[hnthrowaway0328]

I read somewhere that Ultima V is the last Ultima that Lord British did the majority programming work. For Ultima VI he was convinced that he need a full team to get it done.

I still think it should be rather doable (and should be done by any aspiring game programmers) for a one man team to complete a Ultima V spin-off (same graphics, same complexity but on modern platforms) nowadays. Modern computers, languages and game engines abstract away a lot of the difficulties.

[mschaef]

Completely agreed. The tile based graphics that pushed the limits of a mid-80's computer (and in some cases required special hardware) can now be done off the cuff with totally naive code in a matter of a couple hours:

https://github.com/mschaef/waka-waka-land

There's lots more room these days for developing the story, etc. if that's the level of production values you wish to achieve.