into space. Starting at level 2, you can buy a space shuttle for about 2000 gold. Board the shuttle and you'll be shot into space for an overhead view docking sequence, where you must fit the nose of your shuttle pixel-perfect with the docking bay of the space station. If you try to dock without wearing a space suit, you die from explosive decompression. Next, you must rent one of two star fighters and go hunting for TIE fighters. Space combat takes place in a first-person view reminiscent of Atari's Star Raiders game. You must destroy 20 enemy ships to become a Space Ace while being careful not to run out of fuel. Each time you need to refuel it will cost you 500 gold. Make sure you're rich before you go into space. If you're a thief with high dexterity the space sequence is the only part of the game where you'll actually need gold, and you'll need a lot of it. Once you're done, you'll need to find your original space station to return to Sosaria. Rescuing a princess after becoming a Space Ace will give you access to a Time Machine.

5. The endgame: Once you've got a Time Machine and all four gems from each continent, enter the Time Machine and you'll be transported to the past when Mondain first obtained his Gem of Immortality. Mondain will attack with unpredictable spells that will sap your HP. After you hit him often enough, he'll turn into a bat so you'll have to chase him and keep hitting him until he's dead. Then touch the gem. Once Mondain and his gem are destroyed, you've won the game! 

The early Ultima games were strange games with goofy stuff in them that would make most Japanese developers raise an eyebrow. They did, however, establish the mythos that would drive the series until it ended with Ultima IX in 1999. And at a time dominated by single-screen arcade games, Ultima was pretty ambitious, and its DNA can be found in most RPGs you play today. It was one of the first RPGs to get players out of the dungeon and let them explore an overworld map with wilderness, towns, and castles. Garriott was an example of the teenage pioneers that helped drive innovation forward in video games back in the early 80s. Today he's working on Shroud of the Avatar, since Electronic Arts has held the rights to the Ultima series since they bought Origin Systems in 1992.