The original version of Ultima I was written in a mixture of BASIC and assembly. BASIC is pretty slow, but most BASIC implementations let you call into optimized assembly routines.

Though, past a certain point of complexity, performance aside, assembly might be more readable than BASIC because BASIC relied on line numbers for jumping around, whereas assemblers offered named labels.

The original version of Ultima I was written in a mixture of BASIC and assembly.

True that. Who could forget "One moment for house-cleaning!" as it ran a FRE(0) every time you saved.

(... uh, everybody?)