Richard Garriott and his older brother Robert cofounded Origin Systems in 1983 to develop, publish, and market the Ultima series and other products. That series, along with Akalabeth: World of Doom, one of the first role-playing games (RPGs) for the PC in 1979, defined the genre for decades.

After the release of Ultima VII: The Black Gate in 1992, Origin Systems was acquired by Electronic Arts (EA). Only three years later, the studio began work on Ultima Online (UO), the massively multiplayer online (MMO) RPG that would quickly popularize the genre.

Disappointed with the greenlight process within EA, Garriott retired in 2000. With producer Starr Long and his brother, he then founded Destination Games.   Acquired by NCsoft in 2001, Destination Games released Auto Assault, City of Heroes, and other titles until finally launching Tabula Rasa, a sci-fi MMO, in 2007 to critical acclaim. Ultimately, the game failed to find a foothold in the highly competitive MMO market, and NCsoft sunsetted the game by 2009.

In 2008, Garriott traveled to the stars aboard a Russian spacecraft bound for the International Space Station. He became the sixth private citizen to fly in Earth’s orbit, and the first second-generation American astronaut. His father, Owen, spent nearly 70 days in space during his NASA career. Upon returning to Earth, Garriott was informed that his position at NCsoft had been terminated.

Garriott joined Portalarium soon after, which was initially focused on social games. In 2010, the company launched a collection of casino-style games on Facebook. By 2013, however, Portalarium was looking to Garriott’s roots, announcing Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, a single-player and multiplayer fantasy RPG inspired by the Ultima series. A successful Kickstarter campaign in 2014 has since led Portalarium to raising more than $6.4 million for that property, and today, Garriott continues in his role as creative director.

Ramsay: You’ve led an interesting life, enjoyed tremendous success in your career, and you’ve even been to space. We should talk about everything, but let’s start where all good stories do: where it all started.

Garriott: I started Origin when I was pretty young. I was 19. Origin was founded officially in 1982. Prior to that, I was a student in high school and then a few years in college, but I was already publishing video games. I started writing my first video games in 1974, the same year I entered high school. I published my first commercial video game in 1979. After working with a couple of publishers, my brother Robert and I decided to form Origin in 1982.

Ramsay: What were the early days of the video game industry like?

Garriott: It’s interesting. In the 1970s, calling it an industry was a bit of a stretch. There really weren’t any national, much less global, distributors of video game software. In fact, in the very earliest years, there weren’t even peripheral computers, which didn’t really come into existence until 1977. There weren’t really even standardized platforms, you might say.

Those earliest days were very much about hobbyist activities. An analogy might be people who build model trains, airplanes, or something. There was very little in the way of organization, especially toward doing business. Even sharing knowledge and the creative process were quite minimal.

On one hand, that sounds very primitive. On the other, that time was a lot of fun. There were few competitors and fewer rules. You had this great freedom to explore, a sense you were on the leading edge of something that was going to be a wave of the future, or at least really relevant and interesting.

Ramsay: Did you have a commercial interest in developing video games?

Garriott: No, not at all. In fact, it wasn’t clear that there could be the opportunity for anything commercial. The motivation was to create something amazing with this new amazing tool: the computer. It was really an artistic endeavor, not a commercial one.

Ramsay: How did you get involved with developing video games anyway?

Garriott: In my freshman year of high school, one of the classes I was taking had a computer terminal, and no one in the school knew how to use it. No class made use of it, and I have no idea how and when it was acquired and put there. But I figured out at least how to turn it on and connect it; it was a teletype with an acoustic modem that you could dial up to an offsite computer. I believe it was a PDP-1I, and I just began to tinker with it.

And, in that school, the faculty knew me very well as a person who would do very well with independent studies. I was a regular serious competitor in science fairs, so when I expressed interest in having access to this machine and teaching myself how to use it, the faculty very quickly agreed. For my four years of high school, they gave me my own class, no teacher, no curriculum, and they counted BASIC as my foreign language credit, so I never took a foreign language in high school. I spent those four years of high school, writing game after game after game, making them bigger and better throughout.

Ramsay: Why games? Why not simpler programs?

Garriott: Well, because Dungeons & Dragons was published in 1974, and I had also just read The Lord of the Rings. Those things struck me at the same time, so games became the amalgamation of my strongest interests.

Ramsay: The games you made were role-playing games even then?

Garriott: That’s right. In fact, I used to call them DND1, DND2, DND3—up to DND28. The clear inspiration was Dungeons & Dragons. As I was finishing high school, the Apple II came out, and I wrote DND28b, which was a port of number 28 to the Apple which finally had graphics, and that became my first published game Akalabeth, which is sort of the prequel to the Ultimas.

Ramsay: When did you become interested in selling your game?

Garriott: I had a summer job working at a ComputerLand store, which is one of the early stores where people would go buy Apples, Commodore 64s, and a few others. And most people who bought these early computers were buying them ostensibly to balance their checkbook or do some word processing on. I was always in the back working on my game.

It was the owner of the ComputerLand store who saw the game I was working on and said, “Look, Richard, this game that you have here in the back is way better than any other piece of software we sell on the store wall here. You really should package that and sell it.”

Since there was no industry at that time, packaging and selling the game meant I went next door to the print shop and made some instruction manuals, bought some Ziploc bags, hand copied disks in the store there, and began to sell them from that store wall. Within a week or two, I was selling a few in the store, and it was one of those first few that got pirated all across the country.

Akalabeth eventually made it to one of the first national distribution companies called California Pacific, who called me up and said, “Hey, we’d like to sell this in stores all the way across the country. How would you feel about that if we paid you five bucks a unit?”

“That sounds fine to me,” I said, and so they sold about 30,000 copies of Akalabeth. If you do that math, that’s $150,000 for my work as a high school senior—double or triple my father’s salary as an astronaut.

Ramsay: And what did your father think?

Garriott: Well, this was right as I was going into college, so on the one hand, he was like, “All right, well, I guess you just paid for your college, and that’s a good thing.” So, I was leaning a lot less heavily on his pocketbook for sure, and that was one very good aspect of it.

You know, what’s interesting is with Akalabeth and Ultima 1 and Ultima II—the first three games that I created—each one made dramatically more money than their predecessor. And so my whole family is watching that happen, and my family though, “Well, of course, Richard, this makes sense to pursue right now because it would be stupid not to. But it’s going so well that it surely can’t last. Surely this will come to an end. This windfall will end and you’ll need to go back to school, finish your degree, and get a real job.” But none of us were really thinking it was the beginning of an industry. We had no idea it was the beginning of something that would be permanently growing. And it never ended.

Ramsay: You mentioned packaging games in Ziploc bags?

Garriott: That’s correct, yeah. Little 5x7 Ziploc bags and Xeroxed heavy card instructions. You had eleven sheets of paper cut into fourths and stapled together to hand bind the little instruction manuals and things of that nature. Now the ones I made and shipped myself are so rare that they sell for something on the order of $10,000 dollars each on eBay now.

Ramsay: Jason Rubin told me he got started pretty much the same way with Naughty Dog in the early 1980s, selling games out of Ziploc bags. I’m wondering now why nobody put more thought into packaging then.

Garriott: Let me give my take on that. Drug addiction was sadly common during the early days of the industry. My first publisher, California Pacific, went out of business because the principals were drug addicts and snorted all the money they were making instead of paying people like me who were making their games. So, after they went out of business, and after I got the name “Ultima” back, I kept it as my own personal trademark.

I was already working on Ultima II, so I then said, “Hey, I’m Richard Allen Garriott. I’m interested in a publisher who’s interested in publishing my next game.” Every publisher in America was interested. I already had a strong track record, but then I said, “I don’t want my games in bags anymore.” Most all of my competitors’ games were doing things like Apple-Oids, the Asteroids knockoff that looks like an Apple, or a Millipede instead of Centipede, or some play on words. Most early Apple developers were developing knockoffs of simple arcade games. I was already making virtual worlds in my mind, so I didn’t want my game in a big Ziploc bag. I wanted my game in a box. I wanted a cloth map of my game to describe the reality of the game world. I wanted the manuals to be written as if they were real magic tomes and things of that nature.

So, although lots of publishers were interested in publishing Ultima II, when I asked for all of that, everyone put their hands back down—except for Sierra, which was called On-Line Systems at the time.

Sierra Online was the only company that agreed to my outrageous demands for putting my game in a box. Ultima II is actually the first game in the entire industry that was not packaged in a Ziploc bag. So, I think I can lay some level of claim to advancing us from Ziploc bags to boxes. Another one is the use of the term “avatar” as your character; that is, you, the real person from Earth, projected into a virtual world. Another one I often get some credit for is the term “massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” or MMORPGs.

Ramsay: When did starting the company come into the picture?

Garriott: Right after Sierra Online, but just like California Pacific owing me a bunch of money, Sierra Online also started having financial trouble and quit paying their authors, including me. And so when both of these companies were going down, each time, I called my brother Robert who had multiple business degrees, and I said, “Robert, can you help me try to collect from these dirt bags who quit paying me the money they owe me?”

In both cases, he tried, and in both cases, we failed to get any of the money that was owed to me from those publishers. But after doing it twice, Robert then turned to me and said, “Richard, why don’t you and I go into business together? Because, at the very least, I know that when I receive a check for selling your games, I will give you your cut first. You can make a lot of people unhappy in tough times, but I know the one person you can’t make unhappy is the person who’s laying the golden eggs—the person who’s making the game—because without him, you have absolutely no future.” And I said, “Well, that’s a better deal than I’ve had so far.” That’s what started Origin Systems in 1982.

Ramsay: What was your brother’s background then?

Garriott: He’s five years older than me. He has two bachelor’s degrees from Rice University, one in engineering and one in economics. He then went to Stanford University and got his master’s degree in engineering. And he went to Sloan Business School at MIT and got another master’s degree in business. While going through this over-education path, he worked at Texas Instruments designing RAM chips; and then he worked in venture capital, studying investments in entertainment software companies. He was basically the perfect person for tackling this business with me.

Ramsay: Did you personally have any experience with starting businesses?

Garriott: Oh, no. Don’t forget I started making games in my freshman year in high school. I was the game guy. He was the business guy.

Ramsay: What did you learn in that short while?

Garriott: In those earliest days, we were both young and brothers, so we had plenty of what I would call “good fights.” By that I mean something that made us better in business and something that made Origin a particularly shining example of a good early company, compared to our competitors.

I’ll give you an example. Let’s assume that a publisher had a royalty agreement with an American developer to sell a game in the United States. So, let’s then suppose that game was licensed to sell in Japan. A company in Japan would build, market, and distribute the game, and pay the publisher a licensing fee. Royalties in those days were very high compared to today, something like 30%.

What the publisher would do is they would say, “Okay, well, now we’ve just received a licensing fee, so we’ll pay the developer that same 30% royalty.” Robert proposed that “we should do the same,” and I would go, “Well, wait a minute. That’s not fair. The manufacturing and marketing expenses have already been removed. It would actually be fair to pay a 50% royalty because by that time that licensing fee came in, that money had no process associated with it.”

And Robert would argue, “Well, Richard, I don’t disagree with what you conceptually consider fair, but fair in business is based on what you negotiate and what the industry has as a standard. If we pay our authors higher than the industry standard, that means our company will make less than other companies in the industry, and our company will be less competitive, less profitable, and less capable of maneuvering and acquiring and doing all of the things we need to do as a business. You’d be hurting the business to have this ’sense of fairness’ that no other company feels like they need to have.”

We had that argument, and we’d have those arguments, but we’d find some middle ground usually. I was always the author’s advocate though. I was always the person there going, “Wait a minute, I am an author for my company. I may be an owner of the company, but I also get paid royalties. That’s how I pay myself.” Other authors in our industry knew that when they came to Origin, they would have someone who was fighting in their corner to make sure the company operated openly, above board, and fair to the creators of products. I think that was an essential part of Origin in the early days.

Ramsay: Given the nature of these arguments, did you work with your brother to put together a business plan?

Garriott: We did put together something of a business plan, but we weren’t taking any outside money. We built the company all on money I had earned from Ultima. I mean, a business plan is usually there to sell somebody something, to convince somebody, “Hey, give us a bunch of money, and here’s how we’ll spend that money to try to earn you some money back.” In our case, we had the Ultima series and we knew it was successful. By the time we formed the company, I was almost finished with Ultima III, so we got off to a pretty good, fast, quick, and easy start because of that kick start we had.

Ramsay: What was your relationship with your brother like prior to going into business with him?

Garriott: Well, interesting. I have two older brothers and a younger sister, and my two older brothers were playmates, you might say, and my younger sister and I were playmates. So, although we were brothers, and we went on some family vacations and outings together, throughout junior high and high school, he and my older brother hung out together while my sister and I hung out together. We weren’t distant or argumentative by any means, but we didn’t have any cause to be nearly as close as we did once we got into business.

Ramsay: When did you hire your first employee?

Garriott: Our first employee—well, let’s see, I remember our first few employees. First was Jeff Hillhouse from Sierra who, to this day, has followed us around from company to company. We still work very closely with Jeff.

Another was a most interesting character. He was a gentleman in our industry known as “Doctor Cat.” We ran an advertisement in a magazine, and we didn’t even have a logo yet, so one of the employees of the magazine made up this ad with a compass rose as the backdrop behind the word Origin, announcing the existence of our company. We basically said, “Hey, we’re Origin. We’re going to change the world and make some great games. If you want to make great games, too, come join us down here in Houston, Texas.”

A week or two later, Doctor Cat showed up at our door. And when I say “showed up at our door,” I mean he literally showed up at the family house. He knocked on the door and said, “Hi, I’m Doctor Cat. I read your ad, and I am here to work for you.” And he had moved lock, stock and barrel down to Texas from way up north, and he became one of our first and one of our strongest employees for the first ten years or so of our existence as a game developer.

Ramsay: Why did you start hiring in the first place?

Garriott: We wanted to not just be the publisher of Ultima. We founded Origin the same year as Electronic Arts, and a number of other early companies were formed that year, plus or minus one year. A couple of those earliest companies, like California Pacific and Sierra, had done such a poor job, squandering their money and putting themselves out of business, that we said we can do better. So we immediately tried to become one of the first great game—not only developers —but publishers. Origin throughout its existence was always in the top ten. That’s something we were very proud of.

Ramsay: Early on, was Origin just you and Robert?

Garriott: No, even on the day we formed the company, we had Jeff Hillhouse, for example. We hired Keith Zabalaoui, a guy who’s still in the industry today, and he now makes war games, I think. He was my neighbor who had helped me on a couple of my earliest games, so we hired him to make some games as well. And Chuck Bueche. Chuckles had published some games through Sierra, too. He had lived in Friendswood, Texas, near me, so he came back and joined us at Origin. On day one, Origin started with half a dozen to a dozen staffers.

Ramsay: Was there anyone outside the company whose advice you relied on?

Garriott: We had one person on our board, Bill Richards, who was an independent businessman. He was a friend of my father, and he was the only person amongst us who had really been through building a business. And my parents were both investors on the board, and there was my brother and me, of course, but Bill Richards was the one outsider, the one experienced person. I still chat with him periodically today.

Ramsay: What was your business model then?

Garriott: Yes, very good question. The reason we chose the name Origin, which originally was Origin Systems, was because we weren’t even sure about whether games would be the big growth area that we’d stick with or whether we would get into operating systems or maybe even hardware.

In fact, in those very earliest days, there was one plug in the back of an Apple II for putting in a game control device. The plug was actually capable of running two joysticks, but no one ever made one. And there were games out like Crazy Climber, Robotron, and others in a coin-op arcade that used two joysticks. And so we actually went and built a prototype of a dual joystick, and I still have all of the components at my home. We built out this prototype and almost went to manufacture this dual joystick from Origin, except that the cost of doing plastic injection molding and to get the dye made was about $10,000. Anyway, we picked the name Origin to give us the freedom to go into either entertainment software or business software or hardware.

Ramsay: What then was your next step for your game business?

Garriott: Well, we were doing lots of other games that weren’t as big of a hit as Ultima. The first time we did something that was as big or bigger than Ultima was when we discovered Chris Roberts and the Wing Commander series.

That again was a good stroke of fate in that it was after I had already moved Origin here to Austin, Texas. We were already hiring all the artists we could find in Austin. In fact, there were basically no computer-skilled artists in the world, much less in Austin, so we had to train them to work with a computer. One was a guy named Denis Loubet, who went on to draw every Ultima cover except Ultima II, and when we hired him, Chris was already trying to work with Denis on some of his early games. So, we hired his artist away.

That’s how we became known to each other. Chris was writing small games mostly in England, but his parents lived in Austin, so he was spending time in Austin as well. He was trying to work with Denis who we had hired, so he came walking in the door, saying, “Hey, what are you guys doing hiring my artists?”

And we said, “Hey, we make games,” and he made games, so we brought him on board at Origin as a partner. He then began to work on the Wing Commander series, which, until Ultima Online, was our biggest seller.

Ramsay: When I interviewed John Romero last week, I learned that Origin had two locations: New Hampshire and Austin. Is that correct?

Garriott: That’s true. Well, technically, we even had more than two locations. We formed the company in my parents’ garage in Houston, where we operated for about a year, and then we moved out to real offices in Texas for about a year. Then we moved first to Massachusetts and then New Hampshire for about three years, and then we split the company and a bunch of us came back to Austin when my brother stayed in the northeast before we all got back together again in Austin. Kind of a complicated story, but yes, there was a period of time where the offices were fully in the northeast, and for the longest of that period, we were in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

Ramsay: Did you have multiple offices simultaneously?

Garriott: We did. The way that transpired was we formed the company in my parents’ garage out of convenience. It was free, and it was sort of centrally located in a sense between me in Austin, where I had started school, and my brother, Robert, who was already living just outside of Boston where he and his wife had just finished school. So, my brother was commuting to Texas for three weeks out of the month. After a year or so of him commuting to Texas, we all agreed to go to the northeast for a few years because Marcy, his wife, was expecting a promotion within AT&T Bell Laboratories where she worked.

And we were all young, and where our computers went, our jobs went, so we all moved to the northeast and we stayed there for about three years. By the time three years had passed, the company had then grown to a scale that it became difficult to move back to Texas because we now had hired a bunch of people who worked locally in New Hampshire. But it was always the plan for those of us who were from Texas to move back. And so a bunch of us who were unhappy with the cold weather, among other things, decided to up and move back to Austin, so that’s how we got started in Austin. The Austin office grew very rapidly, and eventually, the northeastern office really had no choice other than to join us back in Texas.

Ramsay: Did the distance between Austin and New Hampshire affect how you or the company worked?

Garriott: Well, development and publishing, especially back in those days, were fairly distinct. Nowadays, online game development and publishing are sort of intermingled from the beginning and definitely through the life of the product. Back in those days, you would develop a game and then you would be pretty much done with it, and you would then ship it onward to retail, and after that, the developers really couldn’t do anything with it. So, it was easier to do at that time than it would be now.

Ramsay: And you always had a team around you, correct?

Garriott: Well, by that time, sure, but I did all the early Ultimas all by myself. Obviously, the prequels and Akalabeth I did completely by myself. I wrote Ultima I completely by myself, except one small subroutine, which a friend of mine, Ken Arnold, helped develop, but then I effectively made Ultima II, III, and IV on my own. It was only starting with Ultima V that I began to have a staff of people who worked with me. That’s about the time of the shift to Texas.

Ramsay: Which was most important to your development strategy: demonstrating new technology, or creating original works?

Garriott: Definitely both, but if you look at the 28 DND games I wrote, some of them I would never finish. I would start writing one, but I was also teaching myself to program while writing these games. There were no classes, and there were no books to read. It was all self-taught. When I wrote Akalabeth, which is like Ultima 0; the game was written in BASIC. It was the first game I ever wrote on the Apple II. When I finished it, I went, “Wow, that game sold 30,000 units and I never even meant to sell it. It doesn’t have a story, and there’s no way to win it.” I thought, “Wow, I could do a much better game if I just started over.”

And so I began the first Ultima. The first Ultima was also written in BASIC, but it was written with an eye toward users, not just myself, so it’s a much better game than Akalabeth. And then when I finished Ultima 1, which sold almost twice what Akalabeth sold, I thought, “Wow, now that I’ve mastered writing a game at all, if I mastered assembly, I could write a much better game.”

So, I wrote Ultima II in assembly language. When I finished that, I said, “Wow, that was my first game in assembly! That language is much more powerful than BASIC, but that first version is pretty clunky. Now that I actually understand assembly, I can do a much better one.”

You get the idea that what was happening was just to creatively fulfill my need and desire to do something much better than its predecessor. Because of how much I had learned, I was creating game that really were better, functionally and measurably better in every way you could slice it.

The sales trend followed that improvement. Whereas if you look at a lot of my competitors in those days, once they shipped one that was successful, they would then go, “Wow, we made a bunch of money with that. Let’s change the story and the monsters a bit, and we can release version two and make some more money off that same game engine.” Those games tended to sell to a subset of the people that bought and enjoyed the first one, so their sales declined over time. My sales went up over time, but again, I was not motivated by trying to gain more sales. I was motivated by trying to make better art.

Ramsay: Between Ultima 1 in 1981 and Wing Commander in 1990, Origin developed a variety of games, like Ogre and Space Rogue. How many employees did you have?

Garriott: At our peak, just before being acquired by EA in 1992, we had 250 or so, and then right after we were acquired by EA, we grew to 400. But then after UO in 1997, a lot of us started drifting out.

Ramsay: Did your role in the company extend beyond Ultima?

Garriott: I was the Ultima guy more than anything else, but I did also work with and on other projects by all means. The majority of my work was in Ultimas though, and helping out on other games along the way. Robert was CEO and the business guy.

Ramsay: Did you explicitly split your responsibilities that way?

Garriott: Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. In fact, if you tried to ask Robert for his opinion on any game, you’d be in trouble. He was not a gamer. He was never a gamer. If you got his feedback, you would find it fairly useless. On the other hand, he was a brilliant business person, so Robert had 100% control of the finances, and he made sure that in lean times, we survived and never went out of business. Between the two of us, I could make sure we made some great games and made sure we made great deals. Origin did well because of it.

Ramsay: Had you always intended Ultima to be a franchise?

Garriott: It depends on what you mean by “intend.” Again, if you go back to the beginning, there wasn’t much intention behind any of it. It was all creating art that we enjoyed and felt compelled to create. The growth of this industry was so fast, it was hard just to keep up with—much less have a sense of “wow, this is going to be an empire unto itself.”

Interestingly, if I look at the games I’ve been the happiest with and the games I’ve been the least happy with, there’s an interesting correlation. I think my very favorite games that I’ve built are Ultima IV, Ultima VII, and UO. And in all three of those games, while I was building them, my teammates, my friends, my family, my marketing departments, and any distributors that we were working with did not believe they were going to be successes.

But there are always things I believed in devoutly. I was changing the rules the most. I was going away from things that everybody else had already been doing. I just knew in my heart of hearts that this is what I needed to do, and I wanted to do it without regard for whether it sold better or worse. Most people told me to quit and not do it. But in all three of those cases, those games became the bestselling Ultimas I’ve ever done and the ones that I persevered through.

On the other hand, a lot of the games I’m the least happy with, like Ultima VIII and Tabula Rasa, I think could have been very good. But the reason why they fall on my least favorite list is because I listened to that same feedback. When we were striking out to do something new and people had misgivings, those were the times I gave into those misgivings, I settled, and I regret it.

Ramsay: What kind of feedback did you get from the naysayers?

Garriott: The feedback was different for each one. In the case of Ultima IV, it was the first game in the industry that included ethical parables and virtuous tales, forcing the player to live by a code of ethics instead of just running around and killing everything all the time. My friends and family and coworkers thought by taking this moral high ground in a game, it would drive people away because people just like to kill and blow things up. Now, if you read about the Ultimas and Ultima IV in particular, that’s the reason the whole series is remembered. That decision I made with Ultima IV is what took it from a good game to being a great number-one bestselling game.

Similarly, with Ultima VII, that was the first time we did a super highly detailed sandbox virtual world where anything that looked like it could or should operate the way you would expect did when you interacted with it. The world was not just an art backdrop for you to fight monsters and hunt treasure in, but everything in the world operated as you would expect. People thought I was wasting my time. It took an enormous amount of time to code for all those levels, but that’s when people began to go, “Richard Garriott is the Tolkien of role-playing games; his reality crafting is superb.”

With Ultima Online, the sales projections at EA were miniscule. We had a hard time even getting permission to make it; no one believed that an online game could or would sell. When it shipped, it was the fastest selling game in Origin and EA’s history, and within two years, it had outsold every Ultima combined. UO was phenomenally successful, and the first successful MMORPG.

In the case of Ultima VIII, EA does a great job selling sports games on a yearly cycle, and it was the first game I published after being purchased by EA, and they said, “Look, Richard, with our sports games, we’ve proven that shipping before Christmas is much more important than shipping after Christmas with all the features you want. We insist that instead of finishing after Christmas, cut out a bunch of features and ship it for Christmas.” I did. It was the wrong decision.

Ramsay: EA acquired Origin in 1992. Why did you sell to EA?

Garriott: To answer that question, I need to say why we would sell to anyone. My belief about business in general is that as any new industry grows, there’s an upheaval, and this first upheaval was the coming into existence of computer games. Lots of different players were mini companies, dozens of startups, and dozens of publishers were all vying for the attention of consumers.

What happens over time is that the distribution channels begin to close to all but the largest players. Look at Walmart. For a period of time, Walmart was selling 20% to 30% of all the games that were sold in the game industry. But the Walmart buyer, the person who puts the games on the shelf at Walmart stores, doesn’t have time to speak with 50 different distributors of software.

Not only do they not want to take the time to talk with 50 distributors, but when you get to the bottom of those 50, you get to small companies that only have one or two products a year. If Walmart were to buy one or two of those products, and they didn’t sell, it couldn’t do stock balancing. They couldn’t return that non-selling game for another one from the same company that might sell better to balance their stock and get things on their shelves that would sell.

And so Walmart basically started saying, “You know, instead of talking to 50 distributors, we’ll just talk to the top five. If you’re not one of the top five, frankly, you’re financially irrelevant to us, so we just won’t carry your products.” Origin was always in the top ten, but always right about number ten. As distribution into retail began to close up, it became obvious we could not remain independent much longer at the size we were as a publisher.

We went through a careful process of considering our options. We looked at joining forces with Brøderbund Software; we really loved the Brøderbund team. We looked at joining forces with two or three smaller companies, where combined, we would make it into the top ten. But putting together a multi-company merger is very complex. So, of course, the option we took was to join forces with EA, who had previously, frankly, been a nemesis of ours. We had even had some legal run-ins with EA. But the people with whom we had those arguments and legal entanglements were no longer part of EA and hadn’t been for many years, so when we considered all of our options, EA seemed like the place that could help us move boldly into the future better than anybody else.

Ramsay: When you considered Brøderbund, did you speak with the Carlston brothers? Were they there at the time?

Garriott: Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. We knew them very well. The Carlston brothers, and we at Origin, and a couple of other companies were the founders of the Software Publishers Association. We were the developers of the very first ever rating system for games. We knew each other very well, and we had a very deep admiration and respect for them.

Ramsay: Why did you choose to not go with Brøderbund then?

Garriott: I honestly don’t remember what didn’t work out. I don’t remember whether it was that combined, we still weren’t big enough, or if there were some other financial reasons why that didn’t seem like the best course. I honestly don’t remember, but we did consider it very carefully. It would have been an option we would have looked at very favorably.

Ramsay: What were the considerations with regard to EA?

Garriott: I would say the biggest positive was that EA had done very well in a whole wide variety of areas and platforms, but not specifically on PC and not specifically in RPGs. It looked to us like an area where we could really plug a hole for EA, and therefore, we would get the proper level of mindshare and support within what was a much larger organization.   We thought we’d have our own niche carved out. The other big factor was the power to move stock into retail outlets. EA remained much stronger than every other company then.

Ramsay: You mentioned Ultima Online a few times. How did that get going?

Garriott: Starr Long and I were the champions of UO. We saw the growth of the Internet coming and said, “This is the moment when online games are going to be possible and not only possible but compelling.” So, we began to pitch EA about this idea of making an online game to coincide with the emergence of the Internet and what an online game could be.

And EA was going, “You guys are nuts. The biggest selling online game in history is one of these AOL dial-up bulletin board games. It has 10,000 or 15,000 total lifetime sales. We need to sell millions before it’s even interesting, and since you can’t show us any big successes, we won’t fund your game.”

We went back during three different cycles of pitches, and three for three, they said no. After the third attempt, I just went to Larry Probst, who was the president of the company at the time, and I said, “Larry, I have to do this game. I know you guys have said no, but you have to let me build the prototype. I insist that you at least give us a few hundred thousand dollars to prove to you the power of this thing that we believe in.”

Begrudgingly, he said yes. We built a prototype and that prototype we put up online and said, “Hey if anybody wants to help beta test it, it’ll cost you $5 just to get the discs sent to you.” And then 50,000 people signed up within the first week or two. EA’s lifetime sales projection for the game had been like 30,000 units, so the fact that the number of people who wanted to play in a tiny beta was so much bigger than they had ever anticipated for lifetime, they went, “Oh, we get it.” And the rest is history.

Ramsay: The way Raph Koster tells the story is that the project was a skunk works that the rest of Origin knew nothing about.

Garriott: That’s not exactly right. In the sense that a skunk works is off the books and off the record, that’s true, but everyone in the company knew about the game. UO wasn’t a secret, but it was sort of the bastard stepchild that, frankly, EA didn’t want and no one cared about.

If any other project wanted to hire someone, they were not allowed to work with us on UO. The same thing was true with office space. We operated in a hallway during the demolition of a floor around us because every other project was more important and they got the nice office space.

Until that demo, this was the project that only existed because of my insistence. EA wanted to kill it. Origin didn’t care about it. It was completely unfunded. It just existed by sheer force of will until the demo. And then as soon as we got the demo working and people realized the power of it, it became the most important thing happening in EA’s world, and suddenly, not only were the purse strings loosened, but everyone in EA wanted a piece.

Ramsay: Until UO, had you receive the support you wanted?

Garriott: I would actually say that EA originally gave us all the support we could ever want. In fact, frankly, I think we made a mistake in accepting too much “opportunity”.

The first real struggle Origin had after becoming part of EA was not EA’s fault; it was completely Origin’s fault. Since EA looked at us as the PC and RPG saviors, they really hoped we would grow, build more products, and build more capacity to dominate PC and RPGs. We happily took on that challenge.

However, in the 12 months that transpired immediately after EA’s purchase of Origin, we doubled in size. When you double in size, it means you take your entire management team and split them in half. For our second tier project leaders, that was a great opportunity for them to get a chance to take the reins and run a product. The problem is that we didn’t have twice as many people capable of managing the millions of dollars it takes to create a product successfully, from beginning to end.

So, although we started twice as many products as we ever had before, we didn’t finish twice as many products. In fact, half or more of those products ended badly. It wasn’t EA’s fault though. But the result was the first big downturn at Origin. A lot of those projects that already spent a lot of money started failing and a lot of staff started leaving. EA understandably began to lose patience and faith in Origin, so things got much harder after that.

Ramsay: Since you were originally brought on as the RPG division, what happened to the rest of your other projects?

Garriott: The only other highly successful project we had was Wing Commander, which I would still put in the RPG genre, but it was still well outside of anything anybody at EA was doing.

Whereas Wing Commander and Ultima were definitely our biggest series, there was a product called Crusader, which was our next tier product that at least had done well after the sequel. We got three versions of Crusader out, and all of those I would classify as action RPGs. But those are really the products we had active, so everything really did fit in that category.

Ramsay: Was EA’s evaluation of Origin’s post-acquisition performance one of the reasons why they were not thrilled about UO?

Garriott: No, I don’t think so. Here is the way EA ran their greenlight process. Every six months, they convene a group of executives from different parts of the company, but most critically in the mix is the sales and marketing department. If you want funding, you put together a pitch document that describes the game, gives sample art, describes the team you’ll need, describes your target audience, and everything else you would think of to make sure that the investor—in this case, EA—would need to know.

The first place you send that pitch document to is sales. They look at the pitch, and they go find comparables that are thematically like it or play like it. They look at whether it’s medieval, modern, or whatever it might be, and they then look at the team and go, “How will this team do compared to whoever’s making the number one best game like that out there in the world today?” Based on that, they give you sales projections and they say, “We project we could sell a million copies” or whatever that might be. To get a game greenlit in the mid-1990s, the projection had to be in the millions. Two to six million copies might be realistic for the bestselling games on the PC back then.

It’s important to note that prior to the pitch we made for UO formally to EA, we had been looking at an online game pitch for decades. Every time we looked prior to the Internet though, we would have been using dial-up bulletin board systems like AOL, and they charged by the hour. The total number of users in any game that ran on those systems then was measured in the ones of thousands, too, so we’re talking about three orders of magnitude below the top selling games that do not require being online.

So, when we pitched UO, we pitched it because we saw the Internet coming. We said, “Now is the time where anyone and everyone will be able to play online, and playing online is far more compelling than playing alone. This is the time to strike and to create the MMO genre.” And although we made that case we thought fairly eloquently, the projection from the sales department at EA was a lifetime grand total of about 30,000 units. And how they got there was pretty simple. They basically said the only successful MMO-like games had been BBS games that had only 5,000 to 10,000 users at most. In this mix, the game Meridian 59 had at least been discussed or thought about, but the sales prediction for that game was something like 15,000 units lifetime.

And so they thought, “Oh, Ultima will do twice as well as the highest selling thing we can possibly imagine, so we’ll give him 30,000 units lifetime.” But that’s inconsequential. You can’t make a modern game that sells only 30,000 units. That’s how many copies of Akalabeth I sold. I was basically being told, “Forget it Richard, you can’t make this game.” In fact, that’s what they actually told me.

But, as I mentioned earlier, Larry Probst gave us $250,000, and when we released the beta disc and 50,000 people paid $5 to get it, suddenly, we got a lot of attention, which became a new problem.

Ramsay: Why was that attention a problem?

Garriott: Frankly, the attention became a huge problem because suddenly everybody realized, “This is so important that we can’t let this ragtag team screw it up; we need to go help them.” While we were having trouble with a budget that was too small in the beginning, we had real trouble with a budget that was too large and too many managers on the backend.

UO was a very difficult game to develop. It was truly a labor of love, a great joy, and everybody knew we were doing something really big and important. UO was very exciting but also very difficult. Part of the difficulty was building a prototype on the cheap with few resources. The code also wasn’t written for scalability, so as the game became more popular, going from the tiny single world to the giant multi-sharded global game with tens of millions of players over its history, we struggled just to support the team, the code base, and the users.

Ramsay: Can you give me some examples of the problems that arose from being the hot property within EA?

Garriott: Yeah, so if you were an aspiring EA executive, there’s only one president of EA, and that job opens up only once every 10 or 20 years. If you’re aspiring to that top job, you take a tour of duty around EA. Origin became the place where managers came in to “prove” they could make a difference.

And the problem with that is they universally come in going, “Whatever my predecessor did was wrong, so I want to dismantle whatever their strategy was, and, of course, my strategy is right, so now I’m going to make you adhere to it, and I’m going to hire people around me to help with my strategy.” At least up until they leave within a year, and then the whole cycle repeats. It became a burden for us to try to just stay the course shall we say, and not get caught up in the “here’s the latest person’s great advice, passionate belief, and authority” to come in to try to tell us how we should do our jobs.

If that happened only once, it would have been survivable. The problem is that you can’t keep changing your way of going about business or you end up treading water and going nowhere. In our case, by this late date in our relationship with EA, it was very common to have at least one new general manager per year, often two, as people would come over here to try to make their mark and then move on, disappear, or get fired or whatever it was, as we were the stop off in their tour of duty.

Ramsay: You lost some autonomy and had to deal with the bureaucracy of a large enterprise. Would you consider that one of the negatives of selling?

Garriott: Oh, absolutely. In fact, I would say that was actually much worse than we had anticipated. In particular, this was I really think unfortunately the true cause of the ultimate downfall of Origin. Prior to EA, Origin had been a very author-oriented company and great company stewardship came out of it.

That showed in our product success rates and our turnover. We had virtually no employee turnover prior to EA. We occasionally had to fire people, and there were occasionally people who’d leave for a better job elsewhere. But we also had an opinion about product development.

If a product looked good enough for us to invest in at the beginning, and if when we got two-thirds of the way into it and it no longer looks like it’s worth investing in, we had two choices as a company. We can either cut our losses, or go ahead and finish it. If we finish it, and it doesn’t make money, we’ve wasted that last piece of money we’ve just put into it.

Our opinion was that if we go ahead and finish it, first of all, we might be surprised when it does better than we thought, or when it at least brings back some of that last piece of investment. But even if it doesn’t, the team which has finished a game is now stronger for having finished that game, seeing the results and seeing how it did and seeing why it did better or worse in the marketplace. That team will now be better prepared for the next title.

If we kill the project, we might save that last third of money, but inevitably, that team will split up. We’ll probably fire a few of them, and the few we don’t fire will leave. They’re not going to believe their program was cancelled because what they made sucked; they’re going to think the company stabbed them in the back, didn’t like them, or didn’t give them the support they needed. The team won’t learn anything, and we won’t gain anything when they disband.

We were a very stable organization, but EA had a very different mentality. EA believed that you always dump have a bottom 10% of your staff, and then hire people at the 50th percentile. When you do that, you’ve just improved the total health of the organization because you’ve moved the average up a notch. While that technically might be true; it was pretty darn draconian by our standards.

Additionally, EA believed that if you’re going to make sports games like baseball, one of the things to do is to start three baseball games, and eventually, when you see one of them doing more poorly than the other two, you kill off that one, and then finally, when you get close to the end, you pick the one that’s doing the best. You back that one and sell it, and the money you wasted on the first two false starts is actually relatively insignificant.

Businesswise, there’s nothing wrong with that other than the fact that those other two teams were probably third-party independent developers and now they’re probably completely out of business without even being consciously aware of the fact that EA was playing them against each other.

So, where Origin had always been this very nurturing, supportive environment with a lifelong commitment from the employer to the employees, EA on the other hand would describe itself as a wolf pack. They would say, “Look, we are a wolf pack. We are here to dominate. We are here to make the best games, find the best way to make the best games, keep the people who can make those best games, and it’s survival of the fittest inside and out.” By the way, to build a big company, I’m not knocking that, I actually have a very healthy respect for that as a business. However, it just wasn’t what we had built.

It’s not what I personally enjoy. It’s not what I personally want to thrive within. And it’s not what I think I’ve rebuilt now at Portalarium. But it was where we found ourselves. The lack of support we got on future things with Origin really grew out of that kind of fundamental strategy difference that we found ourselves in once we were on the inside.

Ramsay: Going back to UO, how involved were you with the prototype?

Garriott: Well, I am Mr. Ultima, so to speak. If I had to give credit to the main people that made UO what it was, number one credit goes to Starr Long. He’s actually the guy who built the team, held the team together, and had the clearest vision of why and how. He became the director and executive producer. Another person who gets great credit is Raph Koster. Raph was the lead designer and he comes from the dial-up bulletin board background. He was the person who, by far, brought the closest thing to historical skill in online games to the degree that it existed. Raph embodied it very, very well. And a lot of what UO became, he gets a great deal of credit for. Lastly, there’s me because of my vision for what Ultimas can and should be.

Ultimas are games where virtues matter. Ultimas are games where the world around you is not just a set for you to wander through and think that it’s beautiful; it’s a place that is completely interactive. Every cup, every bowl, every chair, every light switch to the degree there was any, and every object can be interacted with in the way that you would expect and have the results that you would expect that object to have. And that purity of vision of what is an Ultima came from me. With Starr as the arbitrator, Raph with his history in MUDs, and me with the history of what is an Ultima game, and our ragtag team of highly motivated youngsters, we made the game.

Ramsay: Who were the others?

Garriott: I don’t mean to discount any of the other team members. They all played their parts. I was just giving a special callout to Starr and Raph. There was also Rick Delashmit; he was one of the early coders.

Ramsay: Raph told me that Rick Delashmit coded 80% of the game.

Garriott: That’s possible. Raph was closer to that than me, so I would believe Raph. That would probably be especially true of the original version of the game. Rick was a very fast coder, but what’s interesting is that Rick represented the quintessential high-speed hacker. He’s probably responsible for coding the entire prototype or pretty darn close to it. By the time the finished game shipped? Hard to know. There were a lot more people involved by then.

Ramsay: For the prototype, what were your goals?

Garriott: For the prototype, we wanted to make a multiplayer game that looked like Ultima VI that combined PvP, PvE, the Eight Virtues, and even some story fragments in a homogenous, continuous no-loading world. And so while that was a mouthful, it was still pretty simple structurally. Not that it was easy to pull off. I just mean the task was clear.

Ramsay: What about technically?

Garriott: Well, the technical goals shifted a fair bit. Originally, when EA had 30,000 lifetime sales projected, we thought they were terribly wrong, so we gave ourselves an expectation of 100,000 lifetime sales, and we built a world that could handle 100,000 subscribers.

When we had 50,000 people sign up almost immediately for the beta, we then knew we were substantially under the mark. That actually caused us a real problem, both technically as well as for me—the fiction and the spirit of the game had to undergo a transformation. It was very important that everyone playing was part of the same reality. We were going to put them all in the same physical world, but with millions of players, that was not possible.

It started as a big disappointment because I’m going like, “Ah, I’m going to have to build duplicate copies of the world, and if one friend is living in one reality and another friend is living in another reality, they will evolve in these two realities. One could be more hostile and one could be more friendly, and that’s going to bother me that people aren’t having the same experience. When they go to the city of Trinsic, they’re not seeing the same Trinsic because there’s two differently evolved versions of the city.”

And so I created a piece of fiction where I called each server set “shards.” The term “shard” really comes out of Ultima I and the destruction of Mondain’s Gem of Immortality, where different copies of the reality were put into each shard. We actually scattered shards in the game originally so that people could go and find and try to unify the servers back into a single server in theory. But the shards were my fictional explanation as to why the world was broken up.

Ramsay: You couldn’t unify the shards though.

Garriott: Yeah, exactly. We actually put a fair bit of work into it. The players would find these shards, and take the shards back to a magical chalice. There would be scribes who would talk about other instances and how unification is coming, getting people to go out and find these shards, bring them back, have a slowly growing gem, and eventually, even unify a couple of shards back into one at some point. Over time, that plan just fell by the wayside due to the incredibly large number of other critical problems we had to solve.

Ramsay: When did you start thinking about the business model for UO?

Garriott: Even early on, we knew there wasn’t going to be a retail price. And this was before anybody had considered free-to-play or other ways to charge. We never considered hourly because we always thought that, even in the old dial-up days, it was way too painful and dissuaded people from playing. We always knew UO would have a retail component and a subscription fee. We just figured that was the only fair way to present it at the time.

The issue was what the retail price and the monthly fee would be. The retail price was already fairly standardized at the time. We went with approximately $50 or $60 dollars, and that was largely set because of the retail channel. You had to have a box, you had to have discs, and there were physical components to that cost. When you go to retail, that’s just where you end up for paying for the physical process of getting it to people.

The bigger question was “what’s the subscription fee going to be?” There were two different numbers. There was a number we need and a number we could probably convince people to give us. And so we went in at the low end of our need. UO started at $9.95 a month, but most every other MMO went with $15, if not $20 dollars a month. We probably left a bunch of money on the table. But it was still gazillions more dollars than anybody could have imagined prior to that. I think UO remains about the cheapest MMO you could ever play.

Ramsay: If someone had approached you back then and said, “Hey, let’s sell costume items in the game,” what would you have said?

Garriott: Hard to know. My first response might have been, “Well, that’s ridiculous. Just let them pay gold in the game and be done with it.” If somebody had brought up the subject of buying assets for a premium in real money, it would have been laughed out. What wouldn’t have been laughed at—but we still wouldn’t have figured it out—was how to make real-money player-to-player transactions relevant and then try to take our cut. Almost immediately after we launched, there were black market items sold everywhere independent of us. Had there been a 10% fee on that stuff, we’d have made a bunch of money.

But it was hard to imagine implementing that and not running afoul of everything from money laundering charges to legal issues when people lose items because they expect the transaction to be protected. There were tons of interesting discussions about other ways to monetize, and where money was flowing that we made nothing on and had no ability to control. All that said, we were still pretty content with the way things turned out.

Ramsay: What were some of the other monetization ideas?

Garriott: The only other real big one was something I still have a strong affinity for. It’s probably best if I describe it metaphorically. In UO, we built theaters, but those theaters were basically just buildings that looked like theaters. There was no ticket price, and there was no way to keep people in the theater from jumping up on the stage. And even the people who tried to put on a good play in the theaters, frankly, had terrible puppeteering tools to emote and actually put on a play that was anything short of terrible. People still tried though.

But what if we were able to control the variables, eliminate the bad and simply took a cut of 10% from the performances? Of course, there are service issues with that approach. Or perhaps this could have been the model: let’s suppose you’re a director and you can rent the theater. Renting the theater meant that I could say who gets to come in through the back door and get on stage, and everybody else has to come in through the front door. Anybody who comes in through the front door has to pay real money to come in and sit down in my theater, but they cannot interfere with the performance. And as the director, I probably paid a real $10 to rent the theater.

Ramsay: You were thinking about live performances back when it was still in beta? When was the beta?

Garriott: Yes, we launched UO in 1997. We probably did the beta in 1995.

Ramsay: I read about a story that you had an entertaining experience during the beta. Tell me about the assassination of Lord British.

Garriott: That was at the very end of the beta. That was like, literally, the last five minutes of the beta. Would you like my recounting of that story?

Ramsay: Sure.

Garriott: So, as the final day approached, first of all, we knew we were going to have to do a player wipe because, during the beta, people found exploits where they duplicated tons of gold. People had found all kinds of ways to steal everything from other players, and the balance of the dataset was wildly off by the time we were done with the beta process. Since we were going to do a player wipe, we decided to have a big event for the finale and thank everyone who had been there in the beta. No one had been charged during the beta other than the $5 for the disc, and as soon as we launched for real, we were going to start charging people a subscription fee.

We decided to do this day-long event where Starr Long and I would go from town to town all over the whole world, seeing as many of the players as we could face-to-face. Then we’d do a broadcast where everyone in the whole world would hear what we had to say. And so we planned this long series of stops and we went from town to town, shaking hands with people, saying thank you, and so forth, and even the first parts of it were amazing.

The number of people who were online and in each of their favorite cities was just astounding for us to watch. I would hope that the people there also felt that it was special. So, they would do things in various towns. In some towns, it was just a free-for-all. In others, people were organized and they had lined up their groups like all of the fighters in one place and all of the magic users in another place, or arranged by color in columns, much like a militaristic revealing of the troops, you might say.

There were funny things that happened, too. In the city of Moonglow, a huge number of people all stood across from where we were going to stand to make our speech, and while we were there making our speeches, all of them took off every stitch of clothing they had, faced north, and away from us and bowed, which basically means they mooned us in Moonglow.

And then, finally, we meandered to the last stop and the last stop was Trinsic. On the outer wall of Trinsic, Starr Long and I stood amongst the final group we were speaking with. We were within minutes of the servers coming down. We had another programmer who literally had his finger on the button. At precisely on the hour, he was going to turn the whole thing off.

As Starr and I were there chatting, a person who at that moment was unknown to us cast a Fire Field spell up in the parapet where Starr and I were both standing, actually engulfing both Starr and me in flames. My first instinctive reaction was to step backwards out of the fire, so I stepped away. But when I stepped backwards, I couldn’t see what’s happening farther up the north edge of the screen, and I thought to myself, “Oh, I don’t need to walk out of this fire. I’m Lord British. I’m immortal. It makes no difference.” So, I stepped forward back into the fire, assuming it was harmless to me—and then fell over dead. All of a sudden, we realized the horror of this moment.

The reason why I died was because six months previous, the last time we did a wipe, I had forgotten to set the immortality flag on my character. For six months, we had never noticed because no one had ever tried to kill Lord British. I had never been involved in anything even remotely dangerous, and my stats were very high, so killing me was not trivial. I had just been merrily going about my life for six months thinking I was immortal, and I was not. And when you die, including me when I die, everyone becomes a ghost.

As a ghost, if you tried to talk to somebody, you just went, “Ooo.” So, I was there just ooo’ing. No one else was in my office. Everyone else was spread out around the building. And we didn’t bother to get on a phone conference because we could all chat in the game, but now not me.

So, now I’m cut off from the rest of the team, and the rest of the team is going, “Oh my god, Lord British is dead. What do we do about it?” And part of the staff was doing things like trying to resurrect me, and part of the QA was on conference with each other going, “Quick, somebody figure out how to get Richard resurrected.”

The other part of the group that was there were there invisibly or visibly to watch the final moments of the game with a couple of thousand players. And, in these groups, they were going like, “Who did it? How can we figure out who killed Lord British?” Later, we went into the data logs and found out it was a person named Rainz, but at this moment, we had no way to tell who had created that Fire Field. So, immediately, the staff was going like, “Well, we’ve got to punish the person who did it. We’ve got to find a way to punish the person who killed Lord British.” But they couldn’t figure out who it was, so somewhere in that throng of chaos, someone came up with the idea: “if we can’t figure out who killed Lord British, let’s kill them all.”

That idea was quickly adopted by the rest of staff immediately, just so right as I’m resurrected, the massacre had already begun. All of the invisible employees had turned themselves visible, and people started summoning demons and dragons. People started directly using kill spells to just kill one player right after the other. They were summoning lightning storms, and, basically, any manner of mayhem the employees could think of to unleash upon these people in the audience. And, of course, we, the employees, thought this was hilarious.

However, some of the people being massacred didn’t think it was nearly as hilarious as we did. What was happening to them is that when they were being killed, their ghost was sent all the way back to a shrine miles away from the city. So, in these last two or three minutes, instead of getting to sit there in Trinsic and watch the beauty of the whole world collapse, they were getting cast out into the wilderness as ghost. And so they’re all wandering through the woods trying to find their way back while this massacre is going on throughout the city of Trinsic when finally kaboom, the whole server came down.

Ramsay: That sounds like a blast.

Garriott: It was. It was hilarious. But it did anger some of the players I must confess, but oh well.

Ramsay: So, in addition to mass destruction, UO had user-generated content. There were live performances, but there was player housing, for example?

Garriott: Player housing is a good example, I think. Players could craft equipment as well. With most things, you could decorate them uniquely, but the framework was preset. The player-created part was the choice of where to put them. So, you could build a town out in the middle of the forest if you wanted, but the houses and equipment were largely standardized.

And although we made little theaters, players would be “acting” in theory. People could put on whatever play they wanted from scratch. We just didn’t give them very good tools for expressing themselves. In my mind, a strong game of the future would include the ability to make paintings, make individual pieces of sculpture, have much better tools for acting, in theory give you the SimCity-level of architectural control, the ability to compose music and play it with your friends, and the list could go on and on.

To me, the development team is always going to be outnumbered and outrun by the player base, so as long as the majority of the content must be made by the development team, there’s no way for any reasonably sized, reasonably funded team to keep up with the consumption rate of the populace of even a modestly successful game. Ultimately, what you’re really looking for is giving people the ability to create content that other players would consume.

Ramsay: Second Life found some success with that.

Garriott: There are games like Second Life that were open metaverse games where all there was user-created content. The problem with games that have nothing but user-created content is that they became giant minefields of junk. The majority of content that the majority of players create is unfinished, much less any good. People will start something, leave it in disarray, and move over to another piece of land. Then, they’ll build something else and leave it in disarray, even people who finished their creations.

If you pick 100 people at random to make a great painting, you’d get zero great paintings. If you picked 1,000 people, you might get one good painting. In the real world, the stick figures and finger paintings that most of us make never get plastered on billboards for everybody else in the world to see; they’re quickly thrown in the trash. Only the highest-quality works make it into stores and print shops. That economic reality is critical to sorting the chaff from those rare high-quality contributions.

Ramsay: Is there a relationship between the quality of content and the amount of money it makes?

Garriott: There’s a general tendency in that direction by all means, but I would say quality is a difficult word. The word quality can easily be interpreted based on the eye of the beholder. What becomes popular may not be strictly speaking quality-related; it may have other intangible reasons for why it became popular, like if it has a particularly important or strong or catchy message, for example.

In Second Life, the majority of content created by the majority of people is not interesting, so you have to find a way to navigate to find things that are interesting. But the other interesting thing that it taught me was that if you try to write a simulation of everything, you don’t make the best simulation of anything in particular. So, you end up with all these games in Second Life which were sort of B-side versions of those same kinds of experiences if you played it in a standalone way. And so while it was profoundly cool, Second Life uncovered a wide variety of good and bad lessons for the future in my mind.

Ramsay: Speaking of simulation, you did try simulating everything with UO.

Garriott: There’s a little difference: the guidance I gave my team was that if you put it in the game, it must work correctly, but don’t put anything in the game that you’re not going to bother to do correctly. And so what I mean by that is if we had put horses in the game, then they need to move around, you need to be able to ride them, and they need to do the things that people would expect of a horse. And if you don’t have the time to simulate the horse correctly, then don’t put the horse in the game.

An interesting contrast to Ultima is the Lineage games from Korea that were developed by my previous business partners. If you look at Lineage, a lot of people would look at it and go, “Hey, it looks a lot like UO.” In fact, the NCsoft folks would tell you it was inspired by UO. The combat and commerce aspect of Lineage were done very well and the visuals for the game Lineage, if anything, were far better than Ultima. The game was developed at about the same time as Ultima, and so the world you would go around in was gorgeous.

However, they did one thing that I very much disagree with from the Ultima design philosophy that I espouse. And that is you could walk through a village, and see barrels and chests and fish in baskets and all of those details that made the experience of walking through the town far richer, but if you walked over to any of it, none of it would react to your interaction. There was no chest you could open, and there was no barrel you could open or break or move. The only things in the world that responded to your interaction were monsters to fight and NPCs to get conversations from. The rest of the world was really just the visual tapestry. That’s a perfectly good way to make a game that is about fighting monsters and talking to people in a beautiful environment. As long as that’s your goal, great; they did a perfect job and it’s extremely popular in Asia.

For me, I like interacting with the world. I think the world itself is a great opportunity to make me feel and invest and suspend my disbelief about the world that we’re in. But if you start down the path of saying, “I can pick up the plate and cups and bowls off the table move them,” well, then you don’t want to break that logic halfway. If I can pick up the plate and cup and bowl, but I can’t pick up the flower vase and the bottle, how would I have known to expect that other than it just didn’t move? That is where I think a lot of even adventure games of the past have fallen flat.

I’m a big believer that when you put the player in a situation, the player needs to have the information and the rules of the game; and the physics of the game need to be consistent and thorough enough to let the player figure out the solution to the problem. An example I used to always give was if you’re in my office right now, and the door is locked from the other side and you can’t get out, and nobody can help get you out, you might first look to see if there are hinge pins that you could knock out and pull the door off backward. If that doesn’t work and you’re in an office with acoustic ceiling tiles, you could move some of those tiles and hop over the wall. And if that doesn’t work, and you’re really stuck in here and the place is on fire and you’ve got to get out, you could probably bash through a Sheetrock wall, if you really, really had to.

Ramsay: How do you help players find that content then so they don’t get frustrated or lost?

Garriott: Well, you have to introduce it to them slowly. The case study I did there was with the doors in Ultima. A lot of times in Ultima, we’d build a variety of door types. There were wooden doors, steel doors, magically sealed doors with a blue edge around them, and unlocked and locked versions of all of those. If you ever wanted to get through a door, first of all, if they’re unlocked, just walk through. If they were locked, you could hopefully find a key. But let’s suppose you couldn’t find a key. Well, then I gave wooden doors hit points, so if you walked up to a wooden door with an axe, you could chop your way through it and eventually the door would break and you would get on through. But then I added steel doors, so that if you walked up to a steel door with your axe, you would end up breaking your axe prior to breaking the door, and so the door would resist your ability to get through with your normal weapons.

I made those doors such that if you could maneuver a cannon nearby, you could fire a cannon at the steel doors and knock those doors down, too. And then I said, well, there’s actually some doors I really just don’t even want people getting into, so I made the magically sealed door, which you could just basically never get into without special requirements.

So, you just introduce those pieces slowly, and you make sure that people are learning the mechanics. When you add a wooden door, you put an axe in the room and lock the door. Leave somebody in a room with a wooden door and an axe and stone walls, and it’s not that long before somebody figures out, “Let me try to pick up that axe and whack on the door.” And so now you’ve taught people that kind of activity is at least one they should try.

Ramsay: The beta started in 1995 and the game was released in 1997. That leaves around two years for development. Was the dev cycle really that rapid?

Garriott: Yeah. It was relative to both time and cost. Compared to the tens of millions in MMOs that have been spent since then, it was quite modest at maybe $2-5 million in total spending, front to back.

Ramsay: Why do today’s MMOs take longer and cost more?

Garriott: I think the main reason is that games are just bigger. There’s a lot more art, a lot more geography, and a lot more features. UO had the advantage of shipping early, so it could have a smaller amount of territories, smaller amount of content, and smaller amount of features, and then grew once it was live. That’s more difficult to do now. You have to compete with the existing games, and reach a higher bar than they’ve already reached.

Ramsay: UO also had a 2D world.

Garriott: Yeah, I think that when you go from 2D to 3D, it’s harder to compare world sizes because you can stretch a polygon to be whatever amount of meters you want. Another way to compare world size fairly might be how many hours or days does it take you to wander through the entire world. From that standpoint, UO may have been comparable to World of Warcraft. I’m not even sure which would be bigger, if you did that comparison. But developing a 2D world was probably a lot faster than a 3D world like World of Warcraft, so it’s hard to compare exactly. The combination of the contained scope of UO and 2D graphics made development easier and faster than other 3D games.

Ramsay: Which do you prefer: smaller worlds where a lot of things are happening, or larger worlds where you can travel across vast, empty spaces?

Garriott: I think empty spaces are a waste of time. Not that you don’t want a few of them here and there to give you a good vista, where you’re crossing the hill and watching the sun rise or set alone from a hilltop. Sure, there are plenty of times where getting some alone time is a good thing, but too many games have erred on the side of too much empty space. Content is expensive to create and usually boring to traverse, so it has exactly the wrong metrics. It takes a lot of time to build and it doesn’t keep people busy very long. I think content in games should be spread out only just enough to give you the proper crescendo and lull cycles that make good storytelling.

Ramsay: When gamers talk about their favorite MMOs, they usually come back to UO and they say that the content and the gameplay of UO had more depth and was more meaningful than more modern experiences.

Garriott: Yeah, I would agree. I think that’s exactly true. If you think about most every MMO today, they’re all in the EverQuest or World of Warcraft model, generally speaking; they’re very combat focused. And, by the way, as great combat and roleplaying mechanics games, EverQuest and World of Warcraft are phenomenally great games; they do a lot of things amazingly well. But if what you’re looking for is a virtual world to live in, then after a year, how many times can you be on the level grind where your goal is to level up, go into a new territory, fight some new monsters, get some new armor, and repeat?

I think both EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and probably many others, do the combat challenge and reward cycles actually far better than UO, because they have been focused on that and are very skilled at that. UO focused more on professions, so that you could live an entire life in the world and never engage in combat. In other games, you can craft things, but you are also a combatant. Everyone playing World of Warcraft is first and foremost a combatant who might also be able to craft things on the side.

In UO, you had all kinds of fully developed professions that had nothing to do with combat, and it was the interplay between those professions that made such great content. For example, to be able to make swords, he would need metal ingots. To get the metal ingots, there would have to be miners who would go to the caves. The miners going into the caves were in danger from not only monsters but other players, especially on the way back from the caves when they had gold and other precious metals. So, the miners would hire protection from other powerful players who would say, “Look, I’m a level 10 guy. I’m happy to take you to the caves and back.”

As a miner, you’d hire those guys to escort you from the dungeon and back, and, of course, those adventurers would need better equipment to help defend those miners, which means they were going back to the blacksmith to buy the equipment. And that sort of interdependence between the players of different types throughout UO is one of the key aspects that made the game so special.

Ramsay: One of my earliest memories of UO was the packaging. The box had two flaps with a spread beneath. On that spread, there were photos of real people and mini-dossiers next to them. Each dossier would read like, “In the real world, John is a banker, but in UO, he’s a wizard.” How did you go about marketing a fantasy world where you didn’t have to be a hero?

Garriott: In a single-player RPG, every player becomes the one hero who saves the entire world. If you have everybody in the same world together, you can’t tell each person in the world they will become the one person who saves the whole world, so therefore you had to have an angle.

UO was also trying something new in the following way, too. I’m not giving UO credit for this, other than timing, but there was a big shift in the perception of who would, should, or could play video games. In the first 20 years of video games, they were played by somewhat wealthy teenage males almost exclusively.

There were few people who weren’t teenagers, virtually no women, and the computers and the software were relatively expensive. UO came out right at the time of a big shift where, suddenly, it was okay to be a gamer. You saw this happening in popular culture, typified by The Revenge of the Nerds. At about the time of UO, the tattooed, surfing skateboarders became gamers and began to work at game companies.

Ramsay: After the beta, what did you learn?

Garriott: Well, during the beta, it became obvious that we had two opposing and exacerbating problems. One problem was that the codebase for UO was fragile; we had only planned for a much smaller game, and it was built with the ragtag team I had described before. The codebase was pretty hacked together, and only barely holding together.

The opposing problem was that it was very clear that UO was going to be dramatically more successful than we expected. Our expectations were going up and up and up each month. Those two problems meant we were in trouble and we knew it, so when we launched the game, we were just struggling mightily to keep the servers running and to keep players happy.

Ramsay: What happened to the other projects at Origin? Were resources moved from them to UO?

Garriott: Yes, but that’s another interesting story: the difficulties of Ultima IX. It had been very difficult to get resources for UO, so I had talked to EA and said, “Look, it’s really important that you don’t scavenge resources and move them from one place to another. Otherwise, you’ll collapse things of value. You need to more equally distribute these resources.”

When I was pitching UO, EA said, “We don’t want it. We want Ultima IX.” Once UO was clearly going to be a hit, they reversed their stance and said, “We’re no longer interested in Ultima IX. We want you to work on only UO.” I just said, “Screw you.” I said, “Look, Ultima IX is already well in progress; it’s the end of the trilogy of trilogies that I’ve been working on for my whole career. You can’t pull the plug midway through.”

I finished Ultima IX but only because I insisted on finishing Ultima IX. The struggle for resources between UO and Ultima IX is likely what eventually drove me from EA. I wasn’t a team player in their mind. I wouldn’t just open and close projects at their whim. Instead, I would insist on finishing what we had started. I became a real thorn in the side of EA management.

Ramsay: Did that resource strain affect Wing Commander in any way?

Garriott: I don’t think it affected them negatively. Wing Commander was doing very well during this period, so Wing Commander, I think, had no resource issues. Ultima and Wing Commander were the two biggest properties at Origin, followed by Crusader, followed by a bunch of much, much smaller stuff. The much smaller stuff generally took the hit, but in most cases, not inappropriately.

Ramsay: What was your position in the company then?

Garriott: As now, I was creative director. I shun management whenever possible. I think my greatest value is in leading game design.

Ramsay: You said there are innumerable examples of Origin being very poorly managed by the people EA sent over after UO launched. Can you name names?

Garriott: Yeah, well, I would hate to specify any one individual. I would actually more broadly state that without regard to the quality of any individual person, the problem was each person would come in, starting with Neil Young, and they would stay for no more or no less than one year, and then a new EA general manager would show up on our doorstep.

Ramsay: So, the problem was not actually the work that the managers did, but the fact that there was no continuity between the transitions?

Garriott: Yeah, I would say that was the number one issue. It’s impossible to be successful without continuity. However, the fact of the matter is also that, for many of the people, frankly, I think their plans were bad. And, to be perfectly honest, I can’t think of a single manager post-Robert who had a particularly good plan.

Ramsay: You were creative director, but you were also the cofounder. You have a great deal of authority, power, and influence in your companies. How do you balance your leadership role with your actual creative responsibilities?

Garriott: That’s actually very difficult, but it was something we learned how to do back when Robert and I founded Origin. It’s just having a clear division of responsibilities. As painful as it was, you have to decide which things are in your control and which things are not. You know, hypothetically, a single person could be both the creative director and chief executive in a company.

Right now, I’m filling that role for Portalarium, but that’s because Portalarium is tiny. But once any company gains any size, you really have to decide which side you need to do, which side you are skilled to do, and then you have to entrust somebody else to do the other side. Fortunately, in pre-EA Origin, we had my brother Robert who was a phenomenally good business person, and whose number one goal with the company was to make sure that he retained enough money to make sure we could live through any tough times, and then make sure that he invested in the tools and products that would make money and not waste money anywhere else. And that was sort of his philosophy.

And it was my job and a lot of the other creators’ job to make games that sold well. But then Robert ultimately had control of the purse strings. One of the more painful days for me was the day when Wing Commander started outselling Ultima. Ultima had always been the lead dog when money or resources or key personnel were needed. Ultima would always get first pick, and then all of a sudden, Wing Commander’s getting first pick. And, suddenly, I am one of the founders of the company no longer getting first dibs. That was a tricky, personal moment to go like, “Okay, well, I guess that’s the way the rules work, and I agree with the rules, so I have to live with the results.” Anyway, so I at least respected the decisions, tough or easy, during that period.

Ramsay: Outside of the EA structure, was Origin itself very flat?

Garriott: As a general rule, we were quite flat. We did have an executive level of people who were responsible for different disciplines, whether that was product development, marketing, sales, or general management, but beyond that, even our teams were very, very flat. Everyone always felt that they could chime in on almost any subject the company was involved in.

We actually had a very upfront policy that anybody who wanted to see the details of the financials or the details of contracts or anything else they were welcome to do so and comment on them or criticize them. And that was part in parcel. I think I’ve said before why I felt that Origin was a very author-oriented company. One of the big concerns that developers had about a lot of companies is that those companies might be in one way or another ripping them off. Either there’s somebody making a ton of money who really doesn’t deserve it, or the company’s retaining a lot of profits instead of distributing to the employees. There are all kinds of ways employees can perceive, sometimes correctly, that they’re being taken advantage of by a company.

Ramsay: Was that organizational structure compatible with EA?

Garriott: Not at all. In fact, if you ask Larry Probst, or John Riccitiello, both would tell you that they thought EA blew the opportunity they had with Origin. That’s not to say, by the way, that Origin didn’t also blow its opportunity it had with EA. But the incompatibility is neither company’s fault; it was just a difference, and a difference that served EA well for many years. It just wasn’t particularly conducive to the way Origin had been built.

As I said before, EA openly and internally described themselves as a wolf pack. They described their whole corporate culture as survival of the fittest. Their whole corporate culture was whoever can dominate this next sector will win and get accolades and huge amounts of wealth, and anybody who falls a step behind would be cut loose. That mentality can be extremely successful. That devotion to domination can work extremely well to make sure you really do have the best people on the most important problems possible.

Origin was built on a different premise. Origin was founded on creating art, in a sense, which is not necessarily the best business plan. I mean if you can create the best art, then usually enough money will follow so that you can live just to create art the next day, but that does not make you the number one dog in town. Origin and EA started at almost exactly the same time, within a year of each other, but if you look at EA’s growth, it was much more rapid. I would say it was largely because of this aggressive attitude that EA had in business, whereas we were trying to make sure we just didn’t go out of business while allowing ourselves to make the art we wanted to create.

Ramsay: Do you think that if Origin had more layers of management that the organization would have at least fit better within EA?

Garriott: No, I don’t think it was a layers issue. I think it was a corporate presence and understanding of the politics issue. I was always surprised when I would go to California to hear people telling stories about how our products at Origin were being discussed in our absence and often unflatteringly. And it was sort of a wakeup call that if we’re not here to defend ourselves and constantly make the case for why we should continue to exist, the other wolves of the wolf pack here in California will beat us to the food and empty the plates before we even know that dinner’s served, if you know what I mean.

Ramsay: There were internal fights over what?

Garriott: Oh, as always: resources. EA was producing 100 to 200 titles every year, so that’s one to four titles every week that were launching through EA. If you wanted an end cap in a store, if you wanted any marketing to happen for your game, and, frankly, if you wanted the money to make your game at all, you had to be fighting all the time for your share of the resource.

Ramsay: Robert actually left EA before UO launched. Why did he leave?

Garriott: Robert is an entrepreneur. He would be happy building companies, whether they were game companies or airlines or almost anything else. Once we were acquired, he became a middle manager in EA. His interest was really just never to be a manager, so he just lost interest in being an employee.

Ramsay: His decision to leave was his own then?

Garriott: Oh, yes, absolutely.

Ramsay: How’d you feel about your brother taking off and leaving you to the wolves?

Garriott: I was worried. I knew that my first two publishers went out of business because they were drug addicts, owing me and their other developers a lot of money. Robert was the first competent business person I had had the chance to work with, so I knew there was a risk that Origin wouldn’t succeed if just anyone took up the mantle. But I was comforted by the fact we had a lot of our old guard management and a good group of products in development. In spite of the fact that we knew it was a big loss, we felt we had some continuity and a safety net with EA around.

Ramsay: Had you and Robert discussed him leaving?

Garriott: I think so. Origin was a very open place. Everybody knew everybody’s motivations, I especially knew Robert’s. His decision didn’t come as a shock by any means. We knew what his main interests were.

Ramsay: You left EA in 2000. You used a specific phrase to describe this event. You said that you were “driven to end up being parted from Electronic Arts.” That sounds like you were forced out.

Garriott: Yeah, I was basically forced out. The longer version of the story goes like this. When we finished UO, our advice to EA was we should now do Wing Commander Online. At that point, Wing Commander was an even bigger property than Ultima, we thought it would naturally become an MMO, and we had the team that just finished a Wing Commander game available. But EA said, “We think Ultima was a special case. It’s a roleplaying game that has 20 years worth of fans, and you’ve been teasing UO for decades. We’re not prepared to believe that Wing Commander should be an MMO right now. Instead, we want you to build Ultima Online 2.”

Our immediate advice was “we should not immediately begin a sequel because UO has just started; and it’s growing and changing constantly.” If we started UO2 right now, we’d be chasing a moving target, continually adding features to UO. We really recommend starting with Wing Commander. Oh, and by the way, the whole team that’s working on UO is still working on UO, so what we have available is a Wing Commander team, not an Ultima team." And they said, “Nope, we really want UO2.” Again, they do everything based on sales projection meetings, where they greenlight games, and UO2 was greenlit. Wing Commander Online was not, so off we went to work on UO2.

Fast forward a few years and EA comes back to us and says, “Hey, it’s obvious UO2’s going to take a long time and cost a lot of money because you’re chasing UO,” and we said, “Yes, that’s exactly what we told you.” And they said, “Well, in that case, we’re going to stop UO2.” So, they killed UO2, and got rid of the entire Ultima team. During this same period, the Wing Commander team left to Sony Online Entertainment to make Star Wars Galaxies. So, that game was built largely in the image of Wing Commander Online. It shouldn’t be that shocking or surprising how that turned out.

Finally, EA said, “Look, we’re just not interested in MMOs anymore. We think MMOs are too big, too risky, and too expensive. What we want you at Origin to do and you specifically, Richard Garriott, is make tiny games for Pogo.com, which we just acquired. Instead of costing $10 million, these games will cost $100,000 and they’re web-based.” And I said, “That’s the wrong charge to put me on, but you’re my boss, so if you tell me to go pitch games like that, I will pitch games like that.” So, I pitched four or five games through their process.

The problem with these pitches is, although I think a lot of them were really quite good, that even if one could get through the pitch process at EA, it costs between $50,000 and $100,000 to get to the greenlight process. And by the time you get to the greenlight process, they go, “No, we don’t want that one.” And then I’m going, “Well, you’ve now said no to ten games in a row. We’ve spent way more than it would have cost to finish a few of these. Instead of having us running around in circles, making pitches you turn down and spending money we could be making these games with, why don’t you just let us finish some games?” It was that kind of argument that sowed the seeds of my departure. It became increasingly frustrating for both EA and me.

Ramsay: What was the day of your departure like?

Garriott: Oh, it was a tragic day. That was a very tearful day from my end. It was the end of the thing I had built for 15 years. It was horrible.

Ramsay: So horrible that you soon started another company?

Garriott: Well, I remained retired for a year, and for that year, I wasn’t much in the mood to jump back in to start anything. Robert and I began to at least ruminate about the game business, how EA had bizarrely given up the MMO throne, and that no US company—with the possible exception of Sony—was really stepping up to take the MMO mantle.

We were thinking about starting a company specifically focused on MMO development. So, about nine months into that year, the two of us began to put money into a bank account to start Destination Games. We were talking to some our old recently retired allies and were literally just getting started when EA decided to shut down most of Origin. On almost the day that my one-year non-compete agreement expired, EA laid off about 200 people at Origin. That was basically all of product development, customer service, QA, and so on.

In our mind’s eye, this was EA giving us back the company we had recently sold them for free. We called up as many of those people as we thought we could manage, which was maybe a third, and we said, “Hey, would you like to reform together with us as Destination Games? We’ve only got a couple million bucks in the bank, we can’t afford to pay all of you starting today, but as a team again, as the core of Origin, we are far more valuable than we’d be individually.”

And you know that was not hollow and lost on the others. We announced the existence of Destination Games, and we already had employees who had made Origin great. Within a few days of that announcement, we got a call from NCsoft. NCsoft had seen UO, and they were inspired by UO to create a game called Lineage in Korea. Lineage was already ten times bigger than any US MMO and was, in fact, bigger than World of Warcraft.

But none of us had ever heard of it, so we were like, “Wait a minute! How is it possible that there’s a country on Earth where there’s a game that’s ten times bigger than any game we’ve ever heard of and we’ve never heard of it?” So, we quickly were doing the research to figure this out. It turned out that NCsoft had this ginormous success in Korea, where one out of ten people in the country were playing Lineage. I mean, the game was on Coca-Cola cans distributed out of the vending machines all over the country; and they had three TV channels devoted to games, and one was devoted to Lineage almost exclusively.

NCsoft had an office in the US for three years already, and they were trying to find developers to make games for either the US or Korea. They were trying to launch Lineage in the US, but they couldn’t find any partners to help them launch it. And we said, “Wow.” They looked at us and went, “You guys are the guys that created the game we patterned our game after, and EA just cut you all loose. We would love to talk to you about co-developing games for the US and Asian markets as well. Can you help us distribute Lineage in the US?”

We said, “For us, that’s perfect. That gives our sales and marketing people something to do until we actually manage to ship some products that we start developing in the US.” The match seemed perfect. Within a week or two, we had inked a deal, and so Destination Games as a company only existed for literally a few weeks before we became part of NCsoft.

Ramsay: And you were again inside another large bureaucracy?

Garriott: MMOs are expensive. We had no illusions that with the money my brother and I put in the bank that we’d be able to fund the development of an MMO. We always knew we were going to need partners who had deeper pockets. We just didn’t know what the nature of that partnership would be.

In this case, it appeared we had a much friendlier ally. There were actually many, very good things about the relationship with NCsoft like there is in many companies. With NCsoft, we did things like build and acquired the studios that made Guild Wars and City of Heroes, as well as a game out of Colorado called Auto Assault, as well as the games we built internally.

Ramsay: What was your original plan for Destination Games?

Garriott: We knew we’d be making RPGs, and we knew the first of those would be medieval fantasy. We knew it would be a Lord British-style virtual world. There was a deeper question as to whether that would be medieval fantasy, or more sci-fi, or more contemporary. We were fairly flexible as to what the setting would be, but we fully committed to do another RPG to pick up where we left off.

Ramsay: Can you clear something up for me? What’s the difference between Destination Games and NCsoft Austin?

Garriott: Destination Games was the development studio. NCsoft Austin was the publishing arm.

Ramsay: I see. How was everything organized? What did you take away from your experience at EA and bring to Destination Games?

Garriott: We set out to find the best studios, individuals, and small teams that were developing MMOs and tried to bring them into NCsoft. We felt that was the only way that even NCsoft would not be swallowed up by somebody like EA. That’s why we found Cryptic Studios, who did City of Heroes and City of Villains. That’s why we found ArenaNet, who did Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. And we went after NetDevil in Colorado that did Auto Assault. That was a very purposeful strategy to which I was personally leveraged extensively. Instead of NCsoft calling, it was Richard Garriott calling from NCsoft, and people would now take the calls. I was used as the bait to draw people into conversations.

Robert and I would give them the sales pitch we did at Origin. We were saying, “Look, we are building here in the US a publishing empire that is very much like Origin. It’s going to be very author-oriented, it’s going to be very developer-friendly, it’s going to be very open, you’re going to see how all the numbers work, and no one’s going to get cheated.” That message still worked very well and allowed us to grow NCsoft in the US much more rapidly than we had ever grown Origin. Within maybe 18 months or so, we went from zero revenue to a couple hundred million dollars in revenue.

Ramsay: Did Destination perform better than Origin?

Garriott: I would say the total revenues were definitely stronger and faster than at Origin. That’s a really interesting question. A successful MMO makes a lot more money than a successful solo player game, in spite of the fact that Wing Commander at its peak was probably selling high single digits of millions of copies. I’m not sure we sold that many individual copies of any MMO, but the total revenue of these MMOs was dramatically higher. The subscription business model was still proving very fruitful before the marketplace was flooded.

Ramsay: Destination was founded in 2000 and joined NCsoft in 2001. There was a whole year there that something was happening. What was happening?

Garriott: The answer is not much. Robert and I put a couple million dollars in the bank so we could begin to noodle on how to reenter the game industry. We secured the name of Destination Games, I think we might have built a tiny little website that just, you know, said, “Yep, this is the Garriott brothers. We exist.” Probably nothing more.

Ramsay: Who contacted you from NCsoft?

Garriott: Let’s see, I don’t remember the gentleman’s name, but it was the person who ran their LA office. But within 24 hours of the first phone call, Jake Song, the author of Lineage, and TJ Kim, the founder of NCsoft, flew from Korea to come meet us in Texas.

Ramsay: You got to talk to TJ?

Garriott: Oh, yeah, of course.

Ramsay: What was he like?

Garriott: TJ’s a great guy. One of the things I like about doing business in Asia is it’s very different than doing business in the US. In the US, people do business based on the numbers. You know, “Let me look at the bottom line, and if the bottom line looks good, then we’ll make investments or whatever.”

Asian business practices are more relationship-oriented. They spend more time on getting the measure of the person with whom you’re trying to do business, and if that measure is good, your belief is that you can make something work. You move onto the numbers as a second step.

So, we had a very good initial meeting. It was very obvious that TJ and Jake were on a course similar to ours, discovering this new opportunity in online games and believing there was a great future for at least the next five or ten years.

Ramsay: Lineage launched a year after UO, correct?

Garriott: Yeah, I think that’s right.

Ramsay: By the time you were working for NCsoft, did you have any responsibility for Lineage in the West?

Garriott: No, but I did help by all means; my help though consisted of things like playing Lineage and giving feedback to the development team about what features could be enhanced or changed to get traction in the US. It was very clear even from that point in time, and it’s still true today, that MMOs that sell well in Asia are not necessarily at all the same games that sell well in the US. I was more of a senior advisor to the team, but never a producer or director.

Ramsay: Did you figure out why Lineage was doing so well in Asia?

Garriott: It’s a complicated answer. It’s multifaceted. One reason was the environment itself. Korea has had such a longstanding post-World War II argument with Japan that they’ve banned the import of all game machines like Atari, Sega, Nintendo. So, if you’re a gamer in Korea, you play on PCs, period.

Second, Korea is a physically compact urban environment, and the government invested in putting broadband into everyone’s home. If you’re doing online games, you are guaranteed that every person in the country has broadband, so that makes online games particularly desirable. With no console games to compete with and everybody having broadband access from their PC, that’s a fairly homogenous environment to ship a game into.

A good MMO on PC has a lot of opportunities in Korea that it wouldn’t have in other countries. On the game itself, one of the things they did particularly brilliantly was they started small and grew with the audience. I would say it’s a similar story to Minecraft. In the rest of the world where the original Lineage was shipped, you could run around on only a single island, you could play only the fighter class, there were only a few monsters to fight, and only low-level armor to be acquired. As people played it, NCsoft rushed to bring in new creatures, new armor, new stories, and new places to explore. Their audience started small, but their audience grew as the game expanded very well.

Ramsay: How did you advise the developers to gain traction in the US?

Garriott: Lineage was a very Korean or Asian-style game in the following ways. You could sit with your mouse, click on the ground and walk, click on monsters to fight them, and click on NPCs to get information, but not much else. There were no chests to interact with, there were no puzzles in the game, there was no arcade combat or first-person shooter stuff in the game. The things that it did very, very well were not the traditional list of things found in American-style RPGs. So, our advice was to make sure the core features—exploration, discovery, and alternate combat skillsets—were available within the game.

Ramsay: When you started Destination Games, you wanted to build an MMO. When did you get a chance to do that? Was that game Tabula Rasa?

Garriott: Before we even met NCsoft, I used to call that game “Project X.” I’d been talking about Project X for five years, even during the development of UO. When I went independent, I really wanted to do a sci-fi game. And when we joined NCsoft, Jake—who had just written Lineage—and I were both saying, “Well, the last thing we want to do is compete with our currently still operating very successful medieval games, so let’s go do something in science fiction.”

But then, two years later when Jake left NCsoft, we had to do a major regrouping. One of the key people for whom we had chosen for the style and direction was no longer there, and it wasn’t our style and direction; it was his style and direction. So, we had to restart the project again.

When you have to restart a project like that, it’s difficult to get back on track. You’ve already spent a fair amount of time on developing something that you really can’t sustain, and you really need to go back and retool, which is what we did. But it meant that we were always under pressure of being too far behind and over budget, although we were really starting again from scratch.

Ramsay: What does starting over entail?

Garriott: Well, for example, when we were working with Jake, we were trying to make a game that would sell in Korea. In fact, it was more important that it sold in Korea than in the US because Korea’s a much bigger market than the US. But as soon as Jake left, we realized our ability to make a game for Korea has just been cut off. The rest of us didn’t really understand the Korean market, so our probability of success went way down. We said, “Look, what we really need to do is make a game we would enjoy and believe would be successful in the US market.” So, we basically abandoned a lot of the core style and design detail of what was Tabula Rasa with Jake to make the new Tabula Rasa that was really targeted for the US market. It really meant we started over.

Ramsay: What was different and difficult about starting over post-Jake-Song?

Garriott: The thing that’s different about being “post-Jake” is that although the team knows they’re starting over, the company doesn’t start their schedule over or start their funding over. The company looks at it and says, “Look, we know you lost your main guy, and we know you’re having to do some significant retooling, but we’ve already been into ’this project’ for two years and $10 million, so I sure hope you’re shipping next year.”

Ramsay: What year did you begin the game that eventually launched?

Garriott: Somewhere around 2003.

Ramsay: Tabula Rasa was released in 2007, so that was four years that the game was in development. Was sci-fi too new to you and your team?

Garriott: I actually believe science fiction and fantasy are very closely related. I think you can tell the Lord of the Rings story in a Star Wars universe just like you could tell the Star Wars story in a Lord of the Rings universe. One of my attractions to science fiction is that in science fiction, it’s rare that people use magic to solve the problems of the good guys or bad guys.

Using a sci-fi story, you have one or two scientific breakthroughs like light travel or whatever it might be, but otherwise, you live within the constraints of reality. One of my common problems with a lot of fantasy is when magic is constantly saving the day because it’s magic, not because it fits any pseudoscience.

And so when I write fantasy, I try to create fantasy that feels more like science fiction. It has a rational logic to it that is used consistently, not just “magic.” So, when I started on Tabula Rasa in a science fiction environment, it still felt very familiar to my process for creating a medieval fantasy world.

Ramsay: How do you begin to even create a universe?

Garriott: You have to go back and ask, “What’s the point of the universe? What’s the story you’re trying to tell?” Because everything comes out of that. It usually begins with: “what is the message?” Is your message about virtues? Is your message about how the fabric of society has begun to crumble due to a lack of moral fiber, or because politicians became too powerful?"

You know, one of the parts I enjoy the most though is the development of things like the languages and the histories and the stuff that I think makes the world feel real, that makes the world feel like it has depth. I’d like to think I learned that from being a big fan of Tolkien’s work.

Ramsay: What did you come up with for Tabula Rasa? What was the plot?

Garriott: To me, Tabula Rasa was a futuristic fantasy RPG where the Earth is overrun by an alien species that is slowly taking over star systems one by one, and the surviving humans help other species rise up.

Ramsay: You had a third of the core of Origin and then you joined NCsoft. What kind of team did you have on that game?

Garriott: A large one. This game was made in the heyday of large MMOs. If you look at the growth of game development, you could go back to a time when you could make a game by yourself. Starting with Ultima V, it took teams of up to, say, a dozen, and then with UO, you had teams of up to 200. With World of Warcraft, you get into the many hundreds. Tabula Rasa was hundreds.

This style of game development has become not uncommon in the MMO field, but it is terribly costly—terribly costly to the point where it’s extraordinarily risky to make these games, and extraordinarily costly in years of career time for anyone who works on them. You will get only a handful in your entire career.

It means you’ve spent incredible amounts of money, and an incredible amount of your entire life’s career on something that probably won’t work. I am actually pessimistic about the traditional development of most MMOs just because there’s so few that succeed while their costs remain so high.

Ramsay: How do you cut the costs of a game like UO or Tabula Rasa?

Garriott: One key ingredient is to know you can build with existing tools. Half the effort and money going into a game’s development is rebuilding the tools to render and operate the environment in which you’re going to play. A lot of games do that to make sure they look better than what has existed before.

If you decide you’re going to compete on the bells and whistles of a game, then you’re doomed to spending an extra one to three years upfront on nothing but the bells and whistles. If what you’re doing is a first-person shooter, that’s probably a good investment because that’s pretty much the only way to judge the difference between first-person shooters. They’re all basically “run around in a maze and shoot each other” games.

If you’re doing a game that has more depth, like a role-playing game, you’re going to spend a few years on top of all the bells and whistles. Then, I think you should, in most all cases, use an existing development environment like Unity. Try to be judged and compete on content, not on the bells and whistles.

Ramsay: What about MMO engines like BigWorld?

Garriott: Yeah, I know them. The BigWorld guys were super talented, super devoted to making it work and created some very, very impressive technology. The problem is they were making technology; they weren’t building a game. My team has, down through the years, evaluated BigWorld two, if not three, times and opted not to. It wasn’t because it wasn’t good technology; it just wasn’t ever doing exactly what you needed. It was sort of an engine to solve one very specific problem of MMOs, but it wasn’t the way to build an Ultima.

And there’s this gap that’s been hard to bridge. You can get just a render pipeline, of which now there are some very good solutions. There’s the Unreal and Quake engines, and there other phenomenally good 3D render pipelines. If you’re going to do a first-person shooter or something that starts there, and just add some extra features, you can buy those engines off the shelf today. You could even do that ten years ago and make a really darn good game.

The problem is that if you’re going to do a game that’s deeper than that, it was hard to define what tools to use. There were things like BigWorld, there were a handful of other people trying to do reality engines that were usable, but most of them were underpowered or failed our metrics in some way.

There was a big gap that existed, and, frankly, I’m pleased, surprised, and relieved that this gap has finally been filled with Unity. The competitors to Unity are also worth examination. Unity is now not only a highly competitive 3D render pipeline, but they have built a wide variety of these other tools they need to make a complete game. They also have enough third-party people making plugins for anything and everything you could imagine.

There are tons of inventors now creating technology that people who are on a common platform like Unity can all share with each other, and dramatically cut the time it took and the money that it took to make AAA games. Having to rewrite other people’s engines has been the death of many companies.

That is absolutely historically true in our industry. That being said, for us, with Unity, that has not been true. Unity so far has proven to be a shockingly elegant environment. I’m impressed yet again with how well thought out Unity is as a development environment—just how very well object-oriented it is at all levels from the top to the bottom. It really truly is easy to pull code, functions, and add art, music, trigger events, AI, and conversations. “Dropping content in and out of a Unity environment is trivial” might be overstated, but not by much.

Ramsay: How much time and money do you think Unity actually saves you?

Garriott: There’s no question that it saved us many man years and many millions of dollars.

Ramsay: Getting back to Tabula Rasa, you had a four-year development cycle. What was launch day like?

Garriott: Launch day for an MMO was always scary because it’s often the first time you’ve really put a lot of load into the servers, and each time you scale up the data flow or load by an order of magnitude, you inevitably unearth some new real problems. For Tabula Rasa, I’d actually say we had less problems than usual, just because we’d all done a handful of MMOs before, but it’s still a day where you sit back, you start to throttle it up, you open it up to other people, and you wait for things to fail, and then everybody rushes off to go fix them.

It’s a very exciting day, too, because you’re switching modes from just being a financial drain to where there’s finally going to be a return flow of money to support the project. So, it’s kind of exciting and scary rolled into one.

Ramsay: What happens internally after a modern MMO is launched?

Garriott: Launching a MMO is a scary ordeal. It used to be that when you finished a game, you put it in a box, you shipped it, and that was the end of it. If there were any problems, there was nothing you could do. It was done and gone and out, and there wasn’t even the Internet to send people patches or repairs. So, you immediately then moved on to your next game.

In a MMO, what you might call the finish line is releasing it to the public, but that’s really where the work starts. If you thought you were working hard on debugging just prior to launch, it gets worse right after launch. Immediately after launch, if there’s a problem that’s bringing down the servers, you’ve now got people paying for it, so you better get those servers back up right away, or people could start demanding their money back. So, the days, weeks, and first months after the launch are in many ways terrifying. There’s a lot to do.

On the flipside, you finally have people living in a virtual city you’ve spent so much time refining. And there’s great joy in watching all the pieces move properly and come to life in the way they were supposed to. You’ve been running around in a largely empty city up to that point in time and now it’s a living, breathing thing, so there’s also great joy in it at the same time.

Ramsay: How were the initial tenants of Tabula Rasa?

Garriott: They just kind of ran the full gambit. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of Bartle’s Four Player Types, but in RPGs, it commonly describes how some fraction of players are the Achievers who are just trying to get to the topmost level, some are the Explorers who are trying to really just go to see every nook and cranny of the game, some are the Socializers who like to hang out and role play in the towns and settle into the reality of the game, and then you have your Dissidents—the ones who are there just to muck with it, harass other players, and also try to bring down the service because that’s how they get their fun.

And so you have all those people in the game on day one. Different people are finding different levels of joy with certain parts, and sometimes they’re finding different struggles with parts of it. At this point, I couldn’t tell you which of those paths were working the best and which of those paths had the hiccups. Inevitably, all have a few hiccups, but you fix one and let that group race on ahead for a while and then you fix another, and let a different group race on ahead. It’s a balancing act to stay in front of everybody with updates and repairs.

Ramsay: Who are the loudest tenants?

Garriott: I don’t think any one of them is any louder than any other. I think the most interesting group are the Dissidents. They are people who—if you don’t give them an official way for them to act out—they will make up one of their own, which is usually worse for the game and worse for other players. And so you do things to help them channel their frustration. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a modern city, where sometimes they’ll put up a concrete wall near a playground and tell anybody that might like to do graffiti, “Here’s a free graffiti wall that we won’t yell at you for. Please do you graffiti here.” The real challenge for managing Dissidents is giving them an outlet, letting them feel sated without making them feel like they were cowed into something politically correct.

Ramsay: Was your Dissident problem a significant problem?

Garriott: No, our dissident population was no more and no less than the usual number in other MMOs. Dissidents represent only 5% of the total population; they are a vocal minority that you just need to manage carefully.

Ramsay: Despite their size, they have a sizable impact though.

Garriott: They can, like in UO. A lot of player killers started preying on newbies, and that damaged our game in that we had a hard time attracting new customers. New customers would have a really bad experience because more experienced customers are purposely giving them a bad experience. That’s the kind of behavior you want to stop the most. We didn’t really have a problem with that on Tabula Rasa, fortunately. It was worse, much worse in UO.

Ramsay: What kind of hijinks could they pull off in Tabula Rasa?

Garriott: That is a good question. You know, since we didn’t have PvP, the hijinks were much less overt. So much less overt, I can’t even find you a good example. Instead they were be pushed farther underground to try to do things like sniff packets and try to interfere with the function of the service.

Ramsay: I remember vaguely that when Tabula Rasa’s reception was mixed.

Garriott: Yes, it’s interesting that people know me so well as a fantasy RPG creator that people had more mixed expectations when I started to go off into sci-fi. When we did the sci-fi game, we felt that having to be a little bit more action-oriented is thematic with the setting. But because it was from me, the Ultima creator, a lot of people expected it to be more like a themed Ultima. And because it was me, we didn’t get a purely Wing Commander audience, you might say. But because it was sci-fi we didn’t get the purely Ultima audience, so we had a mix of audiences, and so we had a mix of responses.

Ramsay: Was your attachment to the game actually a detriment?

Garriott: Oh, no, I don’t think so. I actually still look back at that game, and I think we did some really great innovative work on control points, how to handle multiplayer quests , and how to make creature AI more sophisticated than just standing in front of each other and trading blows like is true with most other MMOs and most RPGs for that matter. A lot of those lessons I’m taking further here into Shroud of the Avatar, so I still look at the things we did well very fondly. There were some great successes that we’ll carry forward.

In my personal opinion, I honestly think Tabula Rasa could still be an extremely successful game. It’s just that NCsoft was so accustomed to their instant mega hits for their one or two products they had done in Korea that their patience for getting it right was lower than I would have at least recommended.

Ramsay: Before we go there, can you describe some of those systems where you had innovations?

Garriott: Take control points. If you think about most RPGs, you either run into monsters out in the wild, or go into a dungeon and monsters are pre-set there or spawn randomly in that environment. If you leave and come back, you see the same monsters there again. If the instance closes, the monsters respawn, and it resets for the next player.

What we did in Tabula Rasa is we said, “Let’s build some points on the map where if the players occupy them continually, then there will be NPCs, quest givers, shops, and maybe ships to take from place to place.” There were all kinds of goods and services that were valuable to the players.

But if the players either completely abandon the location or if the location succumbs to the ever increasingly strong waves of bad guys, then the control point flips to where it is under enemy control. That means all of the valuable goods and services are no longer available, and the only way for those goods and services to come back and become available again is for enough players work together to retake the control point.

Ramsay: What about creature AI?

Garriott: Another example is creatures taking cover. For example, if you look at most RPGs, a monster walks up, stands in front of you, at its maximum weapon range, and then repeatedly starts using its abilities and its weapons to just throw things at you. Occasionally, they have enough AI to decide to target the wizard in the back first, or decide what opponent to face on your team, but largely, it’s just trying to lay out the most damage over time and resist whatever damage you can lay out over time. So, you quit looking at the screen because the screen is largely standing there, animating whacking each other and now you’re really managing the shortcut bar and playing a spreadsheet game. You’re just managing your hit points, healing, and such.

That makes creatures fairly unintelligent in my mind. If you remember going back to Napoleonic warfare compared to the American Revolution, armies used to walk down the street in columns, the first row would shoot their guns at you, the second row would walk through them, shoot their guns at you, and the third would walk through them to shoot their guns at you. It would be kind of this constantly advancing line.

But then the Americans who were used to hunting in the woods said, “Screw that! Instead of standing there and getting shot, why don’t we hide behind a tree? Then we’ll just shoot from the side, and we’ll run around back and shoot from behind. Why would we want to stand in a formation and take this thing head on?” That was true for players fighting each other and players fighting monsters. Our monsters were smart enough to take cover.

Ramsay: How do you successfully operate a live game post-launch?

Garriott: Once a game goes live, you’re sort of in this race to make sure people know you’re listening to them. I would say that’s the first and most important part: people need to know they’re being heard. If they think the game’s got bugs, they need to know you’ve heard them. That’s step one. It just takes time to reply to people in a way that they know you’re listening.

Step two is addressing a lot of those bugs or concerns as quickly as you can. But, inevitably, there’s more coming through the door than you can deal with in short order, so you have to begin to start building priority lists and communicating to people, “Hey, by the way, here are the ten things you’ve said, here’s the three we’re going to do immediately, here’s the three that are going to wait a while, and here’s the four we’ll get to one day, hopefully.”

Then the third step is you have to recognize that people are going to consume all of the content you’ve created fairly quickly. Those Achievers and Explorers, especially, will power through whatever it is you’ve created. They’re going to see every monster, every quest, and they’ll have been to every corner of the map long before you could ever create new monsters, new stories, and new maps. So, you can’t just be supporting the game you’ve launched; you’ve got to add to it in a way that retains people who have chewed through your content.

Ramsay: During the operation of Tabula Rasa, you went somewhere where no game designer has gone before.

Garriott: Yes, that’s true.

Ramsay: You have a family background in space, correct?

Garriott: True. My father is a NASA astronaut who flew twice: first on Skylab and then on the ninth launch of the shuttle. I’m actually the first second-generation astronaut, and I flew with the first second-generation cosmonaut.

Ramsay: I remember you sharing a story about when you, as a kid, would be sitting around the dinner table, and there’d be various people visiting with you who were astronauts. You lived in an astronaut neighborhood.

Garriott: All of my neighbors were astronauts. My left-hand neighbor was Hoot Gibson, another shuttle astronaut. My right-hand neighbor was Joe Engle, another shuttle astronaut and an X-15 pilot before that. Over my back fence were a few more astronauts, and I lived just two or three blocks from the front gates of NASA. So, when I went to college and met people who were butchers and bakers and firemen and policemen, it was culture shock. Suddenly, I met these Sesame Street people that I had thought were a fantasy before, and then I realized they were, in fact, normal, and I grew up living in the fantasy world.

Ramsay: You’re saying that you saw the space program as mundane because you grew up with astronauts all around you?

Garriott: Yeah, absolutely.

Ramsay: Is that why you didn’t pursue it?

Garriott: No, I didn’t pursue it as a career for a variety of reasons. When I was young, one of the NASA doctors told me I was ineligible because I needed glasses, and the other reason was that although I was a great self-study student and a constant competitor and winner of things like science fairs, I was not a super studious grade-A student.

Ramsay: And, of course, you heard a lot of stories about real space, and so much so that space travel didn’t catch your imagination as it did the rest of us?

Garriott: I did hear a lot of stories, although not as many as you might think. If you had to say what movie character is most like my dad that people would recognize, the answer is absolutely, unequivocally, and precisely Spock. He’s not the storyteller. He’s not the guy who sits down and says, “Come sit around the fireplace and let me tell you a story about how I went to space.” My dad would never ever do that. And so when I had kids at school ask me, “Hey, your dad’s an astronaut. That’s cool. What did he say it’s like being in space?” I’d have to say, “I don’t think he’s ever said. Let me go ask.” And then I’d ask, he’d say, “Oh, it’s a lot like the training; it’s kind of like scuba diving.” I’d go tell my student friends that, and then I’d be sad that they’d asked.

Ramsay: What attracted you to medieval history?

Garriott: I think it was things like Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t remember having much interest before. I was interested in haunted houses and things that were a little bit historic and scary, but nothing as explicit.

Ramsay: Was your trip to space a publicity stunt for your sci-fi game?

Garriott: No, no. If I’m going to space, we might as well use the publicity around it, but my desire to go to space had nothing to do with publicity. I just always wanted to go, and I’ve been investing the money I’ve made in computer games in building a space frontier since I was very young.

Ramsay: This was personal then?

Garriott: Absolutely.

Ramsay: How do you feel about being called a space tourist?

Garriott: I’m not a fan. I don’t think what I did was tourism. First of all, I was one of the cofounders of the XPRIZE that brought private vehicles into existence. I’m the largest and first large shareholder of Space Adventures that has flown every private citizen into space. On my own flight, I did tons of experiments for profit for NASA and other commercial partners, as well as many for the businesses I was starting. I am a private astronaut, period.

Ramsay: You’ve said before that there was a year of training. Is that the same amount of time that a government astronaut goes through?

Garriott: Sort of, and here’s the qualifier for that. The way a crew is put together for a space mission is there are three levels of training on any system. The first level of training is to be a user, meaning I’m qualified to use that device, like the radios without mucking it up. The highest level is to be an expert, and an expert on radios, as a case study, is somebody who could disassemble the radio, repair defective parts, put it back together, and make it work again.

In any one crew, every member of the crew has to be at a minimum user level on every system that they will ever possibly interface with, otherwise they’re not allowed to use it and that, of course, would make sense, you would think, right? Similarly, any crew has to make sure that amongst the three or four or six or however many crew members there are, one person is an expert on each system. They don’t want to get into space and say, “Oh, look the radio’s failed,” and no one in the crew is an expert on it.

Professional astronauts want to do enough training to become an expert in as many things as possible. That way, they can be assigned to almost any crew, so professional astronauts go through many more years of training. For people like me, however, who are not staying up for six months or not doing this professionally, and who are flying under the assumption that if their seat were to fly empty, the other two members already have the expertise to cover all the other systems, then it allows me to train only to the user level on all systems. But we do the exact same user-level training as any other astronaut or cosmonaut. One year is sufficient to become a user on all the equipment and International Space Station subsystems that you would need to interact with.

Ramsay: A year of training still doesn’t actually sound like a whole lot.

Garriott: I don’t know if you’re a scuba diver, but I imagine that you believe if you’re not, you could be. If you aren’t, I know you probably have some friends who have gone through the scuba training courses that take you a few nights in classrooms and pools. At the end of scuba diving training, you learn about partial pressures of various gases, and why if you go really deep, certain things like oxygen become toxic, and why if you come up quickly you can get things like the bends, as nitrogen bubbles out of your bloodstream. Those are the same type of things that are true in space. If you can handle a scuba license, you can handle learning about the life support systems aboard a spacecraft.

Similarly, if you can handle getting a ham radio license, you can handle the communications gear on a spacecraft. And the list goes on to where there are a lot of systems to learn, but no one of them is rocket science, so to speak. The hardest part was actually learning the Russian language. I mean, half of my day every day was spent in language classes.

Ramsay: Before you arrived at the International Space Station, you went up, of course, on a spacecraft. In the spirit that your young school friends asked you about your father’s experience, what was that like?

Garriott: What’s interesting is launch and reentry, which you think of as the most exciting and dangerous parts, but they’re a lot different than you would imagine based on, for example, TV. It’s really like a beautiful ballet move, lifting you ever faster in the sky compared to say dropping a clutch on a sports car at a green light to take off in the sky. It’s quiet, smooth, and the g-forces come on very gently. It was much more elegant than I would have anticipated, both for the launch vehicle side and the reentry side.

Ramsay: It’s actually quiet?

Garriott: Yeah, on the outside, it’s extraordinarily noisy, and the shuttle has solid rocket boosters that add a lot of vibration inside of the shuttle, but all of the liquid-fueled rockets are very, very smooth and very, very quiet inside.

Ramsay: So, you never thought the giant explosion beneath you?

Garriott: Oh, you think about it, of course, but you’re pretty well resigned by the time you’re sitting on top of it. If it was going to cause you any alarm, you were long over it by then.

Ramsay: How much of a view did you have on the way up?

Garriott: The capsule you’re sitting in has a protective cowling over the entire orbital module during launch. So, my right shoulder was touching the window, but there was nothing to see out the window. It’s not until you reach space that that cowling pops off, and that gives your first view out the window. At first, it’s just space, which is black, but once the engine shuts off, it rolls over and you can see back toward the Earth in a much more beautiful scene, of course.

Ramsay: At what altitude does the cowling pop off?

Garriott: It pops off before you reach your apogee, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what the altitude is, but your full apogee altitude is 250 miles above the surface of the Earth.

Ramsay: When you returned to live among us surface dwellers, why go back to video games, especially after seeing firsthand the insignificance of mankind?

Garriott: I needed more money for another spaceflight! Very simple!

Ramsay: I would have thought that going into space would have been a life-changing experience. Your life doesn’t seem to have changed at all.

Garriott: I would differ. I still really love making games. It’s a passion. I still have my feet in space, too. I’m a member of the Commercial Space Federation. I was on the NASA Advisory Council and met regularly with NASA. But I would actually say that there are parts of my life that changed dramatically.

I now no longer think that the world is very big. Since you said that humanity seems insignificant, I actually think the globe itself is tiny and insignificant. I no longer think hopping from country to country as being a very big deal, so I feel like a master of the Earth in a way that I didn’t feel before.

The biggest change is that I do a lot more environmental work. I’m now devoted to living, championing, and showcasing an environmentally friendly lifestyle. I espoused those values in the past, but I just didn’t live it. I’m now a much better shepherd of those sorts of things. But my passion for exploration, my passion for space, and my passion for games have not abated at all.

Ramsay: How long were you in orbit?

Garriott: Two weeks. The orbital altitude of the space station and other Low Earth Orbit activities are only 250 miles up from the surface of the Earth. That’s only 10 or 20 times higher than airplanes fly. So, you get this very enormous grand vista out over the entire planet, but it’s only one order of magnitude higher, so it still feels very intimate and the kinds of things you can see out the window of an airplane are very much like the things you can see out the window of the space station. You really get this incredibly intimate view of the Earth that goes by very quickly because you’re traveling at 17,210 miles an hour, which means you orbit the earth every 90 minutes, and so you see a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes, and you cross continents like the US in 10 or 15 minutes. It’s really stunningly rapid movement, being so close.

Ramsay: You docked with the ISS, right?

Garriott: Correct. A little more than 24 hours after insertion into orbit, and we free-flew in the Soyuz for about 24 hours as they kind of checked out a variety of systems aboard the Soyuz prior to docking.

Ramsay: During that 24 hours, what were you doing?

Garriott: We still had a lot of work to do. You’re checking out all the systems aboard the Soyuz, and you’re doing mundane things like stowing the gear that you went through the launch process in. You’re doing mundane things like eating meals and shaving your face, and in no time at all, you spend one night and then you’re onto docking.

Ramsay: Did you ever find time to sleep?

Garriott: Oh, yeah. Since there’s no gravity, there’s no bed either, so you just sort of relax, get into a fetal position, and drift off to La La Land if you can.

Ramsay: Could you?

Garriott: About half of the people who fly in space find it to be far more relaxing than being on Earth, and they fall asleep very quickly and easily. It’s like the perfect bed with no pinch points. I found that I was just so excited to be there and I wasn’t going to be there long that, for me, it was more difficult.

Ramsay: Docking with a space station at 17,210 miles per hour doesn’t sound terribly easy.

Garriott: Well, you’re correct, and in more ways than you might know or might be obvious to most people. Everything that’s in orbit around the Earth orbits the precise center of the Earth. So, let’s suppose you and I were in rockets, traveling parallel to each other. And we came up side by side and we were both going to go around the Earth with one of us slightly to the north around the equator and one of us slightly to the south around the equator. We’re going to take a parallel path, or at least attempt to take a parallel path, around the Earth. We actually can’t because we’re both orbiting the center of the Earth, which means we’ll actually collide with each other only one fourth of the way around the Earth.

Our centers of mass will be at the same spot as when we’re switching sides, and since our centers of mass only take 20 minutes before they’re in the middle of each other, it’s really only about 10 minutes before you hit each other. You can’t come close to something in space and then stop. You push on in and dock right away. As you’re pushing in, due to orbital mechanics, you’re usually going forward or up or you’re drifting. You’re changing your velocity, which is putting you at a higher or lower orbit, or a retarded or pushed forward orbital position.

So, it’s actually very complicated to dock two crafts together in space, and that’s why the Russians do it with computers more often than by hand. The US doesn’t even do it at all. What the US does is they get close and then reach out with a robotic arm to pull them into docking.

Ramsay: Was docking a stressful experience?

Garriott: No, there was almost nothing about the whole trip that I would describe as stressful.   The only exceptions would be that sea survival training is definitely a hardship that must be endured, and if you were at all claustrophobic, you would absolutely not like boarding the Soyuz; it’s very, very cramped. But, otherwise, the launch, reentry, docking, floating around in space, and looking back at the earth never seemed particularly stressful or dangerous.

Ramsay: Once aboard the ISS, what was your first order of business?

Garriott: The first order of business after docking was to set up a wide variety of experiments. I immediately set to work, setting up a slow-scan TV device on the ham radio equipment that I brought up. I installed it so I could leave it on to transmit the view from space of the Earth back to ham radio aficionados around the globe to be able to pick up and decode.

Similarly, there was an experiment called protein crystal growth, which I’ve now flown a few times in space. In that experiment, we fly a couple thousand of these little tubes of protein and precipitant that we load on the Soyuz just before launch, frozen to minus 30 degrees Celsius or so. It’s important we get them to the space station at its center of gravity where they don’t get much vibration or movement, even if the station reorients, so they can thaw out, cross-diffuse, and crystalize.

And there are things you do right away from a safety standpoint as well. Upon arrival, you reconfigure everyone’s seats to be in the emergency escape orientation. For example, I went up on the Soyuz TMA-13, but I came down on Soyuz TMA-12, so my seat was moved to the Soyuz TMA-12 immediately.

Ramsay: How many people were on the station?

Garriott: There were the three of us who went up on Soyuz TMA-13 and the two I would be returning to Earth with on the Soyuz TMA-12. There was one more for a total of six who had gone up by one shuttle and would be later retrieved by a different shuttle.

Ramsay: How big is the ISS internally?

Garriott: It’s large. It’s as a big as a 747 jumbo jet. In fact, you can kind of think of it as school buses parked nose to tail and also occasionally branching “T” shapes. There were more modules than people, so it was not uncommon after breakfast with the crew that you’d go off to a module to do your work and you wouldn’t see any other people except at meal times, or while traveling back and forth through the stack.

Ramsay: Did you have any ideas for video games up there?

Garriott: Not a one. You know, it’s funny because even before space, I’ve made trips to Antarctica or down to Titanic or hydrothermal vents and other things, and not one of those can I say, “Here is an idea that came from one of those travels that has shown up specifically in a game.” That being said, I’m sure they all inspire a great deal of the detail that I put in my games.

A good example would be when I was in Antarctica, we came across this gigantic, long formation made by the wind that whistled across the top of a mountain, swirled around the base, and dug into the ice what appeared to be a tidal wave 100-feet-tall and a mile or two long. As we walked along at the base of what appeared to be a frozen tidal wave, you sort of half-expected to see frozen dinosaurs inside. It felt and looked completely otherworldly. And while I don’t think we could actually build that in a game and have it be interesting necessarily, the sense of wonder and awe you get when you turn a corner and discover something like that is what I try to think about doing in a game.

A good example from space would be when you look out the window of the space station. Since there’s no ground for light to bounce off, and there’s no air for light to refract through, the sides of the space station that face the sun are very, very well-lit, while the sides of the space station that face away from the Sun are pitch, pitch, pitch black.

Ramsay: You said that nothing about your trip was stressful, even reentry. All of the Hollywood depictions of reentry paint a different story.

Garriott: Well, it really wasn’t stressful, although we had reentry malfunctions. But what’s interesting is part of your training is to go through the history of every malfunction that has ever either occurred or has been theorized to occur. When you actually see a malfunction, especially if it fits but even if it doesn’t fit, 90% of the time you’re going, “Oh, okay, I’ve seen that one. It’s no big deal.” And even if it’s a new one, you kind of put it in a class of activity. You kind of go, “Oh okay, well, that one’s sort of like this, so we’ll deal with it sort of like that.”

We had two malfunctions during my reentry. The first malfunction was when the heat shield dropped away at about 10,000 feet above the ground and the parachutes deployed. There is a valve that opens to equalize the air pressure from the outside of the vehicle to the inside of the vehicle. Right about at the moment we were going through the checklist for the sequence of events in our logbook, smoke started to pour into the cabin. It was coming in from underneath the control panel in front of me on my side. I took some pictures and video of the smoke coming in, and I pointed it out to the crew commander in the center seat, but we never figured out what it was.

A second malfunction occurred when right as those same parachutes deployed, it dislodged a large metal bottle that was supposed to be strapped above me on the ceiling. And when that metal bottle dislodged, it fell between my helmet and the window beside me and sort of got wedged in there.

The seat you’re sitting in has an explosive charge that goes off to lift your seat into a landing position, so that when you hit the ground, it can compress and go back down. When my seat lifted, it wedged that bottle even tighter between my shoulder and a piece of instrumentation on the control panel. It hurt, but more importantly, it prevented my seat from lifting to the landing position. And so my seat was still in the down position, which meant that if I didn’t get that thing dislodged and we hit the ground hard, I would get an extra hard wallop. So, I said, “Okay, I really need to get that bottle out of there.”

I actually couldn’t do it on my own, so I struggled and struggled with it, but I couldn’t get it. I told the crew commander in the center seat who’s obviously busy doing a lot of other stuff, but because I felt this was important, I got his attention. With him pulling on it at the same time as I was, we managed to dislodge the bottle, my seat raised to its upper position, I stowed that container between my legs and some place where it wouldn’t bounce around too much when we did impact the Earth a few seconds later. And, bam, we hit hard.

Ramsay: I have this picture in my head that you’re in a capsule and you’re hurtling toward earth at an ungodly speed with no ability to control your descent past a certain point and you’re going into the middle of the ocean.

Garriott: We were actually headed to land in the case of the Russian capsule. We landed, bam, like a car crash. So, once you undock with the space station, you’re free floating at over 17,000 miles an hour. The first thing you do is burn the engines to slow down just a little bit. If you slow down much slower than 17,000 miles an hour, you will not stay in orbit and you will fall back to Earth. And so you do a controlled burn that you can barely feel, just a little bit of pressure, and you burn for two or three minutes. In that two or three minutes of running the main thruster that you have still some energy in, it slows you down enough to where now you will reenter Earth’s atmosphere. It’s fairly predictable, mathematically, where you will enter, not exactly but pretty close.

As soon as you impact the upper atmosphere, you begin to slow down; the atmosphere has some thickness. But you start very high in the atmosphere where there is almost no thickness, and still you’re moving at 17,000 miles an hour, so the few molecules you run into you’re ripping apart and creating a plasma hotter than the surface of the Sun and the vehicle begins to melt around you. So, just three inches away from my shoulder, it’s hotter than the surface of the Sun and the heat shield’s bleeding away.

As you get deeper into the atmosphere, you slow down faster and faster, and, even with no parachute, your terminal velocity drops to only a couple hundred miles an hour. However, you don’t hit the ground at a couple hundred miles an hour; you want to hit the ground as close to zero miles an hour as you can. But before you deploy a parachute, you can actually steer.

Although you’re in a teardrop-shaped thing with a heat shield on it, you can actually tilt it slightly left, slightly right, and by tilting it slightly left or slightly right, you can actually steer slightly left or slightly right. You can actually guide your descent, even if your mathematically predicted reentry is slightly wrong, you can actually steer right back on course.

We landed within 500 feet of the mathematically predicted place at the end of the orbit burn. When you get down to about 10,000 feet—that’s at terminal velocity—that’s when you deploy the parachute, which is the first time you actually feel a big whip crack; that’s jolting. As you get very close to the ground, right before you touch the ground on the Russian Soyuz, there’s what they call soft-landing thrusters, which are basically explosives that go off underneath the vehicle to make it where, instead of just banging on the ground directly, you get a softer kick from the thruster that slows you down before you hit the ground.

If you just hit the ground without the thrusters, you’d probably hit the ground with about 25 g of force, which is survivable but just harsh. And if, as usually happens, the soft-landing thrusters work properly, you hit the ground with only about 9 g worth of force, which is actually quite comfortable.

Ramsay: Where did you land?

Garriott: In Kazakhstan. There’s farmland in remote parts of Kazakhstan where you land.

Ramsay: On someone’s farm!

Garriott: Yeah, on somebody’s farm, exactly. They got a show for the day. They were like, “Wait a minute. There’s space men popping up in my yard.”

Ramsay: And you were in quarantine after that?

Garriott: Correct. Your quarantine lasts really just a few days or a week. It takes you at least three days for your brain to readjust to gravity, so you need to relax for a good fraction of that time. The main reason you’re in quarantine though is that most everybody’s involved in medical experiments. If you get contaminated by somebody on the ground before the people who are studying your physiology get a chance to run whatever battery of tests they want to run on you, that spoils all the time and money that’s been put into those tests. So, the real reason for quarantine is to finish your medical workups.

Ramsay: When did you learn that you lost your job?

Garriott: While I was in quarantine. I was bedridden. For three or four days, you really can’t stand up without getting the spins. And I got a call from one of the principals at NCsoft in Korea, and they said, “Hey, Richard, we decided to part company.” And that’s their legal prerogative.

Ramsay: So, there you were in quarantine, your brain readjusting to gravity, and, suddenly, you’re fired. What were you thinking?

Garriott: It wasn’t that much of a surprise. The launch process of Tabula Rasa was fairly contentious, and it was obvious that NCsoft’s heart wasn’t really in it. Although, my immediate reaction was “can’t this wait one week so I can get back to Texas and be with the team?” Their answer was “no, we want to make a public announcement about it right now, so we’re just calling to tell you.”

Ramsay: Given that face is so essential to Asian cultures, perhaps the fact that they couldn’t wait a week was not that they couldn’t wait a week, it was because they were saving you face?

Garriott: I think it was the other way around, I suspect. Again, I don’t know. They had a shareholder meeting where it came up in that intervening week that if they didn’t do this, they would have to explain something to shareholders or make up a different story. I think they felt like they had to make it public so that they could share it with investors on very specific timing.

Ramsay: You now sound very matter-of-fact about the whole thing, but you were engaged in a big lawsuit, right?

Garriott: Well, the lawsuit came up for very specific reasons, which in federal court and appeals court, my position was unanimously upheld, so therefore I can describe it in cold detail. It was clearly obvious to anyone I did not wake up on my quarantine bed and decide to quit long distance from quarantine in Russia.

NCsoft had acquired my company Destination Games for a combination of stock and options. I had sold my stock in order to pay for my trip to space, and I had held onto my options because you’re going to want to hold options as long as you can towards their maturity from a financial perspective. But NCsoft noticed that if I quit, they could force me to exercise my options. This was at the end of 2008, right at the end of the stock market crash, so they tried to interpret my contract to say that I had quit, in which case I had to sell my options at the low end of the market.

What clearly happened was that I was fired and the courts upheld that. There were e-mails around NCsoft from executives to other executives saying, “Hey, it’s time for us to get rid of Richard Garriott.” The evidence was not just obvious from the outside. The trail is completely clear that if they had to let me exercise them at a much later date, they’d be much more valuable. In fact, they were much more valuable at any time other than Christmas 2008.

And so the lawsuit was about was how to deal with my options, and the federal courts agreed with me. NCsoft appealed, and the appeals court also unanimously agreed with me, so NCsoft paid me that difference in value.

Ramsay: So, was the lawsuit just about money to you?

Garriott: Yeah, I think it was mostly a money issue. It could be for NCsoft that they thought, “Look, if we’re going to cut Richard loose, we have to make sure he doesn’t have enough money to start competing with us immediately, and take all these things he helped us acquire and start sucking them back out into doing other things.” They did their very best to kill off value they didn’t control. While that’s speculation, that would be a reasonable business strategy—without regard to whether I might personally find it to be offensive.

Ramsay: A few months later, Tabula Rasa was closed. You started Destination Games to make that MMO, and you had spent several years doing just that. Were you surprised that NCsoft so quickly shuttered that game?

Garriott: At that point, it wasn’t much of a surprise; it was my presumption that that was their intention when they let me go. However, in NCsoft’s defense, they are used to mega-mega-mega-hits. If you think back to Lineage again, it’s pretty hard to think of a level of success that is relevant in contrast to Lineage. From an NCsoft perspective, they just said, “Look, we just don’t have time, bandwidth, management bandwidth, or interest in playing the long game.” They’d rather circle the wagons and focus on the things that are the strongest immediate hits for them as a company.

Ramsay: After the NCsoft incident, how long did you take a break?

Garriott: About a year.

Ramsay: Another year before starting your next company?

Garriott: Portalarium was started by my teammates in September 2009.

Ramsay: When did you get involved then?

Garriott: I was around when they started, but I was just busy doing my own thing. And then pretty quickly, they wanted access to the Lord British IP, even if I was still a little bit busy, but I agreed to provide that access. Then they needed some office space, so I let them operate out of my lake cabin in Austin prior to growing big enough to require office space.

I joined in a full-time capacity as things were getting going, so there really wasn’t a moment when I was not some part of Portalarium. I’ve always been part of Portalarium, but the amount of time that I’ve put into it has grown and grown and grown. I was also an investor soon after it started.

Ramsay: You’re listed as a cofounder. Who started the company, if not you?

Garriott: Dallas Snell and some of our other staff members, but, really, Dallas is the main cofounder. Dallas and I now describe ourselves as cofounders, although he really started it ahead of me. I was already around from the very beginning, and more importantly, they floated a few ideas before I formally joined, but once I formally joined, this was the path we were on together.

Ramsay: Portalarium was established to develop social games, right?

Garriott: One of the very first games we did to get the team together was a social game, but more importantly, we knew we wanted to leverage the Lord British history and do the next great ultimate RPG. We also knew that one of the key factors in doing that was being able to leverage the social graph that was emerging in this new era of games. I think that social graph actually helps games reach a much broader audience, and helps people find people they already know in the real world versus just strangers as you commonly find in most MMOs.

And then, thirdly, we were big fans of making sure that we can migrate to whatever platforms players are playing on these days. These days, that’s mobile as much as it is PC, so even though I’m a huge PC fan and we’re doing Shroud of the Avatar first for PC, we also think that mobile needs to be a part of any growth strategy. It’s a little more complicated than just saying we’re doing social games, but one of the first games was a social game.

Ramsay: What game was that?

Garriott: That was called Ultimate Collector. It was a game about collecting as you might imagine by the name. It was a small game where you would build a home, and in that home, you would not only have collections on display, but you would build sort of a garage sale out of the back of your house.

As you ran around and collected items at other people’s sales or at stores, you would build things you could show off in your house, and you’d get scores based on those. You could also sell off stuff you no longer needed to other people to gain more money, and you’d get scores on the sales side for finding bargains and flipping them for profit. It was a buying, selling, and home decorating game.

Ramsay: Around that time, a lot of people who had worked on blockbuster games, both online and off, were all getting into social and mobile games.

Garriott: Yep, and there’s a good reason for that. Look back one generation. Look at Star Wars: The Old Republic, any Guild Wars product, any Lineage product, or any competitor to World of Warcraft. As I said earlier, they are enormously costly in time and money.

Ramsay: Wasn’t there another dimension to that sometimes temporary exodus? Sure, social and mobile represented a big opportunity, but the games and their development cycles were also very different.

Garriott: Yeah, in fact, the way I would even say it is that mobile and social do offer great opportunity, but what’s interesting about the first successes in mobile and social is that most hardcore gamers scoffed at FarmVille, Peggle, and just pick a small game. That’s fine, but they are only part of the market. When we first did UO, people had that same opinion. People who were looking at screenshots of UO were going, “Wow, this game looks like it’s five or ten years old graphically; it’s kind of clunky, it’s kind of slow, it’s full of bugs, or the user interface is just inelegantly designed. I just don’t get it.”

And yet UO quadrupled the sales of any previous game. I think experienced game designers look at that and they go, “The reason why mobile and social is so powerful is because mobile is obviously ubiquitously available to everyone, and at a price point of free, or an app is cheap enough where if someone sees something cool, they’re willing to buy it.

Ramsay: The ubiquity of social and mobile games also means that there’s a race to the bottom, and not just a race to any bottom, but to the bottom of an oversaturated market where the chance of a big success is very small.

Garriott: If you think mobile games are more saturated than non-mobile games, I would potentially argue that case because I think all games are saturated. There’s no shortage of games coming out on any platform. However, I would argue that there’s a shortage of good games on all platforms. So, if you actually make high-quality content, you can still do just fine on basically any platform. The issue is: can you really make a good game?

Ramsay: Do you think the costs of getting social and mobile games to market will rise to the astronomical levels we see now for AAA console and PC titles?

Garriott: Unquestionably. I think that any mature market is, by definition, a competition to not only create the best product, but to simultaneously make people aware of it. And as much as you know if you’re the first app on an app store, you kind of get free mindshare by being the only one available in a particular category on the app store.

Those days are long past and the only way to now get that mindshare is to start putting advertising wherever the best advertising is—whether that’s on TV, radio, movie theaters, or virtual reality brain implants. Whatever method of reaching the public mind that can be bought, people will have to spend money to do that. Anything that doesn’t do that is temporary because any free way to do it will quickly get jammed up.

Ramsay: You’ve now mentioned Shroud of the Avatar a few times. How did that project get started?

Garriott: Shroud of the Avatar has had several different names. There was a time where we called it Akalabeth Online, as an example. Helping kick off this game was the whole idea behind me coming to Portalarium. The origin of the game actually goes way, way back though. I’ve always wanted to return to medieval fantasy, and during my absence post-Ultima, I’ve been publishing for a decade or more little treatises that I used to call “Lord British’s Ultimate RPG” to talk a bit about what I would do, given the chance to get back into medieval fantasy. This direction and interest of mine has been something I have been working toward for quite some time.

Ramsay: When did you decide to run a Kickstarter campaign?

Garriott: That was another decision where we kind of sat down and said, “Okay, what are we going to do here with this game?” We hoped that Ultimate Collector would do well enough to fund Shroud of the Avatar, but it didn’t. We then had to say, “We have a few options available to us. We can find investors to back it, we can try to work with another large publisher, or we can do something like Kickstarter.” Going with Kickstarter was not the easy choice, or the obvious choice, because you never know if it’s going to work until you do it. It wasn’t something we looked at and said, “That’s the right way to go.”

Kickstarter was rather was one of those things where you’re going like, “Well, it’s one way we could go, but if it works, that’ll be great. If it doesn’t, boy, will that be not only embarrassing, but would the company come crashing down around us?” If it worked, it would mean we could used that as evidence to tell another company, “See, people do care. Give us some money.” But if it didn’t work, then we couldn’t go to another company because we’d have just demonstrated that nobody was interested. So, once we decided to pursue Kickstarter, we though, “Well, this is either the beginning of a new way of operating a company, or it is the end of Portalarium.”

Ramsay: One frequent criticism that I read of Kickstarter campaigns like yours centered on your apparent wealth, or the apparent wealth of other prominent developers like Peter Molyneux, Brian Fargo, and Tim Schafer. How do you respond to the suggestion that Kickstarter is being used, or coopted, by wealthy people who’d rather spend other people’s money than their own?

Garriott: If we didn’t need your money, why would we bother asking for it? Why would be bother going through the pain and struggle of not only of running a crowdfunding campaign, but all the difficulties of keeping everybody up to speed, managing relationships, and building websites and stuff? Why wouldn’t we just go build it, finish it, and ship it? Of course, we need the money, and, of course, by the way, I am wealthy; I’m just not that wealthy. I’ve already put millions of dollars into Portalarium, so how many millions of dollars do I need to put into Portalarium before I go, “Hey, that’s enough of my money. Why don’t we find a publisher or somebody else to join us on this risk?”

Ramsay: I’m convinced. Is Shroud of the Avatar worth that risk?

Garriott: Ultima I was the very first ever tile graphic game, and Ultima IV not only introduced the term “avatar,” but also was the first game where you really had to play according to a moral code and the beginning of deep storytelling with you as not just as the hero, but the person who was evaluated as a hero. UO was the first successful MMO. I really do think that Shroud of the Avatar is going to introduce a whole new type of gaming again.

One of the really unique aspects of Shroud of the Avatar is a feature we call “selective multiplayer.” Normally, one of the first decisions you need to make as a player is “which shard am I going to play on?” If some of my friends are scattered among different shards, it’s difficult to impossible for us to see each other in the game. Shroud of the Avatar is going to start with everyone in the world on basically one shard.

As you move around the world, the game is constantly re-sorting into instances the people who know each other, or have purpose in finding each other. Like a good social game, it will reinforce the existing relationships people have with others in the real world. While you won’t see 10,000 people on the screen, and you’ll only see 1,000 people on the screen, but those 1,000 will be all of your close friends, plus most of 1,000 people you still don’t know. I think we’ve got a really great system that will be the new standard for multiplayer games going forward, or at least a piece of the new standard.

Ramsay: We’ve now spoken for nine hours about your early life, your career, your companies, your games, and your adventures in space and Antarctica. When you look back on everything you’ve done and accomplished, and the challenges you’ve overcome, what are your thoughts?

Garriott: There was a science fiction author, a guy named Bruce Sterling, who gave a talk at a game development conference about how writing the best book ever as he would love to do is different from writing the best game ever as a lot of game developers would love to do. He noted that, in the book industry, for him to write the very best book means he has to beat every book that has ever been written, and there have been some mighty good authors writing some mighty good books in the 2,000-year history of the written word.

But if he does write the very best book ever, it would probably stand for a long time. And he said, “You in the game industry have the opposite problem.” He said, “First of all, games haven’t been around forever; they’ve only been around for a couple of decades. And there haven’t been that many people making them. So for you to write the very best game ever written compared to writing the very best book ever written is actually pretty easy.”

“Even if you do, in a few short years, not only are there going to be better authors that come into existence and therefore they’ll write better games, but the technology’s going to be a lot better, so their ability to manifest a better game will go up. Worse yet, the machines you wrote those early games on will be long gone, and the ability to see those early works in their original form will be more and more remote. And so even if you write the very best game ever, it won’t stand nearly as long as writing the very best book ever.”

And, you know, that’s really true. It was saddening to me to realize that at that time, I hadn’t seen my own first game Akalabeth operated in probably a decade or more. So, I did two things at that point.

First, I went and got my Apple IIs in shipshape and bought enough spare parts to keep them running indefinitely. In fact, here right next to me in my office, I have an Apple II. At our Austin office, I have an Apple II, one of my originals. And they’re all still running Akalabeth. I just wanted to maintain that connection back to the beginning as long as I could.

Second, I said, “I’m going to write a really good game, after a really good game, after a really good game to where even though any one of them may not be remembered enough or withstand long enough, I’m committed to writing a series of games that, in aggregate, will hopefully be seen as relevant in these early days of game development.”

I think I’ve done not too badly. I enjoy looking back both to my successes and my failures. To me, there have been important moments when I think have really helped the industry move from its earliest days into the future.