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:
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.