Martian Dreams: the cannon that fired a day early and shot the Chicago World's Fair to Mars

A rare entry in the Ultima series, it gathers real scientists and writers into a Martian adventure that splits those who remember it fondly from those who run into nothing but technical faults.

A cannon misfires and sends the Chicago World's Fair to Mars

Chicago, 1893. The World's Fair is in full swing when astronomer Percival Lowell tests the space cannon he designed: a colossal thing, built to hurl a bullet-shaped ship all the way to Mars. It fires a day ahead of schedule, with dozens of the era's most famous names already aboard. Stranded and unprepared on the red planet, these accidental passengers have little chance of surviving on their own — and it falls to you, known in the game as the Avatar, to go after the lost expedition before recorded history changes for good.

The search leads through mysterious Martian canals, steam-driven factories and automatons powered by radium, that staple of late-nineteenth-century science fiction. Along the way, the game paints a Mars peopled by real figures rebuilt from historical research, according to the store itself: Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Theodore Roosevelt and many more names from the turn of the century. Before the end, the adventure also asks you to face a dream world where the Avatar's own fears and desires become the obstacle.

Martian Dreams is the second chapter in the Ultima Worlds of Adventure series, which sends you, the Avatar, into worlds of science fiction, mystery, historical exploration, horror, time travel, espionage and fantasy, as the store's own description puts it. Listed as an adventure and a role-playing game, it is the work of Origin Systems. Electronic Arts handled publishing, and the game reached this catalog on June 18, 2012.

The ones who braved the original floppy still stand by this Mars

Among those who wrote in the very week this version landed in the store, back in June 2012, one point of praise keeps coming up: the blend of real history and fiction grips you in a way few games of its day dared to attempt. Some still keep the original floppy-disk box and have been through the adventure three or four times since — rare behavior, by their own admission, for someone who usually drops a game the moment it's over. Another reader, writing in 2015, chose to pick the game up straight from this store's catalog rather than hunt down copies on obscure abandonware sites.

The reimagining of real people draws steady praise too: for this crowd, running into Nikola Tesla or Mark Twain on a Martian adventure is exactly what makes the game stick with you long after the ending. One reviewer also points out that it is one of Warren Spector's early works — the man later behind Deus Ex and Epic Mickey — which helps explain why the story steers clear of the obvious. Even the ones who took a while to warm up — a 2012 account describes finding the game boring the first time around, then feeling unable to put it down after rediscovering it here — end up on the same side: recommending it.

Not all the praise comes clean, though. A 2018 review calls the game better than its predecessor, Savage Empire — more animated cutscenes, a stronger soundtrack, a well-tuned day-and-night cycle — and still closes on a warning: the performance crashes are serious. It is the very people who love the game admitting, between the lines, that it carries the weight of its years.

When Mars crashes before the first step

The most common complaint isn't about the story — it's about the engine underneath it. One player, writing in August 2025, said the game crashed right after character creation: the adventure never even got going. A 2018 account is harsher still — after three more attempts, this reader concluded the problem wasn't a one-off glitch but the whole game being broken; the technical support they turned to brought no fix.

Those who have played the earlier games in the series complain of a different kind of fatigue: to their eye, the Martian setting is just Ultima 6 in new clothes — aliens, robots and historical figures included — too repetitive for anyone who already bought into the formula. Others simply find the interface and the mechanics too rough for the way people play today.

The pattern that emerges is clear: when the game works, the grievance is a matter of taste — repetition, a dated look; when it doesn't, the grievance is one of sheer survival, and the adventure crashes before it can tell any story at all.

Who this Martian trip is for

Longtime fans of the Ultima series, or any reader with a genuine curiosity about seeing Nikola Tesla, Mark Twain and Marie Curie side by side in an 1893 adventure, will find here exactly that rare crossing of real history and science fiction. These are people willing to make peace with an interface from another age, because the payoff, by the account of those who've taken the plunge, is a story that refuses to settle into cliché.

Anyone after a quiet afternoon, with no patience for a dated interface and no room to start over if the adventure crashes right at character creation, should look for their dose of historical curiosity elsewhere. The pool of people who have rated the game is small and leans clearly in its favor — but the dissenting minority isn't arguing over taste: they're fighting just to get the game to open at all.