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A complete copy of Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash, a rare spinoff of the Ultima franchise, sold on eBay yesterday for more than $3,000, but it wasn't a big payday for the seller — he actually lost money on it.
Sierra Online originally released Escape from Mt. Drash on the Commodore VIC-20 in 1983. According to a blog post comment from an individual purporting to have worked for the publisher at the time, the company produced no more than 5,000 copies of Escape from Mt. Drash. The first time any of them surfaced since the mid-1980s was in 2000, and the first complete copy was reportedly purchased by a collector named Peter Olafson in 2004 for $3,605 on eBay.
Olafson was the person behind this recent auction, in which he was selling that copy of Escape from Mt. Drash. The package consists of the VIC-20 cassette in a plastic case, the instructions card and the original cardboard box. The winning bid came in at $3,050, more than $500 short of what Olafson paid a decade ago. Incomplete copies have sold for upwards of $675.
