Richard Garriott and Warren Spector
I was thrilled when I recently found out that Richard Garriott would be speaking at SxSW. It's hard to overstate the impact that Richard's games had on me growing up. Not just the hours I spent playing them with my sister but also everything I learnt trying to hack them (especially IV and V) to see how they worked.
The panel was excellent and Richard and Warren Spector (who worked with Richard on Ultimas VI and VII and designed Deus Ex) make a wonderfully entertaining pair to listen to.
First a few anecdotes about the origins (no pun intended) of the Ultima series:
- Back in 1977, Richard attended a camp for mathematically-inclined kids. There he was introduced to four things: D&D, Lord of the Rings, computer programming and women (the incongruous inclusion of which had the audience errupting in laughter)
- Richard worked on a bunch of D&D-related computer programs culminating in the game Akalabeth (a name which he didn't realise for years he had subconsciously pinched from Tolkien).
- Akalabeth was written after school and on weekends in BASIC over a seven-week period. Bill Budge published it and Richard made $5 on each copy sold. Richard netted a cool $150,000 for seven weeks part-time work (gasps from the audience) and thought 'imagine what I could do if I actually put some real effort into a game'. The result was Ultima I.
There were a lot of things that Warren and Richard agreed on. Both thought story was core. And both commented on the fact that the D&D sessions they most enjoyed were where the rules were almost forgotten about and a game centred around story telling.
(As an aside: I remember when I first started AD&D with school friends in 1985, we hardly even used dice at all. I remember one adventure I DMed on a bus with no dice or character sheets or handbooks - just storytelling.)
Interestingly, Warren (who worked at TSR for a while) said that TSR deliberately left aspects of AD&D underspecified to encourage players to augment the rules (and therefore get them more attached to the game).
Where Warren and Richard differed was on single-player versus multi-player and that largely seemed to stem from their different goals in audience size.
Warren pointed out that if the number of people that played the most successful computer game of all time was the audience number for a new TV show, the show would get cancelled after two episodes.
Warren clearly wants a bigger audience which, both he and Richard agree, means consoles.
Richard is happy with the smaller audience interested in MMOGs - largely because of the economics. The profit margins on successful MMOGs are much greater than those on single-player games and even greater than on console games. Apparently EA made about $100 million on $2.5 billion revenue last year. In contrast NCSoft made $50 million on $125 million revenue.
All the business comments Richard made had Warren staring in disbelief: 'Richard Garriott died five years ago and was replaced by his brother', a reference to Robert Garriott who ran the business side of Origin Systems.
At the end I spoken briefly to Richard and had the opportunity to thank him, not just for a great panel session, but for the last twenty years.
Last Modified: Feb. 8, 2005
Author: James Tauber