Gettin’ Schooled by Lord British
* This is a legacy post from my old blog, which I have re-posted with an edited timestamp to reflect the original date.
It was with great pleasure that my friend Jared and I went to see Richard Garriott “Lord British” speak at GWU tonight about game design. We are long time RPG genre fans and also Lord British fans in general. He’s such a kooky guy (in a good way.) He is a household name around here, where we frequently refer to Richard Garriott’s sofa, Richard Garriott’s desk, Richard Garriott’s cereal, etc. Lately you’ve probably heard of his latest massive online game Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa which released this year. His accomplishments include essentially creating the computer role playing game genre, building the first successful massive online game (Ultima Online) and owning, as well as living in, his own castle with secret passages and trap doors throughout.
Garriott had been experimenting with creating games for Teletype machines on paper tape (held in his hand above is an original copy) as a teenager. Players would make a move and wait for the machine to type the next line, 40 characters at a time. He did this for entertainment and threw most of the tapes away, preferring to create new games rather than edit old ones. This philosophy has carried over into his long game design career.
Richard was an avid pen-and-paper gamer. He even chose to write about his level 26 wizard, Lord British, for an English paper in junior high school (above.) This later became the story for his video game. 19 years old and working at a computer store, Garriott spent his nights writing code on his personal Apple II computer and created the computer role playing game Akalabeth.
The store owner took a look at the game and liked it better than the games on the shelves. He asked Richard to package it and agreed to put it on the shelf for sale. Richard spent what he felt like was a fortune, $200, for plastic bags and photocopies of the cover art he created to go along with the disks. The game had sold about 12 copies when Richard got a call from a publisher. They wanted to distribute the game. Within a short time, Garriott had made $150,000 from Akalabeth at 19 years old (this was a lot in the 70’s)
But Akalabeth had no story or goal. Richard Garriott knew he could do better.
The challenges of creating the first Ultima game were many and with only one programmer/artist/designer, himself, Richard had to come up with his own way of doing things.
Artwork would have to exist in tiny 16×12 “tiles” and had to be planned out on paper like this:
Not only that, but the blocks of color had to be translated to binary, and then to hex, by hand. To make matters worse, the binary code was reversed and he had to double up tiles to get the desired graphical effects. On the image above, you can see where he worked out binary and hex code for a graphic tile. This was way before the days of photoshop and graphics libraries.
Richard Garriott went on to create 9 Ultima Games and Ultima Online, amassing a staff and creating the company Origin along the way.
Among Garriott’s convictions are that heroes should be heroes and not evil barbarians, unlike games of that time and even today. Player actions should have consequences. Garriott pioneered this concept of villagers that would remember if you stole from them and refuse to help you later on; a system that took notes on your behavior as you played the game. He is quick to point out that his goal was simply for the world to behave rationally towards the player, not to preach or enforce any sort of religious views.
Ultima 8 was unfinished and rushed out the door by EA before it was ready. Garriott regrets the early release of this game. Massive sections of content were ripped out just before release.
There came a time when Richard Garriott found himself in quite a bind. They had 5 games in development for Apple II when the IBM Personal Computer launched. Garriott came to the conclusion that the clunky, badly designed and hard to use system would never catch on. He proceeded to go full steam ahead with 100 employees working on Apple II games.
Towards the end of the development, Richard began to realize there would not be an Apple II to publish for and that the PC really had caught on after all. None of the 100 employees knew how to program for PC, and the games were nearly finished. Richard feared he was about to bring the entire company down with the decision to stick with Apple.
Richard began by investing every penny he had earned so far in his career into his company. He mortgaged his house. He mortgaged his brother’s house. Lord British believed in his vision; if they had success on the Apple, they would have success on PC as well. When the money ran out again, Richard and his brother each took out loans to the tune of $1 million (this is in the 80’s), amassing enormous personal debt for the sake of the company.
Garriott tells us that the company was never so motivated. They released the games on time without delays (something he regrets to say has not happened since) They made it, and the games sold enough to keep things going and pay back the debts.
If you’ve played MMO games, you’ve heard of Ultima Online. It was the first successful massive online game, released 10 years ago. The game still has thousands of active subscriptions. Every MMO that has come out since owes its basic foundation to this game.
At that time, Richard and company were working for EA Games. EA’s philosophy is to release games quickly and make as much money as possible doing so. To pitch a game to EA, you approach the sales people. They estimate how much they can sell your idea, and that figure informs the budget. When Richard and team piched UO to them, they did the research. No online game had sold more than 15,000 copies in the past. Because it was Ultima and he was Richard Garriott, they said they would double the projections to 30,000. A projection of 30,000 units, Richard found out, basically equals a budget of Zero. The next year, they pitched UO again and were told the same thing. A year after that, they pitched it again and were rejected again. Another year, and another rejection. Finally, Lord British approached a head exec at EA and told him that he believed this game would work. He asked for a quarter of a million dollars to make a prototype. The boss grudgingly signed a piece of paper without much conviction. The UO dev team was treated like “the bastard stepchild” of EA. The offices consisted of plastic sheet dividers in the hallways and the team was given whatever talent the other teams chose not to hire. Garriott compared the dev team to a group of ruffians. No one believed this would work, except of course for Lord British and his team.
When UO was ready to beta test, Richard’s team put up a small web site asking for $5 to cover the shipping cost of the Beta CDs. The game that was projected to sell 30,000 units got 50,000 beta testers almost overnight. This was the event that changed EA and Origin, as well as the computer game market, forever. Ultima Online went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and became the most successful game Origin ever produced.
Perhaps my favorite moment of the lecture was when Garriott presented something he had heard which struck a chord with him. He paraphrased “To write the best book ever is nearly impossible, but if you do, it will stand for milennia! But if you write the best computer game ever, the machines to play it on will be gone tomorrow.”
The technology of a book has not changed for hundreds of years. It is very difficult to write a memorable book, as so many have been written by masters and hold up the same as a modern writer’s book. With computer games however, it’s not that hard to make the best game ever. It will have better graphics, faster speed and more features than last year’s games. The problem is that in 5 or 10 years, no one will be able to play it. The machines are evolving at such a rate that it’s hard to be remembered. Yesterday’s games are forgotten, too old, slow and ugly to be played any longer.
Lord British worries about this. He hopes that his legacy will live on in some form. He says “after hearing this, I went into my barn and got out my Apple II that I used to write Akalabeth. I set it up in the offices, next to my door, and loaded the original 5.25 disk for Akalabeth. It’s like an homage to myself.” Perhaps that’s the best he can do. But British hopes that the history of his games is intact. He hopes that even Tabula Rasa, his latest endeavor, still contains the soul of each game he has produced.