Ultima Stones | Miscellaneous | Chats & Letters
R. Garriott ScreenSavers Interview
(Transcripted by Silver Dragon -==UDIC==- (Dave Stocker) silverdragon@usol.com)
This transcription is from the TechTV program "The Screensavers" which aired originally on August 13, 2002. Martin Sargent, in the Screensaver's TechTV studio interviewed Richard Garriott, from some undisclosed location in Austin, Texas. ;}
(The following content has been edited grammatically just slightly from the original interview so as not to overwhelm the reader with huhs, hmms, uhs, ahs and the like. Enjoy!)
<INTERVIEW>
[Martin] Welcome back. My next guest is the creator of the Ultima series, one of the longest running computer game titles of all time. Richard "Lord British" Garriott is the role playing game guru, and he joins us now from Austin, Texas to tell us more about the future of online gaming. Welcome to the show Richard.
[Richard] Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
[Martin] Hey, my pleasure, man. I gotta tell ya, when I was a tot, I used to play "Ultima IV Quest for the Avatar" so much on my Apple ][ C that I was, like, in serious danger of becoming a fat kid thats like, all I did.
[Richard] *laughs* Well That's terrible but, its what's even worse is that you were a tot playing "Ultima IV" because, of course, I was already relatively old by that point in time.
[Martin] What was that , 1984, 1986 or so?
[Richard] Eighty eighty five.
[Martin] Eighty five. Amazing game. But, they've changed a lot since then, right? I mean that's
[Richard] Oh they sure have. They've come a long way from the early days of teletypes to hardware 3-D graphics, now.
[Martin] Absolutely. I mean it just started multi-user dungeons. How did you get into the role playing game genre? Did you start out paper based "Dungeons and Dragons" stuff?
[Richard] Yeah, exactly. Back in my freshman year in high school which was 1974. I was reading Tolkien, playing the "Lord of the Rings", or playing "Dungeons and Dragons" on paper, and that's when computers were first becoming popular even before the Apple ][. In fact I brought a little D&D game that I made on paper tape that (talk about teletype and then these first games) you actually, the graphics, there was no video display. You'd actually have a stream of paper that came out with asterisks for walls, spaces for corridors, dollar signs for treasure, very primitive. But, that's the way it began.
[Martin] Can you still play that game? Are there any terminals around that you could play that game that you made in high school?
[Richard] No. Sadly, there isn't. Although, my first published game which is kind of the Ultima prequel, its called "Akalabeth", I actually have a copy of that here too which I self-published back in 1980. When I made this game on the Apple ][ computer, I've actually got this machine, this program still running on a machine in my office right now. Its on twenty-four hours a day just so I can look back and pine for the good ole days!
[Martin] So you're of course famous for being Lord British and in the "Ultima" series, Lord British actually exists in the world of Britannia, and I always tried to kill him when I was playing Ultima IV but you made him impossible to defeat back then
[Richard] Yeah although
[Martin] how did you come up with the "Lord British" character? How long have you been using that moniker?
[Richard] Actually, since the very beginning. These first games that I created, since I was also playing "Dungeons and Dragons" at the time, my D&D character was named, originally "British," and then, eventually, "Lord British" which came about because, it turns out that, though I am an American citizen, I was born in England when my parents were over there for about a year. And, so the character I played in the game was Lord British. And so when I first started writing games, never intending on publishing them, I would give credit to both Richard Garriott as the creator of the game, but also my persona Lord British as the king within the game that I was creating. And then my first publisher was asking me the same sort of question, and thought, you know, Richard Garriott's not a very memorable name but Lord British people will remember that. So, Richard Garriott was removed from the credits of the early Ultimas, and Lord British became the only known author of the series for a while.
[Martin] Gotcha. So those older games, like, you sort of you had to act out almost what you as the creator of the game put into the character but now-a-days in online role playing games we can sort of become whoever we want. What is the most popular online role playing game right now? And then, moving forward, what do you think is the future of online role playing games?
[Richard] Yes, its fascinating that this whole space of online games, though, technically, some online games have existed as long as computers have existed, only became really popular with the advent of "Ultima Online" late in the nineties. But actually, the most popular one right now is one most people in the United States aren't very familiar with its a game called "Lineage" that my company, NCsoft, publishes. However, it was developed out of our Korean office and initially launched over there in Asia. But, it has four million active players, whereas the largest one here in the United States is probably "Everquest" with somewhere between four hundred and five hundred thousand players. So, "Lineage" is bigger than all of the other online games in the world combined times two. So its a huge number of people playing these virtual worlds.
[Martin] The Koreans are nuts about the role playing games, aren't they, with all the cyber cafes there they spend a lot of time playing these games?
[Richard] Absolutely. In fact if you go into these cyber cafes, as you said, they have generally fifty to a hundred machines in these cafes that are just crammed with people every night and these cyber cafes are, literally, one or more per city block, across the entire country, basically.
[Martin] That's pretty amazing. You hear people refer to "Everquest" as "Evercrack." People get seriously, dangerously addicted to this. I mean maybe you're implicit in that. What makes a game, an online role playing game successful so much so that it can become addictive?
[Richard] Well, the fascinating part about it is, whereas with most, you know, non-online games you play basically alone, at home, even in the case of the early multiplayer games, things like the "Doom"s and "Quake"s and "Unreal"s of the world, you're in there basically to just shoot each other. You don't really develop much of a social bond with the people that you're only killing. Whereas in these online games you live and work and play in these virtual worlds in an ongoing way with a persistent character that grows over time. And so people become very heavily invested not only in their individual character but also in the real human relationships that they build with other players over weeks and months and often years of time. Its actually not uncommon to find people who have met in online games, developed long term personal friendships in online games, and even have gone on to, for example, get married and raise families in the real world having begun their relationship in these online worlds.
[Martin] I won't ask you if Lord British found his queen that way or anything but <laughs> So what can we expect, you start to hear about these so-called "second generation games." What are second generation games and what can we expect from them?
[Richard] Yeah, so, what I consider the first generation, like "Ultima" and "Everquest" and even "Lineage," are games that I would characterize as these big virtual worlds where you get dropped into, but you usually have very little guidance as to, kind of, what to do other than to fight monsters and collect treasure and level up, and then, a month later, you're still trying to level up some more. And in many ways they actually don't even have some of the features that are well honed in solo player games like well scripted events and very clear objectives, which have been hard to put in this first generation of online games but they have of course made up for it with their massively multiplayer environments. But, the second generation of online games that are now in development by a number of the studios who have put out these first generation online games, have much more sophisticated features in the sense that they're not just broad empty worlds to get lost in, and they're usually hostile to every person inside them and players in the first generation treat each other with a level of hostility. The second generations are where people can get together, form their parties or groups or teams, and then travel on to adventures where the adventure is much better scripted, and your goals and objectives are much better lined out like they were in the previous generations of solo player games, without interference from the other groups that were trying to reach similar goals. So the second generation, I think, will combine the very best features of twenty years of expertise that we have gained in solo player games, plus the best features of the new massively multiplayer genre.
[Martin] Most of these multiplayer online games have had the fantasy genre but you have one coming out called "City of Heroes" which is sort of a divergence from that. What's "City of Heroes" going to be like?
[Richard] Yeah. "City of Heroes". We're very excited about "City of Heroes" as well as the one we've gotten the most press for of all the new products we have coming up. "City of Heroes", unlike, you said, where the vast majority are medieval swords and sorcery, has been kind of in a rut, so to speak, with these early massively multiplayer games. "City of Heroes" is a game about humans or altered humans or super-heroic type people who travel around in a metropolis that they get to take on the roles that you might think of out of comic books that are very popular, as you know, movies right now, comic book based movies are very popular as well and so we're very excited about the look the feel and the second generation game play coming out in this game.
[Martin] So now you're going to have to come up with a new character, though, can't be Lord British any more in this genre, can ya?
[Richard] Well, you know, in if you look at comic books comic books usually have all kinds of futuristic and historical characters. They use both magic and super powers to accom to reach their goals. So, I actually think I will be taking Lord British, myself, into "City of Heroes."
[Martin] *laughing* Final question. I've heard that you live in, like, a medieval castle somewhere in Texas, true?
[Richard] Oh, thats that's true. I, actually, about twelve years ago, built the castle I live in now that's full of secret passage ways, observatory, indoor-outdoor pool, and waterfalls and caves. But I'm actually building an even bigger one, now, about a half a mile down the street. Its probably about a ten year construction project that I'm about half way through that is much bolder than the last.
[Martin] Yep. Now that you're doing "City of Heroes," you're going to have to build your own "Hall of Justice."
[Richard] Exactly!
[Martin] *laugh* Hey, Richard, thanks so much for joining us on the show here today
[Richard] Hey, my pleasure!
[Martin] and best of luck with "City of Heroes."
</INTERVIEW>
For your surfing pleasure, you might visit the show's site http://www.thescreensavers.com/ where they have an article written by Richard Garriott, especially for this segment, about his own opinions on game design. It can be found in the show notes but here is a direct link:
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/story/0,24330,3395557,00.htmlWant to see more about NCsoft, here's a link to them:
http://www.ncsoft.co.kr/default_e.html