Ah, yes
*opens The Official Book of Ultima by Shay Addams from Compute! Books*
Pages 31-34:
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The Tale of the Silver Serpent
Every fantasy world has its own mythology, and one of the most pervasive and fascinating myths of the Lord British legend is the tale of the Silver Serpent. Garriott says the Serpent initially surfaced in Ultima II, but the legend's first prominent role as a game element came in Ultima III, when a Fighter in a Pub cryptically hints that "Exodus lies beyond the silver snake," blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
"When I was 11 or so," he says, "my mother -- a professional artist who's into all kinds of art like pottery, oil paintings, etchings -- was going through a silversmithing phase. I was always interested into what she was doing, and all us kids would get dragged into her latest project. I had been watching a Doc Savage movie, and I thougt Doc Savage was really pretty neat stuff. The bad guys in this one were natives who all had this snake painted on their chests. It looked somewhat like this shape. " He grasps the thin, shining silver snake dangling about his neck. Most people, upon meeting him for the first time and recognizing the Silver Serpent from the game actually hanging from his neck assume it holds great significance "They expect it means I'm a member of some satanic cult group or something, but it's really just something I thougt was fanciful as a child, and it remained as an icon for me."
When the young Garriott went upstairs to see his mother's latest silversmithing project that day, he felt inspired to make something out of silver, too. Having seen the Doc Savage film just minutes before, he described the snake design to Helen. "She helped me work it out on paper, and I got out my little silver saw and cut this little guy out of silver," he says, as he touches the snake again. Deciding to make a necklace out of it, he dragged out one of his mother's belts. "It was made out of three strands of this chain. Each segment of it was about six inches long, and then there was just a small vertical post that connected the little segments of this stuff together. I said 'hey, that stuff would make a great chain.' I guess as a kid I must have known it was a belt, but it looked like a useful tool to me more than anything else. So I got a screwdriver and separated enough chain to make the loophole here, then clamped it on with a pair of pliers. Of course, I got in trouble when my mother came back and found that I had sacrificed her belt to the cause, but it was too late to put it all back together. And this chain now resides around my neck 365 days a year, 24 hours a day -- it has essentially remained there for the rest of my life ever since the day I put it on. There is no way to remove it without taking a screwdriver to it and prying open one of the links. For the first couple of years that I wore it, I actually had a link that I used to open and close a little bit. In fact, it is this link," he says, pointing out one that's a bit more separated and stretched out than the others. "After I realized I was wearing out something by doing that, I quit doing it, so this necklace remained here ever since. It literally never comes off." (Fortunately, it doesn't set off metal detectors at the airport.) "The chain was gold-colored when I first put it on." Tugging at it, he reveals how "on the inside of the loops, you may still be able to see a little of the gold color. As it wears off, the color keeps changing, and now it rusts on my neck. I mean literally, every day. When I go, I may die of rust poisoning or something." blah blah blah blah blah.
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There
So, the serpent appeared in U2 first. Now, lets clarify something: Origin at some point re-released U1, and incluided those coins.